Once everything had seemed ready, he’d paused to see what he might have missed.

His home computer had never accessed the hidden server, never held any of the incriminating pictures, and had never been used for research. If they examined it, they would find tedium. A search of his phone would show that it hadn’t left his house in the past twenty-four hours.

What was he missing? This was the point at which most people made mistakes. They got in a hurry. He would not hurry.

He had almost convinced himself that he had thought of everything when a mistake caught his attention. The router. A router can collect browsing histories. He had almost missed it. He went and unplugged his router. Back in the garage, he wiped it down with a baby wipe to remove his fingerprints and skin cells, then took a hammer to it, pulverizing it, before sweeping the bits into a second plastic grocery bag.

He then filled eight condoms with gasoline, tucking them around the edge of the bin—a trick he learned from a documentary on special effects in movies. They used condoms to create fiery explosions because gasoline wouldn’t eat through a condom as it would a regular balloon. He slipped a book of matches and a tiny cone of incense into his pocket for a detonation device.

His final act was to back both the Bronco and his Lexus out of the garage and sweep the floor clean, tossing the dirt and broom head into the bin. The detectives would find absolutely no evidence that Sadie had ever been in Gavin’s home.

* * *

Driving north on Interstate 94, Gavin pulled off on Broadway to go through a couple of twenty-four-hour fast-food restaurants, ordering a small meal from each drive-through. As he pulled out, he tossed the plastic grocery bags into their trash receptacles, leaving the remnants of the laptop at the first restaurant and the smashed router at the second.

Continuing north, he came to a stretch of land along the river where they once dredged sand. He had found that spot the first time he went through this ritual. It was a perfect place to set a small fire.

As was his habit, he drove past the sand pit twice to make sure it was deserted in those wee hours of the morning. Then he backed the Bronco down to the river’s edge and slid the plastic bin out of the back, dropping it to the ground. He lit the cone of incense and tucked it inside the book of matches, placing the makeshift timer where its flame would lap against one of the gas-filled condoms.

As he was about to leave, he had another thought and tossed his floor mats and cargo mat onto the pile. Crime labs had the technology to trace the dirt from a pair of shoes to a crime scene. He had been careful, but if any dirt from Nicollet Island had made it onto the floor mat, it made no sense to leave such a thing lying around.