“They have a guy named Gavin Spencer in custody. His first appearance is set for eleven. Put a rush on this.” Andi handed the file to Lila. “There’s not much to work with. I’m meeting with the detectives in an hour, and I want you there.”

Gavin Spencer’s file was the last case that they discussed that morning, but with the clock ticking toward his first appearance in court, it would be the one that Lila would start on. She went to her office and gave the file a quick read-through and saw that Andi was right—there wasn’t much there. A woman named Sadie Vauk had been pulled from the Mississippi River unable to stand or talk. Although she had no memory of the attack itself, she identified Spencer as the man she had been with prior to blacking out.

Then Lila read that investigators were testing Ms. Vauk’s blood because they believed she had been given a date-rape drug. A shiver ran through Lila’s body. She knew in that second that this would not be just another file. She took in every word of the police report, letting her mind paint the picture of what happened to Sadie Vauk. She read between the lines, searching for the smallest detail, anything that might pull her into the mind of Gavin Spencer and offer up a clue about the monster beyond the page.

Surveillance footage showed an older black SUV near the scene where Vauk had been abducted and also near where they believe she was put into the river. Spencer owned a black Ford Bronco, but detectives had not yet been able to locate it. One neighbor thought she saw Spencer drive by in his Bronco around seven o’clock the night of the abduction, but she wasn’t sure.

They had searched his home but found nothing to link him to the crime. Lila read the reports again, hoping that she may have missed something: some tiny drop of semen on the girl, or maybe a strand of her hair at Spencer’s house, but other than Vauk picking Spencer out of a lineup, the investigators had come up empty. And after his arrest, Spencer invoked his right to remain silent.

Lila typed up a skeletal outline of the complaint and headed to the meeting—hoping the detectives might bring something to bolster the case.

The conference room in the County Attorney’s Office had two walls lined with old law books, decorations from an era when you needed more than fingers on a mouse to find a statute, but it gave the room character. A long oval table took up the majority of the room, and in the corner, a single plant—a dusty silk ficus—stood as a sad witness to the many serious conversations that room had held.

In the months that she had worked under Oscar Hernandez, Lila had never once been asked to sit in on a meeting in the conference room. Her eagerness caused her to be the first to arrive, so she took a seat and waited.