Jenner flicked on the lights in the garage. Marty’s car, covered with a weathered green tarp, had been moved to the far side, away from the loading dock. He cut the plastic ties on the tarp and dragged it off.

The car was dry now, blotched with fingerprint powder; as expected, Crime Scene had found no usable prints.

He opened the front door to pop the trunk; the passenger compartment reeked of mold, the soaked carpeting now furred with splotches of black and gray down.

The trunk was just as moldy. Jenner peered into it, shone his flashlight around, unsure what he was looking for. He lifted the rotting floor mat; under the carpet there was no wheel well, just a film of settled black mud. He examined the undersurface of the trunk hood, and found nothing.

He opened the side doors to let the passenger compartment air out.

Crime Scene had removed the debris from the floor well and dried them; nothing interesting, just utility bills, some paperwork from an old office budget. There had been several coffee cups, two mugs, a sodden, crumbling cardboard box containing a fishing reel, and a handful of new waterlogged thriller novels in a Barnes & Noble bag.

Jenner opened the glove compartment—already emptied by Crime Scene. He lifted the carpeting, jammed his hands down the backs of the seats, felt underneath. Thirty cents worth of coins, an old brochure from a fishing store.

Nothing. That’s what he had found: nothing.

He turned off the flashlight and sat on the old couch the techs used for cigarette breaks. For a few minutes, Jenner stared blankly at the car, all its doors open, its trunk gaping wide.

And then he finally let himself go down the path he’d avoided for so long. The logic was simple and compelling:

People get murdered for money, love, or ego, mostly. Random bad luck, occasionally. Insanity, rarely.

He knew the Roburns well enough to doubt that love, madness, or even ego had got them killed. They hadn’t been killed because they’d showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most likely this was about money.

And it wasn’t a standard home invasion, or a robbery—Marty had been tortured and murdered, just like the men in the swamp. Killed by the same men. Bobbie—not tortured, just bound, thrown into the trunk, and allowed to drown when they dumped her husband’s body—was probably an afterthought: this was all about Marty.

So why kill Marty?

Jenner sat staring at the car. Five men murdered, tortured, two of them with clear signs of drug abuse. He tried to figure out how to connect the deaths, but everything he thought up was absurd and fanciful.

Every possible connection except one.

Drugs.

Jenner had seen the bodies of a thousand dead dealers, a thousand dead junkies. Seen men pimp their girlfriends for drug money, seen crack addicts let their children starve to death—most of the genuine depravity Jenner had ever seen could be traced directly back to drugs. Because drugs let the monster out of the man.

Drugs…But Marty? Jenner couldn’t imagine it, wouldn’t accept it.

He looked down, and saw his hands twisting at the fishing catalog.

And then he thought of one place he hadn’t looked.

He knelt by the driver’s-side door, and reached deep under the dashboard. His fingers stroked down the steering wheel column until they felt the soft rubber box of a concealed spare-key safe. He pulled at the rubber, slipped a finger into the opening, then touched thinner plastic. He tugged and it slipped out into his hand.

It was a packet about the size of a matchbox, tightly rolled in plastic wrap. Jenner put the packet on the stainless steel table and carefully unfurled it to find a smaller plastic wrap package inside, still dry. A length of coarse waxed twine—the type used in the autopsy room to sew up the bodies—looped several times around the inner packet.

Jenner fiddled with the twine and the little packet opened like a flower, several grams of fine white powder sitting in the center of the wrinkled film.