Page 8

CHAPTER 8

I KNEW WHAT THIS WAS.

This was a trophy box.

The first time I’d ever seen one was back in Colorado more than a decade ago, when I’d been a relatively new public defender. I’d been assigned to represent Darcy Statesman, a forty-three-year-old married father of two accused of committing a home invasion and rape. The case had been a welcome interruption to my typical parade of drug-possessing idiots and their cousins, the DUI losers. My first meeting with Darcy Statesman had convinced me that he was innocent, that the police had gotten it all wrong, that he was a loving father ensnared in a devastating miscarriage of justice that only I could rectify.

The discovery of Darcy’s trophy box changed all that. That box, which the prosecution submitted into evidence, was polished mahogany with gold hinges, about the size of a shoebox. Inside were sixteen pairs of women’s panties, each tied with a delicate pink ribbon at the left hip. On the ribbons were the names and addresses of women from as far away as Japan — including the name and address of the most recent victim, the case he’d just told me he’d had nothing to do with.

I’d dropped the case. Darcy was eventually charged with sixteen rapes and convicted of fourteen.

As I eyed Troy Hansen’s cardboard box, I felt a hot wave of nausea wash over me, the same as I’d felt looking over Darcy Statesman’s trophy box, and I experienced a similar world-shaking realization: There was a universe where people did things that were unspeakably bad. Inhuman. And somehow a piece of that world had fallen into mine.

The zip-lock bag I’d pulled out held an old wooden hairbrush with a hand-painted image of a bunny on its oval-shaped back. It also contained a newspaper cutting with the headline “Search Continues for Local Teen Missing in Mountains” above a photo of a lanky Hispanic teenage girl with tumbling brown curls sitting on a park bench in the lotus position.

I got up unsteadily, slipped the bag back into the box. The box itself was dusty, bits of dirt collected at the bottom. I rummaged in the desk drawers and found a pair of latex gloves — you never know when you might need them — put them on, and pulled out another, larger zip-lock bag. It appeared to contain a tightly rolled T-shirt or jersey of some kind. I could see printed white lettering on navy-blue fabric. There was a newspaper clipping in here too, and I moved the bag around until I could read the headline: “Parents Desperate for News of Troubled Son.”

Troy Hansen sat silently in the chair in front of my desk as I flipped through a few of the bags in the box, not wanting to disturb them too much. I glimpsed other items. A wool hat. A small painting kit. Each bag seemed to have a newspaper clipping. The contents were carefully organized, indicating the same thoughtful intention and sinister orderliness that Darcy Statesman had used in his collection of sick trophies.

“What in the world is this?” I asked Troy as I sat down behind my desk. “Why do you have this box?”

“I was searching the house last night,” he said, finally looking me in the eye. “Trying to find something that would help me figure out where Daisy is, maybe some clue to where she went. I checked out the crawl space that’s under the house, and I noticed some disturbed earth. That’s where I found the box. It was buried down there. Not deep. There was only maybe an inch of dirt on top.”

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “You’re saying you found this box with all of this ... stuff ... in it buried under your house?”

“Yes.”

I waited for him to say more. I had a ton of questions for Troy. How long had he and Daisy lived in their house? When did he last access the crawl space? What exactly had happened on the night Daisy went missing? But I’d always found that the best way to get suspects talking was to give them the space to wander verbally on their own and let them take me on the journey.

Yet Troy was unlike any man I’d ever had sitting in the chair before me. He wasn’t taking me anywhere.

Troy alternated between avoiding eye contact and giving an unnerving amount of it, staring at me with the unnaturally still, eerily calm gaze of a doll. As the seconds ticked by, a parade of thoughts marched through my mind. I thought of the gun I kept strapped to the underside of my desk. Of the phone in my back pocket. Of the squad cars in the parking lot. Of what I would do if this man tried to hurt me the way he had, perhaps, hurt his wife and the people whose precious items were contained in that cardboard box.

I found myself wondering if I was sitting across the desk from a monster. Troy’s strange and depthless eyes did nothing to alleviate my concerns.

“Troy, this makes no sense,” I finally said, lifting my hands helplessly. “No sense at all.”

“I know.”

“You have to give me some answers here.”

“I don’t have any,” he said.

“Your wife is missing,” I said, my frustration rising. “From everything I’ve heard, it looks like there was a struggle in your home. Your behavior since has been ... it’s been odd. Undeniably odd.” My exasperation made me blunt. “You come across terribly on camera, Troy. And in person, you’re not much better.”

“I know,” he said again. “I’m not hugely social or ... practiced with people. I’m not close to my parents, and I don’t have a lot of friends. I have one buddy, a guy from work, and I have Daisy. I never wanted or needed much else.”

“But you see how it looks, Troy. Like you’re an unsocialized loner with a missing wife who pops up in my office carting what seems to be a creepy collection of artifacts from other missing people.”

Troy sighed and put a hand up. “I know how it looks. It looks like I ... like I killed Daisy, and while the world is howling for me to be charged for that crime, I decided to come clean about all the other killing I’ve done. Or ... I don’t know ... maybe it looks like I’m trying to pin these crimes on her.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” I gestured to the box and laughed humorlessly at the sheer absurdity of this whole conversation. “Are you trying to say that this is Daisy’s box?”

“No,” Troy said. “I’m not saying anything about the box at all. I don’t know for sure what the stuff in this box is. I don’t know who it belongs to or how it got under my house. But I see those newspaper articles about all the people who are missing, just like Daisy. I didn’t want to open the bags, and I can’t easily look into any of this or even google the names to find out more because the police have all my stuff. My phone, my computers.”

I held my head in my hands.

“Try to imagine that what I’m saying is true,” he said. “I didn’t kill Daisy. I don’t know where she is. Just try, will you?” Troy pleaded. For the first time, I saw a flicker of an emotion in his eyes: desperation. “Imagine that I came home to find my wife gone and that I really, genuinely, have no idea what’s happened to her. I don’t even know if she’s alive or dead. And if that’s not horrible enough, imagine that everyone in the world is pointing a finger at me. Imagine that all week, the police have been following me and watching me and questioning me for hours on end. Imagine me getting so tired and scared that I decided to search every square inch of my house for clues about what the hell happened to my wife. Now imagine how I felt when I found this .”

He pointed at the box on my desk.

I did as he asked. While Troy stared at his feet, I sat and imagined, or tried to imagine, the predicament he’d described.

“You haven’t told the police about the box?” I asked.

“Would you?” he responded.