April 2, 8:35 p.m.

Key Peninsula

Kendall looked at the map pinned to her office wall. A casual visitor would not have understood the meaning of the red dots marking Little Clam Bay, Anderson Point, Lisabeula, and the Mary E. Theler Wetlands.

She and Josh had canvassed marinas all over Kitsap County and Gig Harbor in Pierce County. Each of those was marked with a gold star. The detectives knew that the person dumping the bodies was doing it from a boat. A lot of good that did them. Puget Sound was often referred to as the “Boating Capital of the United States.”

“You look intense,” Josh said after sauntering into her office, looking as if he were on vacation or about to climb onto a bar stool.

Without a care in the world.

Kendall was stressed and made no attempt to hide it. “Why wouldn’t I be, Josh? There’s a maniac out there, and everyone from the FBI to the Seattle PD thinks we don’t know what we’re doing.”

“We’re doing the best we can,” he said.

“Not good enough.” Kendall let it go. She didn’t want to get into it with Josh just now. It seemed that he’d let his personal life cloud his occasional good sense, and it irritated her. “Look, the killer is a boater. We know that. He has to moor his boat somewhere around here.”

“He could trailer it and launch it from a boat-ramp too.”

Kendall disagreed: “I don’t see how he’d have time to haul it in and out, dump a body, and get back to whatever rock he lives under.”

Josh sat down with his long legs stretched out. “People like that always find the time,” he said.

Again the noise beckoned. Max Castile thought he’d heard a small animal bawl from behind the mobile home, shrouded from view by a stand of native cedar and a hedge of black bamboo his parents had planted. He’d been admonished to stay away from the mobile “for safety reasons,” and he was the kind of obedient child who knew that when his parents said something, they meant business. From his bedroom window, Max could see into the detached garage. His father was crouched over his workbench, silhouetted by the fluorescent tubes that hung overhead on a pair of galvanized chains. As he looked into the garage, Max imagined that he had become a character in a video game and that his dad was some kind of metallic scorpion that he could take out with a blast of his laser. Sometimes he wanted to do just that. He tiptoed past the master bedroom, where his mother had fallen asleep holding a novel in her lap. The book rested in her hand as if she were about to turn the page.

The boy decided to go through the kitchen to get a flashlight. If his mom caught him there, he’d say something about needing a glass of water or being scared. Something she’d believe. The light was in the utility drawer next to the fridge. He slid it open slowly, quietly. Max fished out the flashlight and started to follow the noise across the darkened yard. It faded in the wind, and he stopped to listen.

Where is it coming from? What is it?

Nothing.

He picked up a large stick and waited for the noise again.

“Pleee-eee-se!”

Just as he thought: it was coming from the direction of the old mobile home.

Max checked behind him. No one was watching. His father had never bothered to skirt the trailer, so he crouched down low and looked to see if there was something caught under the structure.

“Pleee-eee-se!”

It was coming from inside the mobile home.

As Max reached for the door handle, a hand pulled at his shoulder and nearly knocked him to the ground.

“What are you doing here?”

Max spun around and faced his mother. Melody Castile ’s eyes were fierce with anger. It was a mom’s usual look of disapproval multiplied by a thousand.

Max blinked back tears.

“Mom, I thought I heard something.”

She gripped his shoulders and shook him. “What did your dad and I tell you? This place is not for you!”

“I’m sorry. I just thought…”

Without another word, she yanked her son back toward the house.

Paige Wilson had heard shards of the confrontation between mother and son as she lay on the mattress in her own filth. The duct tape that had been applied to her mouth had slipped off, allowing her to call out for help. As she rolled her head back on the mattress, Paige felt the familiar pressure of the bobby pins that held her crown to her head.

How had all of this happened? she wondered, retracing the text messages, the promises of a modeling contract, the meeting in the parking lot at the Poplars…and finally the smelly cloth going over her face before falling into darkness.

She tried to burn into her memory the last thing she had seen: a Department of Defense parking decal, silver and blue, with a beginning sequence of identifiers: D7D. She’d seen the familiar stickers her whole life. Whoever owned the car had been employed at the shipyard or maybe the submarine base at Bangor. Rental cars don’t come with DOD decals.

Whoever had her was not some modeling agent and his assistant from California. Lying on that mattress, in the middle of nowhere, she knew she was a long way from Top Model. A long way from anywhere at all.

She whimpered helplessly in the dark and tried to come to grips with her situation and think of how to get out of there.

Paige had been a virgin before she was captured and violated. She had told her friends otherwise, as if bragging about having had sex made her seem adult. She didn’t want to be called “the Virgin Queen,” so she’d made up a lie about a boyfriend at a prep school in Tacoma. Paige had been all talk. She’d let the float driver fondle her breasts once, but that was the sole extent of her experience with men.

Now she was cut, bleeding, and all but certain she was going to die.

After returning to the house and putting Max in his room for the rest of the night, Melody went to the garage, where Sam was washing out the inside of Paige Wilson’s car. He wore gloves and used a chamois that she’d purchased from a late-night TV pitchman. They’d laughed at how the pitchman could tout the uses they’d devised for his product. Certainly it could soak up soda pop from the floor, but it also did a good job obliterating fingerprints.

Sam stopped what he was doing. “What’s with you?”

“What’s with me? That’s a good one.”

“Are we playing games here, Mel? Because if we are, I’m missing something.”

Melody was tense, her arms folded across her chest, her hair matted against her sweating forehead.

“Max almost went into the Fun House. That little bitch we picked up was making some noise. You need to make her quiet.”

Her tone was indignant-she expected him to do something. Now.

“Oh, I need to?” Sam set down his dripping chamois. His eyes were ice, and the veins in his neck plumped with blood. “What’s the matter with you? You go shut her up. For good.”

“I don’t do that,” she said.

He jabbed a finger at her.

“You do as I tell you. That’s our deal, babe.”

Bernardo Reardon, the detective with the Mason County Sheriff’s Office who’d met with Kendall and Josh when Celesta’s body was a heap of waterlogged flesh the previous March, looked down at the report submitted by the state crime lab in Olympia. It had been among a batch of documents found in the trunk of a fired lab worker’s car.

It was unremarkable except for one small notation.

Trace analysis recovered distinct particles of marine fiberglass and sealant used by U.S. boat manufacturers prior to 1980.

He got Kendall on the phone in her office and told her what he knew.

“Basically, whoever dumped the body had an older boat,” he said. “All have been water dump sites, so I guess that’s no real news.”