anyway. All it would take was a few tiny bits of genetic material to link Alan Hayes to the death of Vicky Meeks.
Still, the entire, vast room looked as if it were freshly scoured every hour on the hour. I did not give it much hope.
I would have given up long ago, but Maggie did not seem discouraged. She was hunting evidence on a much smaller scale than I’d ever been able to see. She seemed elated at the minute traces of dust extracted from a polishing wheel tumbler. And a thin drawer set into the counter itself yielded a few more crumbs of unidentified rock residue, which Maggie triumphantly noted. When every counter and storage drawer had been harvested, she turned her attention to a white metal cabinet nestled in one corner. She had just opened one of its glass doors when a young voice said softly from a spot behind me on the basement steps: “You won’t find anything in there. He’s too careful for that.”
I whirled around, astonished that any human being had been able to get so close without my noticing their presence.
Sarah Hayes sat a few steps above me, taking it all in. Her long coltish legs were folded up against her chest and she had wrapped her arms tightly around her knees. She was as protected as a butterfly yet to emerge from its cocoon.
Maggie did not reply. She simply stepped to the foot of the stairs, looked right past me, and stared at the young girl on the steps above me, a questioning look on her face. I felt the wave of Maggie’s empathy wash over me as surely as I had once felt the cooling power of the ocean douse the heat from my body as a child. The girl felt Maggie’s understanding, too, and she pulled her legs in even more tightly against her body.
“Look behind it,” Sarah Hayes said softly. I could barely catch the words.
“Behind the cabinet?” Maggie asked.
Sarah Hayes nodded and unfolded her limbs. She melted upstairs before Maggie could thank her.
My heart ached for them both.
Maggie did not waste time on sympathy. She was vibrating with an urgency that could not be derailed. “Help me,” she ordered two of her men. Together, they inched the cabinet away from the wall, swinging it out on one leg in an arc that revealed a small door cut neatly into the drywall behind it. Its handle was inset and as white as the wall around it, making it nearly invisible even when in plain view.
I had a sudden flash of Sarah Hayes—who had learned to move silently through her life in order to survive—creeping down the basement steps, peering through the dark at her father, determined to know where the enemy was every moment of the day and night, watching while he accessed his secret cache, not knowing what was inside but knowing that, whatever it was, it was worth hiding and might, perhaps, one day save her from him.
Maggie examined the hiding place with her flashlight, pulled on a pair of fresh evidence gloves, and eased a plastic shoebox from the hiding place. She was careful to hold it by the lip as she gingerly carried it to a countertop and set it down for closer scrutiny.
“Let me do that,” one of the men said as she started to pry it open.
“No, it’s okay,” Maggie assured him. “The sides are translucent. You can see inside, at least a little.” They peered through the milky plastic sides of the box. “It looks like scarves, maybe? Socks. It’s just . . . things.”
The men stepped back anyway as Maggie pried the lid from the box and began to lift the stored items out, displaying them on the stainless-steel counter one by one: a purple bandanna, an ankle bracelet made of tiny seashells, a lacy pink bra, a gold necklace with a heart-shaped locket dangling from it, a white cotton jogging bra, four pairs of panties, a diaphanous floral-print top, and an assortment of earrings.
“Could they belong to Alissa Hayes?” one of the men asked. “Maybe they’re mementos of his daughter?”
Maggie was frowning as she handled the garments, comparing the sizes and placing the earrings in one long row as she examined them carefully. She appeared not to have heard the question, but after a moment she looked up at the man who had asked it.
“They’re mementos all right.” She held up the panties. “But they’re not from his daughter. There are