“If that’s what he asked you, I think it’s clear he already knew what Dee Lécuyer did for a living,” Dandridge said. “He was just looking for confirmation.”

“What the fuck iswrongwith this guy?” Colin asked, half-enraged, half-bewildered.

“He’s obsessed,” Alex said. “It started early, is my best guess, maybe during puberty, when his body was a wreck of hormones. He saw Mercy – I don’t know, somewhere. With these sorts of attachments – parasocial relationships – the obsessed party can build an entire fictional friendship or romantic partnership based on a single encounter. Almost bumping into someone at the store; passing each other on the street. In the case of celebrity worship, they watch all of that person’s movies, or shows, or music videos, whatever. With regular people in their lives, things usually escalate: the obsessed party tries to orchestrate a meeting, or at the very least finds a way to observe the target of their obsession.”

“Spy, you mean,” Colin said. “Boyle spied on him.”

“He could have, certainly. He must have learned who Dee was and what she did somehow.”

“Butwhy?”

“There’s no logical reasoning behind it. For most people, admiring someone from afar is never more than a fleeting fantasy. Wondering ‘what if.’ But when someone is as obsessed as Boyle, it becomes a dominating factor of that person’s dailylife. He would have thought of Mercy constantly. Constructed elaborate fantasies. Sought to become a physical part of his life in any way–”

“The club,” Colin said, jerking upright in his chair.

“What?”

“Boyle found Regina through Dee, obviously. But if he stalked Mercy long enough, then he knew he was a Lean Dog. If you were a young guy obsessed with someone in a motorcycle club…”

Alex sat up straighter, too. “You’d try to prospect.”

“Yeah. Shit.”

“Bob’ll have to help on that front,” Dandridge said, and reached for the file.

Alex stayed him with a hand, and snapped a photo of both sheets, first, then shut it and slid it back across the desk himself. “Speaking of Regina Carroll, did you run her name?”

“Yeah.” Dandridge let out a big breath and his brows jumped in an eloquent gesture. He turned to his computer, and clicked the mouse. “She entered the foster system at thirteen – mother, adoptive mother, whatever she was – died of cancer, and there was no father or other relatives in the picture – and was placed in sixteen different homes before she aged out at eighteen.”

“Christ,” Alex muttered.

“She’s been arrested seven times since, but never convicted. Possession, drunk and disorderly, solicitation, solicitation, and petty theft. Somehow” – he made a face – “all her arrests wound up getting heard by the same judge, and he dismissed the charges on each.”

“One guess how she managed that,” Colin said.

“Yeah. So she’s never been what anyone would call a good girl. Obviously, I can’t confirm whether she’s related to Mercy without a DNA sample.” He glanced between them, expectantly.

“I don’t know if we can swing that,” Alex said. “And, honestly, I’m not sure it matters.”

~*~

It didn’t take long. Ava hadn’t figured that it would. She had met stone-cold, stoic women in her life, but she’d known straight off that Regina wasn’t one of them.

She pressed the pump on the soap dispenser once, twice, three times, and then lathered her hands beneath the hot tap. It wasn’t scented, gently-cleansing soap like she kept at her own sinks at home, but tough, industrial-grade stuff, designed to fight motor oil, grit and grime. It worked beautifully on blood, even under her nails, when she scraped pink suds carefully beneath each one.

Gray had been perfect help, handing her items from the box before she could think to ask for them, silent suggestions she gladly took. He had a small, spiral notebook, and the notes he’d taken were printed in small, tidy block letters, easily legible, but coded so that they didn’t sound like the forced confessions of a tortured woman. When Ava was done, and she knew she’d learned all that Regina could offer, he’d started wiping down Mercy’s tools, and nodded toward the notebook he’d set on the window ledge. “I’ll take care of her,” he said, still in that calm, almost-soothing voice. “If I need help, I’ll ask Bob.”

Ava had pocketed the notebook, thanked him with a look and a nod, and come inside to wash her hands. She wanted them to be clean when she went in search of Mercy.

When the water ran clear, and her nails were tidy and translucent, she washed the sweat from her face, finger-combed and retied her ponytail, and then drank great, gulping mouthfuls of cold water directly from the faucet, head tipped under its spout. She regarded her reflection critically. She looked tired,ragged, really, but there was no evidence on her person of what she’d done.

Her mind, she found, when she probed it, was neither locked up with shock, nor screaming in horror. She felt the same sort of urgent numbness she’d been feeling since Remy was taken. Guilt over the past half-hour didn’t factor into it at all.

She passed through the common room, where Maggie was sitting down with the rest of their party, all of them eating sandwiches and drinking sweet tea. There were three empty chairs at their table, three full plates, three sweating glasses of tea, for her, for Mercy, for Gray. But Maggie didn’t try to make her sit down and eat, yet. “He’s on the porch,” she said, quietly, and that was where Ava headed.

Mercy was sitting down on the far end of it, on a wooden bench hollowed out in three places by decades of denim-clad butts. He had one of his knives – a small one – in his hand, and was attempting to pick a splinter from the palm of the other, brow pinched in concentration.

Ava smiled to herself. For all of his carefulness and gentleness, his hyper-awareness of the size of his hands, he’d never been any good at removing his own splinters.