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I leaned across the bed to kiss him. The light had come back into his eyes. We chased away his clouds together last night. And I was going to put my worries about him, about this case and his connection to it, to bed. Lock was so wrong about himself. He wasn’t evil. But I was about to confront something that truly was.

EIGHTEEN

In my five years as a prosecutor of violent crimes, I’d walked more crime scenes than I could count. But what they found at Daniel Palicki’s house chilled me to my core.

“They’ve brought in trauma counselors to work with the search crews,” Roy said. “This video has already been sent out to the rest of the TRACE team, but I need you to see it.” Roy popped a flash drive into his laptop and played the video footage from yesterday morning’s search.

The camera person walked through the front of the home. Daniel Palicki lived in Manchester, a small town just outside of Ann Arbor. It was a mid-century ranch home on twelve acres of mostly wooded land. A large pole barn sat in the northeast quadrant. Crews were still conducting their search out there. But what they found in Palicki’s basement was damning enough.

The camera panned around a dimly lit corner of the basement with tall metal shelving. There were four shoeboxes lined up on the bottom shelf. One by one, each box had been opened and catalogued.

“It’s going to take some time for DNA, fingerprints, blood analysis,” Roy said. “But we’ve got at least a preliminary match to the owners of some of these items.”

The first box contained a pink, lacy bra. “Jade Darby wore one fitting that description, according to her husband,” Roy said. “There’s a substance that looks like blood on the clasp.”

“He kept souvenirs,” I said.

“Looks that way,” Roy agreed. He froze the video at the next frame, showing the contents of the second box. It was a silver pendant necklace. The pendant resembled an Egyptian hieroglyph. “Amy Pasko described a necklace like this. Lara was wearing it the last time her sister saw her. There were some strands of hair caught in the clasp. We’re hoping to extract DNA. If it’s Lara’s, will that be enough to charge him for her disappearance?”

“That’ll be up to the Ingham County prosecutor,” I said. “I know her. She’s good, but she’s a stickler. She’s going to want more. If you find more of her DNA in the house or on the grounds, she’ll charge. Is there any other evidence so far indicating he may have brought her there?”

“Not yet. It’ll take weeks before the analysis comes back. But they found something even worse beneath the floorboards in the back corner of the basement.”

He advanced the video and then paused it. The screen filled with a shot of the basement floor with several of the wooden planks pulled away.

“Bones,” Roy said. “Cadaver dogs hit right away. These particular K9s are trained to alert on human remains.”

I tilted my head to the side. I could make out what looked like a femur, and a skeletal hand, jutting out of the dirt.

“They could have been there a long time,” I said. “You’re going to have to figure out how long Palicki’s been in that house. I’m not an expert in human decomposition, but…”

“Those don’t look fresh,” Roy said.

My stomach dropped. “What if he’s been at this for years?”

“We’re expanding the scope,” Roy said. “This might go way beyond WhisprMatch.”

“Palicki’s what, thirty?” I asked. I tried to imagine it. Could this man have been killing back in his teens? “What do you know about him?” I asked. “His background. His family.”

“Nothing about any family,” he answered. “We’re still piecing together his criminal history. He did two ninety-day stints in prison on drug-related charges over the past two years. The neighbor said that as far as she knows, he was working handyman-type jobs. All under the table. She said he’s lived in that house for eight years. She didn’t see him very much. Nice lady. Elderly. She’s got aides that come in, but a few years ago, her granddaughter lived with her.”

I rubbed my temple. “Does she know her whereabouts?” I didn’t want to let my mind go there, but I wondered if the neighbor’s granddaughter was under those floorboards.

“She hasn’t talked to her in a while,” Roy answered. “They had a falling out a few years ago. That’s why she moved out. Heller, our FBI guy, is trying to track her down. The lady says the granddaughter used to feed Palicki’s dog sometimes and knew him better than she did.”

“What does she know? The grandmother?” I asked.

“Not much,” he answered. “She’s figured out his home’s being searched. It’s hard to miss with all the vans out there, patrol cars, and crime scene tape.”

“The fewer leaks the better,” I said. “We don’t even know where charges might be brought yet. You can charge in any county where an element of the crime occurred. These women were abducted from multiple counties. But if he killed them here, at his house, he could also be charged in Washtenaw County. Jade Darby disappeared from Fort Wayne. If it can be proved he brought her across state lines to this house, then we’re talking the potential for federal charges.”

“Understood,” Roy said. He rewound the video to the images of the shoeboxes. “Tube of lipstick in the third box. We’re hoping for DNA on that one too. It’ll be hard to match up to a victim otherwise.”

“What about the fourth box?” I asked.

Roy advanced and then froze the video once more. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the poor lighting on screen. When I could clearly make out the box’s contents, it felt like the temperature in the room dropped twenty degrees.

“Red silk ribbon,” Roy said. “An entire spool of it. Eyeballing it, it looks like the kind found wrapped around Gretchen Small’s smartwatch that we found in the center console cup holder. I want to get Corrine Egan back in here, see if she recognizes it.”