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I felt like I’d need a GPS just to find a bathroom if I spent any amount of time in this house. Even now, after touring the whole place, I wasn’t sure I could remember how to get back down to the basement without a little trial and error.

As if he could read my mind, Dad raced back up the loft steps. I heard him open a door toward the back of the house. Then I heard distinct, clomping footsteps as he made his way down to the basement and back up again. The sound reverberated through the entire house.

Even if they were asleep and possibly inebriated, it was hard to fathom how Sidney’s footsteps hadn’t been heard by everyone in the house.

“Have you seen enough yet?” Art asked as Dad finally reemerged in the living room.

“I have,” I said.

“Then we better get back,” Art said. “I don’t wanna be late for lunch. My granddaughter-in-law is making clam chowder. It’s her specialty. I can probably convince her to let you stay if you’re hungry.”

“We have to get back too,” Dad said. He had a grim look on his face. I knew he was thinking the same thing.

Having seen the house, I’d drawn the same conclusion as Dan Holland had in one respect. It certainly seemed like whoever killed those girls that night had to have known their way around. Could he be right? Was it Geneva herself?

Chapter

Eleven

No sooner had Dad and I docked the boat the next morning than a courier showed up carrying a padded white envelope. It bore the Down County Sheriff’s Department seal.

Dad stood at the reception desk, trying to sort through the mass of paperwork I’d asked him to go through. I’d arranged a pickup later today through a shredding service. I couldn’t handle all the clutter in the storage closet across from my office anymore.

I tipped the courier and ripped open the envelope. It contained a thumb drive and a single sheet of paper. “Is that it?” Dad asked.

I didn’t need to read the letter to be able to answer him.

“It’s the Deadwater Lake murder report. My FOIA request came through.”

Dad held a fistful of papers. “Looks like this is going to have to wait for another day.”

I wanted to argue with him. He’d found some excuse or another not to deal with the mess going on for two weeks now. But he was right. I needed his full attention if we were going to make any sense of these files today.

“Come on,” I sighed. “I set up the double monitors in the conference room. Do you have anybody coming in today?”

“Beats me.”

“We need an office manager!” I grumbled. I had a new client coming in later this afternoon, but nothing for the next six hours. We could work through lunch if Dad’s stamina held out.

His eyes lit with excitement. I couldn’t help feeling a little of it myself. As gruesome as I knew these files would be, this was good for Dad’s brain.

Within fifteen minutes, I had the contents of the flash drive pulled up on the main monitor. It had been organized into five main files with multiple subfiles in each.

Crime scene photos. Autopsy findings. Witness interviews. Lab results. Plus Dan Holland’s narrative summary.

I still felt that burning disappointment knowing there was another file that contained possibly even more useful information. What Holland would have written in the official report could be vastly different from what he’d kept in his own personal journals. There were likely various leads he pursued that never made it into the official report. I might need them now.

Then there was the basis for Holland’s suspicion against Geneva herself. I wondered what this thumb drive could tell me that Dan wouldn’t.

I pulled up his official summary and printed two copies. Dad went to the printer and pulled them off. We read together. Me in silence, Dad out loud.

“Forty-two witnesses. DNA from all five victims including Geneva. He’s got crime scene analysis reports from both the state police and the FBI. I’m surprised the feds were willing to include some of their stuff in your FOIA. They can be stingy sometimes.”

I went to the whiteboard and made two columns. I titled one “Sidney.” The other I drew a giant question mark. Beneath it, I wrote two things. “Dan Holland’s Intuition” and “Layout and No Forced Entry.”

Under the Sidney column, I added to the bullet points as Dad and I spent the next three hours poring over the reports.

“Sidney’s on CCTV at a gas station a mile and a half from Deadwater Lake at 6:19 p.m. the evening before the girls are killed,” Dad said.