“Do you want to wait in the car?” Hurt asks Bear.

“I’m not sure why it matters,” Bear says. “Except maybe personally,” he adds.

“Don’t be an asshole,” Hurt says, and brushes past him into the hall. “It makes you a potential accessory, at the very least,” he says. “And a possible suspect.”

The rooms upstairs are empty. Kateri moves from bedroom to bedroom, through the other en suite baths, checking empty closets, the laundry chute, the back playroom. For one second she imagines Birdie there, on the floor with dolls, this one room more vast than anything she’s ever seen in her five years.

In the basement, she finds tools, items she is sure will show Shannon’s prints, and she bags them all out of protocol. A hammer, a screwdriver, a drill, paintbrushes. Nothing looks out of place, stained, or unusually clean either.

“I should have brought a team,” Kateri tells Hurt in the basement. He peers into the back room, an unfinished workroom with a bench and fluorescent lighting. There are saws in there, both hand and power.

“We should luminol that room,” Hurt says.

“Do you think it’s here?” she says, heart hammering. “The real body?” she asks. Her eyes widen. “Hurt, who placed those bones?”

“We’ve got more to investigate,” he says, “that’s for sure. Do you think …” He hesitates, and Kateri thinks he’s about to speculate on whether or not Bear Miller has killed more than one person. “Do you think they’re gay?” Hurt says.

“Joel,” Kateri says. “We have unidentified bones,” she whispers. “And a missing girl.”

But his face is perplexed. It’s a detail he can’t get past.

She opens a utility closet in the workroom. “And a shotgun,” she says.

Bear is sitting on a stool at the kitchen island when they come up. Hurt carries a box of bagged evidence out to the squad car, and Kateri goes out the back door to do a preliminary search of the veranda, the storage boxes, the pool house, the work shed. She orders a team. And cadaver dogs.

She stoops and takes a picture of a boot print in the shed. It’s unusual, and one she’s seen before, inside the Jenkins kitchen. It doesn’t have the normal zigzag or tire print of a work boot. It leaves a sort of fleur-de-lis in the dirt.

Hurt is in the garage with Bear. He has gone through the cabinets and taken apart the Land Rover. There are cigarettes in the can at the back of the driveway, which Hurt has bagged, but Kateri already knows they match the ones she picked up in the park.

“Any Luckys?” she asks Hurt.

He looks in the bag. “No.”

Bear rubs his eyes. “There are yellow American Spirits,” he says, exasperated. “And some cheap white Indian cigarettes. They’re mine and Shannon’s,” he says. “No one smokes Lucky Strikes.” He laughs at her.

“Oh, someone does,” Kateri says. “They’re in the evidence bin.” She holds out the picture of the boot print. “Where are these boots?” she asks. She looks at the ones on his feet, but when he holds them up, the soles don’t match.