Hollis said nothing.
"Why didn't Finch do it?"
"Because he..." Hollis trailed off.
"You know what? I don't care." Spence leaned forward. His hands were on the table now, pressing down as if the surface was the only thing keeping him from going over it. "All I want to know is where my daughter is. She was there that night. What did you do to her?"
"Nothing. I took photos. That was it. She left at the end of the shoot. I swear to God."
"And Tabitha?"
"She tried to help some of them. You know, give them a place away from bad family lives."
"Yeah? And what happened when they wanted to go back? Did you or someone else dump them in that bog?" His voice cracked. "Is that where my Fiona is?"
"I don't know where she is."
"Liar!"
Spence couldn't hold it any longer. He launched himself across the table. His hands found Hollis's collar before theofficers could move. One of them grabbed Spence from behind and the other came around the side. Hollis rocked backward in his chair, the cuffs snapping tight against the ring, his face twisted.
Noah and McKenzie were out of the observation room and through the interview door in seconds. Noah got his arm around Spence's chest and pulled him back. McKenzie shoved a chair out of the way. The two officers had Spence's arms pinned but he was still straining forward, his face red, the veins in his neck standing out.
"That's enough!" Noah said. "Mark. Enough."
Spence went slack. Not calm. Just empty. The fight left him all at once and what remained was a man standing in a room with the person who might have taken his daughter and no way to reach him.
The officers escorted Hollis toward the door. He was shouting over his shoulder as they marched him out.
"I was set up! I never touched those girls! I swear!"
The door closed behind him. The interview room was quiet. Mark Spence stood in the middle of it with Noah's hand still on his shoulder, breathing hard, staring at the empty chair where Hollis had been sitting.
Noah said nothing. There was nothing to say. The evidence was in the cabin. The IDs, the rags, the chloroform, the body. It was enough to charge Hollis and it was enough to hold him and it was probably enough to convict him.
And somewhere underneath all of it, Noah heard Samuel Bridger's voice on a bridge above a river.
Guilty of something isn't the same as guilty of everything.
31
Seraphine's studio smelled the same as it had the first time. Turpentine and linseed oil and the faint earthiness of dried canvas. Paintings lined the walls in their mismatched frames, full of landscapes and abstracts and the occasional portrait, but Noah's eyes went straight to the one at the far end. The bridge. The bog. The full landscape with Whiteface Mountain in the distance and the leaning tamarack and the Y-shaped fork of water that had led him to six bodies in the peat.
Seraphine sat on a stool near the counter with her hands in her lap. She looked thinner than the last time he'd seen her, or maybe it was the light catching the angles of her face. Her dark hair was down and her eyes were guarded. He got a sense she had agreed to something she wasn't sure she should have agreed to.
Beside her, in a chair pulled from behind the counter, sat Dr. Claire Whitfield. Mid-fifties, gray-streaked hair cut short, reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She had a legal pad on her knee but hadn't written anything on it. Her presence was the condition. No therapist, no conversation. Noah had accepted without argument.
"Thank you for seeing me," Noah said. He stood a few feet from them, leaning against the edge of a display table. He hadn't sat down. Sitting down would make this feel like an interrogation and that wasn't what this was. "I know this isn't easy."
Seraphine nodded but didn't speak.
"I want to ask you about the sketch you brought to the police when you were sixteen. The one connected to Kara Ellison's disappearance."
"It wasn't connected to Kara Ellison," Seraphine said.
The words landed in the quiet studio like something dropped from a height. Noah didn't move.
"Go on," he said.
