A cold, discomforting feeling began to grow inside the boy’s stomach.

Newspaper number three.

No pictures of him.

Number four.

A repeat of the previous three.

The discomfort turned to nausea, branching out to some sort of spike that stabbed at his heart.

Five.

Not a thing.

‘The Monster’ simply observed Squirm, his eyes sparkling with satisfaction.

Six.

No.

Last newspaper. The one dated the day after he’d been abducted.

The boy’s picture wasn’t there.

If there was still such a thing that Squirm called ‘world’, it collapsed right in front of him that morning.

OK, this is a dream. It has to be. There’s no other explanation for how fucked-up crazy this morning has become.

‘Nothing?’ ‘The Monster’ asked, his lips parting into a malicious grin.

Squirm’s attention didn’t break from the newspapers, which were now scattered all over the breakfast table. His good eye was still searching from paper to paper.

I must’ve missed it. It’s there somewhere. It has to be.

‘Looking at them some more isn’t going to make your picture miraculously appear on the paper, Squirm. Let me try to save you the trouble. It’s not there. It never has been.’

Squirm began shaking.

‘Haven’t you wondered how come I knew that today was your birthday, Squirm?’ The man shrugged. ‘I never asked you. You never offered it.’

The boy turned to look at ‘The Monster’. All the madness had happened so fast that morning that Squirm had never stopped to think about it.

How did he know it was my birthday?

‘That question can be answered by answering another couple of questions.’ Once again the ‘The Monster’ paused, lifting his eyebrows to emphasize his words. ‘How come there are no pictures of you in the papers? How come there’s no story about the boy who went missing after leaving school a week and a half ago?’

Squirm felt as though something had begun choking his heart inside his chest. He said nothing. He didn’t know what to say.

‘And the answer is – because you were never reported missing, Squirm.’

Fifty-Nine

‘Just turn the page,’ Sanders said. ‘Because here is where it starts to get interesting.’

Hunter did, and Sanders carried on with his account.

‘Five months after Ms. Dillard’s disappearance, in July two thousand and nine, Sandra Oliver, a twenty-four-year-old bank clerk from Fresno, also went missing. She lived by herself in the west part of town. Once again, the Missing Persons investigation concluded that whoever had taken her had done so from inside her own house and, once again, there was no sign of a break-in or a struggle. The abduction scene was almost a carbon copy of Ms. Dillard’s – relatively clean, no fingerprints, no mess, just a few fibers and a couple of shoeprints by the back door. The shoe size and sole pattern matched those found in Ms. Dillard’s abduction scene so suspicions of it being the same perpetrator were high.

‘Now, guess who’d been working in the neighbor’s house the same week of Ms. Oliver’s disappearance?’ Sanders didn’t wait for a reply. ‘That’s right, our friend Mathew Hade. He’d been doing several minor repairs to the property, as well as remodeling their front garden. All the work was completed just a couple of days before Sandra Oliver went missing. Once again, the police ended up knocking on Mr. Hade’s door, and once again they didn’t have enough to take him in. The detective in charge of the investigation managed to get a warrant to search Hade’s house but they found nothing incriminating. A week and a half after she went missing, Ms. Oliver’s body was found on a patch of green grass in the northern part of town.’

Hunter and Garcia’s interest grew.

‘Now tell me if this sounds familiar,’ Sanders continued. ‘She was found fully clothed, positioned in a human crucifix shape, with her legs fully extended but close together and her arms wide open, palms up. Ligature marks were found on both of her wrists and ankles.’

Hunter and Garcia both lifted their head to look at the Missing Persons detective.

‘Her picture follows,’ Sanders said expectantly, nodding at the file.

One more page flip and both detectives were held fast.

Sandra Oliver was a petite woman with very similar features to Nicole Wilson. Just like Ms. Wilson, she had a round face, which was also framed by shoulder-length dark-brown hair.

Hunter checked the next photograph along. It was a crimescene snapshot, showing the position in which Sandra Oliver’s body had been found. If her legs had been spread apart, she would’ve been left in the exact same position Nicole Wilson was found in, on a similar patch of green grass.

To better compare them, Hunter looked at Nicole Wilson’s crime scene photograph pinned to the picture board. This had indeed got interesting.

Sanders’ gaze followed his before he added, ‘The post mortem concluded that Ms. Oliver was tortured for several days prior to her demise,’

‘What sort of torture?’ Garcia asked.

‘She was severely beaten up. The skin under her clothes was black and blue, covered in bruises and hematomas, but no lacerations. For some reason, her torturer punished her body but left her face completely intact, as you can see from the photographs. According to the coroner, the blunt traumas to her body were inflicted by hand alone – punches to be more precise – by someone with relatively big fists.’ Sanders paused for breath. ‘Also, whoever punished her was kind of an expert. Superficial injuries only. No broken bones or internal organ damage.’

‘Was she sexually assaulted?’ Garcia again.

‘Repeatedly, but the assailant was smart enough to use a rubber. No semen was found. Unfortunately, the autopsy examination uncovered nothing else that could be construed as a clue to her killer’s identity. The investigation hit a wall.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘She suffocated. The coroner couldn’t be any more specific as to how it happened but it wasn’t by strangulation.’

Sanders gave Hunter and Garcia a moment to read over the autopsy report.

‘But it doesn’t end there,’ he proceeded. ‘A year after Ms. Oliver’s body was found, Mathew Hade relocated to Sacramento. Six months after the relocation, a twenty-year-old woman named Grace Lansing went missing in River Park, on the east side of the city. She was taken from inside her parents’ house while they were away on a weekend break. Just like Tracy Dillard, the college student who went missing in Fresno, Grace has also never been found.’

‘Did Mathew Hade make the POI list in Sacramento again?’ Garcia asked.

‘He did,’ Hunter was the one who answered, reading from the file.

‘Working in the proximities?’ Garcia half questioned, half guessed.

Sanders nodded. ‘He had found a job with a roofing company. The company was making repairs to one of the houses in the same street as Grace Lansing’s parents’. Once again, Mathew Hade had no alibi for the night Ms. Lansing went missing but, once again, the police couldn’t get anything concrete on him to justify an arrest.’

Hunter continued reading the file.

‘I know that all of this might mean absolutely nothing,’ Sanders said, lifting up both palms. ‘It could all be just a coincidence, but I wanted to bring the file to you and let you decide. Especially because of the last photograph.’

Hunter and Garcia turned to it. It was a mugshot of Mathew Hade. With the exception of maybe a wrinkle or two, he looked exactly the same as he did in the file’s first photograph.’