As the search continues, Will and I and a small team of men, some of them FBI, work to turn over every inch of the Pomo shelter, and the storage room at the Art Center, where other victims might have been held captive or even killed. We get a warrant for Caleb’s house, which will take a long time to go through, even with the additional bodies.

Stepping inside feels strange and unsettling, as if time is spiraling backward. As if I could walk down the long paneled hallway and find Jenny in her room, playing her guitar or listening to Simon and Garfunkel on her hi-fi.

The first door off the hall to the left is Caleb’s. I was last here as a teenager, lying on the brown shag carpet and eating peanut butter crackers while Caleb talked about famous shipwrecks or other obscure facts. The room is the same, feels almost time-stopped, as if Caleb never really finished growing up in this house, because Jenny couldn’t either. The checked bedspread is navy and maroon, boyish. Two walls are lined with stuffed bookshelves. Over his desk and all along one wall are dozens of photographs of girls, all adolescents with long dark hair, brown or black, all beautiful, all targets or objects of obsession. Prey.

Shannan is here in three portraits side by side, looking painfully strung out, her eyes numb and haunted, as if the series is a triptych of her spiral into nothingness. And then I see Cameron, both in color and black and white. There are also pencil sketches of her face and shoulders, her neck and wrists, every nuance and fragment painstakingly captured with layered strokes and shading. Tenderly attentive and meticulously controlled.

I continue to scan the room, feeling more and more on edge. It’s as if I’m standing not in a bedroom, but in a laboratory. This—all of this—is the inside of Caleb’s mind. How he thinks. What he wants. What’s been driving him these last months, if not years. I have to believe there are probably other victims, too, in the places he’s lived before, even the Persian Gulf. That he’s been doing this a long time. That he’ll never stop if we don’t catch him.

—

When Cameron’s out of surgery and comfortable in her private room, Will and I begin to interview her, slowly and with care. One of the hardest things about earning her trust is that we’re part of the problem, making her think about things she wants desperately to forget. We have an obligation to find and stop Caleb. Otherwise, she might never be safe again. But more than this I know that if she can find a way to speak even a portion of her tragedy, reconstruct some of these memories, they might begin to leave her body, and make more room inside, so she can slowly reclaim herself.