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T wo early-morning transports with the investigators had Livia back to the OCME by two p.m. on Wednesday afternoon.

She sat behind her desk in the fellows’ office and perused the Internet.

She was looking for anything she could find about Casey Delevan or the strange group of twisted individuals Diana Wells had called the Capture Club, whose membership Livia was scared to admit included Nicole.

Although Livia found no specific organization by this name, she did manage to locate a strong online presence of people interested in the details of current and past missing people.

“We’re done for the day, Doc. Any calls after three o’clock go to the second shift. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Thanks, Kent,” Livia said.

She ripped the sticky note containing Nathaniel Theros’s information from the pad and left the office.

Mr. Theros lived on the west side of Emerson Bay, not quite a two-hour drive from Raleigh.

Her brakes squeaked when she stopped in front of his house—a single-story ranch with overgrown shrubs, unkempt grass, and weeds pushing through the sidewalk cracks.

Nathaniel Theros’s house sat in a crumbling neighborhood of other dilapidated homes that made up the ruins of West Emerson Bay, where industry had died over the last few decades as factories shut down and moved overseas.

The years had seen a great transformation take place in Emerson Bay, when shipping and port industries spread to the north and south, as if a drop of detergent had fallen onto Emerson Bay and pushed away the greasy factories and grimy shipping yards, leaving behind the squeaky-clean waterfront community of East Emerson Bay, called East Bay by locals, which was hip and young and booming.

The waterfront homes attracted the wealthy, and tourism was rampant.

Restaurants, shops, and galleries prospered as local residents and tourists walked the cobblestone streets and ate on verandas while staring at the bay and watching restored steamboats chug up and down the waterway.

But when tourism took root and sprouted to become the major economy in Emerson Bay, the west side suffered.

Without the factories or the shipping yards, and without the benefit of a beautiful waterfront, West Bay became the dying side of town with crumbling shells of old refineries, and train yards that made for noisy living.

What used to be a place where hard-working folk retreated after a day on the docks or in the factories, a place where a small yard for your kids and safe streets in the neighborhood were enough for a pleasant existence, West Bay now was somewhere only visited when necessary.

And for Livia, today there was no way around it.

One last check of the address, then she walked up the steps and rang the bell. Dogs barked incessantly and clawed the door from the other side. There was some yelling and corralling before the door finally opened.

“What’s up?” the man said.

“Nathaniel Theros?”

“Only if I’m in trouble. Nate, otherwise.”

Livia smiled. “No trouble. My name’s Livia Cutty. I wanted to ask you a weird question.”

The man was bent over, holding a large Rottweiler by its collar. Faded tattoos crept from under his T-shirt, down his arms and up his neck. He pulsed his eyebrows. “I like weird.”

“You used to know a guy named Casey Delevan?”

Instant smile. “Oh, yeah. While back.”

“Mind if I ask you some questions about him?”

“He in trouble?”

“You could say that.”

“You a cop?”

“No, I’m a doctor.”

Nate made a strange face. “Gimme a sec. I’ll put Daisy away.”

Livia waited on the porch while Nate disappeared into the house, dragging Daisy reluctantly with him as the Rottweiler growled and barked.

She heard the rattle of a cage, then Nate was back.

He pushed through the screen door and walked onto the front stoop, sat against the railing opposite her, and lit a cigarette that glowed in the October dusk.

“So why’s a doctor asking about Casey Delevan? ”

“Curiosity, mostly. I work over at the OCME.”

“What’s that?”

“The Medical Examiner’s office in Raleigh. I’m a fellow finishing my training.”

“Oh, yeah? Like CSI stuff?”

“Sort of.”

“Shit,” Nate said with a smile. “What sort of trouble is Casey in?”

“There was a body pulled out of Emerson Bay a few weeks ago. You hear about that?”

Nate nodded his head. “Heard about it.”

“ID came back as your pal, Casey.”

Nate smiled as though Livia were putting him on, then put his cigarette to his mouth. “You telling me Casey’s dead?”

Livia nodded. “Sorry. It’s been on the news.”

“I don’t got a TV, just Internet. And I ain’t been around the last few weeks. What happened to him?”

“Not sure yet,” Livia lied. “He was found floating in the bay, so some people are guessing he killed himself. Jumped from Points Bridge. You two used to work together?”

“Yeah, like, I don’t even know how long ago.

Couple years, maybe. We had a carpentry company.

You know, handyman stuff for rich guys in East Bay who don’t know how to do any of that.

” Nate smiled as he reminisced. “We had some jobs lined up, too. Doing pretty good. Then one day, he stopped showing up. After a week, I knew he was gone.”

“Gone, dead?”

“Shit, no. Just gone. Casey was a drifter. He’d been all over the place and I got the impression Emerson Bay was just a stop for him.

When he didn’t show for work, I figured he moved on to his next place.

But I mean”—Nate shrugged—“I could see him jumping off a bridge. He was the craziest sumbitch I ever knew. Pretty dark, too, sometimes. Depressed, maybe, I don’t know. ”

“When was that? That Casey stopped showing up for work?”

Nate gave a confused look, like Livia was challenging him with a calculus question. “Don’t know. It was a while ago.”

“Let’s backtrack. When did you guys start Two Guys? Your handyman company. In the summer?”

“No. It was springtime.” Nate thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Figured we’d try to get all the richies wanting to paint their big homes and remodel before summer came along.”

“So spring of 2016, then? That was . . . let’s say, twenty months ago?”

Nate wrinkled his forehead. “Yeah, I guess. Couple years, like I said.”

“Okay. So you started in spring. And you said you had some work?”

“Oh, yeah. We were busy.”

“Can you remember how long you and Casey worked together?”

Nate sucked on his cancer stick and rocked his head back and forth as if he were listening to music.

“Few months. ’Member it being really hot that summer, and we were doing a lot of exteriors.

We were painting a big house on the bay.

It was so hot we had to hide from the sun, sort of follow the shadows throughout the day so we could paint in the shade.

” Nate shook his head now as it came back to him.

“That’s right. ’Member that now ’cause we were just halfway done when Casey took off.

Left me to finish the sumbitch by myself.

Big beach house. Yeah, now I got it. Guy paid me when I was done, and I even saved some cash to give Casey when he showed his face.

After a few weeks, I figured the money was mine. He ain’t comin’ back.”

“That was summertime,” Livia sad. “Do you remember which month?”

Nate thought for a minute. “I don’t got the company no more. When Casey took off, I couldn’t do it by myself. But I saved the paperwork for my taxes. Still got it in a folder somewhere. Want me to check when we did that house?”

“Would you mind?”

“Gimme a minute.”

Livia stood on the front porch while Nate headed inside. He returned five minutes later.

“August,” he said as he came through the screen door.

He was holding a small calendar book he read from.

“Job took three weeks. Started August thirteenth, finished by myself September fifth. Last time I saw Casey was that first week we worked on the house. He showed up that whole week, then never came back after the weekend. If I’m remembering right.

So I guess that would be”—Nate consulted the old pocket calendar where he used to track his jobs—“Friday, August nineteenth. Last time I saw him.” He looked up at Livia. “Best I can ’member.”

Livia stared at the book in his hands. Her face stayed stoic but her mind was frantic.

Nicole had disappeared on Saturday, August twentieth, from a beach party that most of Emerson Bay High seniors had attended.

Livia remembered Art Munson, the landlord who reported Casey missing in November.

With three months of rent prepaid, it’s possible Casey disappeared in August along with Nicole.

And it was possible that the time of death, determined by the anthropology department at the OCME to be twelve to eighteen months, was that same weekend.

Her thoughts veered in unorganized directions and for a moment Dr. Cutty, who was trained to take random discoveries and make sense of them, stood with no tools to collect the information she was gathering, no ability to put the pieces together into anything cohesive.

The random bits of knowledge popped into her mind—about the weekend Nicole went missing and that it might have coincided with Casey’s disappearance.

About the two of them dating. About the perverse group called the Capture Club.

About Casey Delevan’s body turning up on her autopsy table.

Her mind flashed back to Dr. Larson and the skewers she had used to probe the mysterious piercings in Casey’s skull.

The “shovel” contusions on his upper arms. His shirt caked in clay from the ground in which he was originally buried.

The ropes and the cinder blocks and the fisherman who had pulled him from the bottom of the bay .

Livia’s thoughts congealed into a single question. She asked it before she knew it was on her tongue. “Were you part of the Capture Club?”