52

The police forensics squad had returned our house to us, but Jill still didn’t want to live there. And I couldn’t stay at Mike and April’s house. My research was about something so evil I didn’t want it near my family. When I got home that night, I hurried to my office and stared at the bourbon bottle in the bottom desk drawer. With a call, I could score both a vape pen and marijuana extract in an hour.

I sat down, closed my eyes, and thought about the children of Harvey Dean Kogan’s victims. My father had said that the killer’s mother was a sadist. She’d so abused her child that he grew up to admire the way Kogan cut her up.

The internet provided more background on my father’s victims. All but one had offspring, yet the newspaper accounts only published the children’s ages and sexes. It was impossible to know which child could have been abused. Twelve women times how many children? I would need the FBI’s help to get information on any of them.

My cell phone squawked and I jumped. It kept screeching while I searched through the piles of papers. I found it on the floor.

“You went to see that cocksucker again, didn’t you?” Polly said.

Maybe she’d guessed because my phone had been off. “You tried to call me?”

“Why the hell didn’t you take me with you?”

“I went with Magnolia.”

She was quiet, surprised.

“The FBI thought he’d open up to her. But he was totally abusive. It was awful. She dissolved in front of him.”

“You expected something different?”

“He loved his sister. Maybe more than anyone.”

“You mean the sister who abandoned him to that mother? The one that let everyone think he’d killed her? That sister? Jesus, she shows up after fifty years—”

“So Magnolia deserved what he did?”

“What I’m saying is, you want something from that bastard, don’t walk in with his useless sister.”

I told her what we’d learned: the killer was a child of one of Kogan’s victims. But I didn’t know who. “Tell me if you have any ideas,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what idea I have. Next time take me with you.”

She hung up and I was left again to ponder which victim’s child the killer was. I fell asleep in my office chair.

My doorbell rang.

Who the hell would show up at midnight?

I kept the hammer with me now. I padded down the hallway, my arm already cocked. But my assailant wouldn’t ring the doorbell, would he?

Someone was pounding the door. “William, open up.” Her bangles rang against the redwood.

I let her in. Polly pushed by me. Her boots knocked against the wooden floor as she headed down the hallway. “Get on your damn computer,” she said. “We have to find one of his photos.”

“I thought you didn’t look at those.”

“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me.”

I followed her back to my office. Woke up the computer.

“Find the Robert Frank one,” she said.

I quickly found my father’s homage to Robert Frank on one of the fan websites. In his version of Frank’s trolley photo, the dark-haired child with haunted eyes stared out of the window of the Elevated train. Next to him was the woman’s blurred face, looking away as if the child meant nothing to her. The image showed the first letter of the station’s name written on the wooden platform. It was an F.

“Google the stops for the Howard line,” Polly said.

I opened another internet window and did what she asked. On the Howard line, only one of the Elevated stations began with an F. “Fullerton.”

“Not California,” Polly said. “Fucking Chicago.”

The train stop where this young boy had desolately stared out at the world. A child who’d grown up to kill in the same way his savior had.