And then, after all the phone calls prove worthless, the detectives get to drive around the city, asking the same questions to the same people in person.

By midafternoon, the investigation had settled into a lethargic drone, like the seventh-inning dugout of a team down 5–0. Pencils tapped, phones stood mute, eye contact was avoided. The task force, with the help of a handful of uniformed officers, had managed to contact all but a handful of the Windstar owners. Two of them worked at St. Joseph’s, one of them in housekeeping.

At five o’clock they held a press conference behind the Roundhouse. The police commissioner and the district attorney were front and center. All the expected questions were asked. All the expected answers were given. Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano were on camera and identified to the media as leading the task force. Jessica was hoping she wouldn’t have to speak on camera. She didn’t.

By five twenty they were back at their desks. They flipped through the local channels until they found a replay of the press conference. Brief applause, hoots, and hollers greeted the close-up of Kevin Byrne. A local anchor’s voiceover accompanied the footage of Brian Parkhurst’s exit from the Roundhouse earlier in the day. Parkhurst’s name was plastered on the screen beneath the slow-motion image of him getting into his car.

Nazarene Academy had called back with the information that Brian Parkhurst had left early the previous Thursday and Friday, and that he had arrived at the school no earlier than 8:15 am on Monday. He would have had ample time to abduct both girls, dump both bodies, and still maintain his schedule.

At five thirty, just after Jessica received a call back from the Denver Board of Education, effectively eliminating Tessa’s old boyfriend Sean Brennan from the suspect pool, she and John Shepherd drove down to the forensic lab, the new state-of-the-art facility just a few blocks from the Roundhouse at Eighth and Poplar. There was new information. The bone found in Nicole Taylor’s hands was a section cut from a leg of lamb. It appeared to have been cut with a serrated blade and sharpened on an oilstone.

So far their victims had been found holding a sheep bone and a reproduction of a William Blake painting. The information, although helpful, shed no light into any corner of the investigation.

“We’ve also got matching carpet fibers from both victims,” Tracy McGovern said. Tracy was the deputy director of the lab.

All across the room, fists clenched, pumping the air. They had evidence. Synthetic fibers could be traced.

“Both girls had the same nylon fibers along the hem of their skirts,” Tracy said. “Tessa Wells had more than a dozen. Nicole Taylor’s skirt yielded only a few, due to the fact that she had been out in the rain, but they were there.”

“Is it residential? Commercial? Automotive?” Jessica asked.

“Probably not automotive. I’d say midrange residential carpeting. Dark blue. But the pattern of the fibers was spread out along the very bottom of the hem. It wasn’t anywhere else on their clothing.”

“So they weren’t lying down on the carpet?” Byrne asked. “Or sitting on it?”

“No,” Tracy said. “For this kind of pattern, I’d say they were—”

“Kneeling,” Jessica said.

“Kneeling,” Tracy echoed.

At six o’clock Jessica sat at a desk, spinning a cup of cold coffee, thumbing through her books on Christian art. There were some promising leads, but nothing that duplicated the postures of the victims at the crime scenes.

Eric Chavez had a dinner date. He stood in front of the small two-way mirror in Interview Room A, tying and retying his tie, searching for the perfect double Windsor. Nick Palladino was finishing up the calls to the remaining few Windstar owners.

Kevin Byrne stared at the wall of photographs like Easter Island statuary. He seemed rapt, consumed by the minutiae, replaying the time line over and over in his mind. Images of Tessa Wells, images of Nicole Taylor, snapshots of the death house on Eighth Street, pictures of the daffodil garden at Bartram. Hands, feet, eyes, arms, legs. Pictures with rulers to provide scale. Pictures with grids to provide context.

The answers to all Byrne’s questions were directly in front of him, and to Jessica he looked like a man in a catatonic state. She would have given a month’s salary to be privy to Kevin Byrne’s private thoughts at that moment.

Late afternoon slogged toward evening. And yet Kevin Byrne stood motionless, scanning the board, left to right, top to bottom.

Suddenly he removed a close-up photograph of Nicole Taylor’s left palm. He took it over to the window and held it up to the graying light. He looked at Jessica, but it appeared he was looking right through her. She was just an object in the path of his thousand-yard stare. He removed a magnifying glass from a desk and turned back to the photo.

“Christ,” he finally said, drawing the attention of the handful of detectives in the room. “I can’t believe we didn’t see it.”

“See what?” Jessica asked. She was glad Byrne was finally talking. She had been beginning to worry about him.

Byrne pointed to the indentations in the fleshy part of the palm, the marks that Tom Weyrich said were caused by pressure from Nicole’s fingernails.

“These marks.” He picked up the ME’s report on Nicole Taylor. “Look,” he continued. “There was trace evidence of burgundy fingernail polish in the grooves on her left hand.”

“What about it?” Buchanan asked.

“The polish was green on her left hand,” Byrne said.

Byrne pointed to the close-up of the fingernails on Nicole Taylor’s left hand. The color was a forest green. He held up a photograph of her right hand.

“The polish on her right hand was burgundy.”

The remaining three detectives looked at each other, shrugged.

“Don’t you see it? She didn’t make those grooves by clenching her left fist. She made them with her opposite hand.”

Jessica tried to see something in the photograph, as if examining the positive and negative elements in an M. C. Escher print. She saw nothing. “I don’t understand,” she said.

Byrne grabbed his coat and headed for the door. “You will.”

Byrne and Jessica stood in the small digital imaging room in the crime lab.

The imaging specialist was working on enhancing the photographs of Nicole Taylor’s left hand. Most crime scene photographs were still taken on thirty-five-millimeter film and then transferred to digital format, after which they could then be enhanced, enlarged, and, if needed, prepared for trial. The area of interest in this photograph was the small, crescent-shaped indentations in the lower left portion of Nicole’s palm. The technician enlarged and clarified the area, and when the image became clear, there was a collective gasp in the small room.

Nicole Taylor had sent them a message.

The slight cuts were not random at all.