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Emmy found a school photograph of each girl. Unlike with the others, she carefully placed each one on the table. “Madison still had her baby fat. She looked like a child. Cheyenne looked like a young woman.”

A reverent silence filled the room. They all needed a moment to absorb the brutality behind the deaths.

Madison’s face was almost cherubic. Her front tooth was snaggled.

She had long blonde hair down past her shoulders.

Cheyenne’s dark hair was shorter, cut in a choppy shag.

Her make-up was heavier. Her lips were pouting in the photo.

She was trying so hard to be older, to live a life that had been snatched away from her.

Jude took a deep breath. “Madison was held in an isolated location for at least twelve hours. The Bad Guy could’ve kept her longer. Why didn’t he?”

Emmy said, “After Millie told me Adam Huntsinger was the Perv, news got out pretty quickly that we were looking for him. Dad and I went straight to his parents’ house.

Clayville PD spotted his truck parked in front of the Hang Out.

Dad and Virgil went to pick him up. I got a call from Hannah maybe five minutes after they left. If she knew, everybody knew.”

Jude asked Virgil, “How long had Adam been at the bar?”

Virgil shrugged, but said, “Your uncle Penley guessed maybe an hour.”

“It’s not Adam.” Emmy sounded dead certain.

“Everything we’ve outlined so far points to a control freak capable of strategic thinking.

The abductions and murders of Cheyenne and Madison were well planned and executed.

Adam Huntsinger’s impetuous and stupid. His rap sheet is filled with dumb people crimes—open container, drunk driving, moving violations.

He can’t even remember to bring his driver’s license half the time.

There’s no way he could’ve pulled this off. ”

Jude said, “We’re not at the point where we know anything for a fact. Let’s keep an open mind.”

Emmy started shaking her head again. She looked shell-shocked. “We got it wrong.”

“Let’s look at alternatives.” Jude went back to the whiteboard. She wrote Adam’s name at the top. “We’re all familiar with the case against Adam. Who were the other men in Cheyenne and Madison’s lives that came up during the investigation?”

Virgil took over when Emmy didn’t respond. “Felix Baker is Cheyenne’s father, Paul Dalrymple is Madison’s, Dale Loudermilk had them both in his choral group. Wesley Woodrow had a drug angle that could’ve overlapped. Dr. Carl Whitlock saw Madison as a patient.”

“We’ve eliminated Felix, but I’ll leave him in.” Jude wrote out the names below Adam’s, then added Father Nate. “Cheyenne’s family was Catholic, right?”

Emmy started to rally. She thumbed through a stack of folders. “We ruled out Nate. He was in Smyrna meeting with the Archbishop of Atlanta. I drove up there to talk to him myself. This is a photo from that day.”

Jude looked at the photograph. Nate was standing alongside a bunch of other fat, white men in fancy dresses, all giving a thumbs up to the camera. “What’s the drive to Smyrna from North Falls? Three hours?”

“Just about,” Virgil said “Nate was up there for the entire day. Highway Patrol tracked his Cadillac on both their scanners and traffic cameras.”

Jude had to admit that she was impressed. Gerald had known Nate for decades, but they’d still run the lead back to the root. “What about Paul?”

“He was with Hannah,” Emmy said. “I saw him off and on the whole day at the park. So did Brett Temple. Paul was intoxicated by the time the fireworks show started.”

Virgil supplied, “Dr. Carl was with his son, Jack Whitlock, all night. They alibi each other. I ran down the browsing history on Jack’s computer. He was online the entire evening but for the forty-five minutes when he went to watch the fireworks with his dad in the backyard.”

Jude remembered Carl. He’d been one of Tommy’s friends. “What about Walton Huntsinger? He’s the town dentist. Everybody I knew went to him when we were kids. Were Cheyenne or Madison his patients?”

“He did an emergency filling on Cheyenne when they first moved to Clifton, but Walton was out of town over the Fourth.” Emmy opened another folder.

She slid a photograph across the conference table.

“This is a selfie we printed out from Walton’s phone that proves he was nowhere near North Falls when the girls were abducted.

There’s an organization called the Tooth Troopers he volunteers with.

They were working out of the American Legion Hall in Bridgeport, West Virginia, for three days.

Walton rented a car since the transmission was slipping in his Jetta. That’s why Adam had access to it.”

Jude looked at the selfie of Walton Huntsinger standing in front of a stone building. She easily recognized his lined face. Same affable smile. Same squinty eyes. Same jet-black hair. “The family certainly loves their hair dye.”

Cole said, “He was pretty old back then. He’s probably peeing dust by now.”

“Cole.” Emmy scolded. “Walton’s only a few years older than Virgil.”

“I’m not peeing dust, son.” Virgil gave Cole a sharp look before finding a yellow carbon copy of a rental car receipt.

He slid it in Jude’s direction. “The Hertz over in Verona verified Walton took out a car on July second and returned it about half an hour before Emmy and Gerald found him at his house.”

Emmy said, “His suitcase was still in the hall. He was in the shower when Dad knocked on the front door.”

“All right.” Jude went to the next name. “What about Woody?”

Virgil took over again. “He was at Lake Allatoona with his father’s people. They got rowdy with another group on the lake. The cops got involved. Couple of folks went to the hospital. Stirred up all kinds of shit. Real patriotic way to celebrate the Fourth.”

Emmy placed another photo in front of Jude. “Here’s Woody’s mugshot from the arrest.”

Jude couldn’t look away from the teenager’s face. He had a nasty smirk on his lips. His beady eyes glared back at the camera. She could see tattoos on his bare chest. A fresh gash on his forehead. There was something eerily familiar about his features. She felt a chill go down her spine.

Jude asked, “Is Woody related to Bubba Rawley?”

“Yep,” Virgil confirmed. “That’s his grandson. Tanya abandoned him. He was raised by his grandmama. She died a few years back. Fentanyl.”

Jude made herself look away from the photo. “What was he charged with on the Fourth?”

“Originally? Drunk and disorderly with a side of assault,” Virgil said. “Lawyer got it kicked down to public nuisance.”

Emmy tapped one of the memory sticks. “This has the footage of Woody’s police interview. Stone cold, just sits there refusing to answer any questions until they give up.”

“Takes after his grandfather.” There was only one name left on the board. Jude said, “Dale Loudermilk. What was his alibi?”

“He didn’t have one,” Emmy said. “He was at home by himself that week. His wife was visiting her sister in Carrolton. He had two days off from the rec center. His neighbors were at the fireworks show. No one saw him until five thirty on the morning of July fifth, when he was seen by a neighbor in the driveway washing the car.”

Jude remembered a detail from the podcast. “What made you follow Dale in the hallway at school that day?”

Emmy didn’t reach for a photo or tap a memory stick.

She went to the laptop Cole had been using.

She clicked through several folders until she found what she was looking for.

Jude looked at the monitor. A school hallway filled the screen.

The color was washed out, the blue lockers blending into the tan-looking floor.

Two of the lockers were open, one several down from the other.

Emmy said, “I was standing with Celia in her office when we saw Dale on one of the CCTV monitors. He didn’t know that the hall camera was fixed a few days before. The open locker belongs to Cheyenne. The photos of her and Madison in matching bras and panties were taped to the back.”

Jude watched Dale Loudermilk appear on the screen.

She had seen the man’s booking photo, but in three-dimension, he looked exactly the way she expected him to: perfectly normal, like every other teacher you’d find at any school in America.

Tan cargo shorts. Green shirt from the rec center.

Bushy mustache. He was walking down the hallway, but he stopped at Cheyenne’s locker.

Several seconds passed as he looked at the photos inside.

Then his head turned left. Then right. Then he reached inside.

Emmy said, “That’s the nude photo of Cheyenne where she’s exposing herself. I left it face-down inside the locker.”

Jude kept her focus on Dale. He was staring at the obscene photo. His face was only in profile, but she could see no emotion. Time spooled out. Nearly half a minute passed before he returned the photo to the locker and walked away.

Emmy said, “I spliced together the footage to track him to the auditorium.”

Jude followed Dale’s progress down the long hallway.

His hands kept moving in his pockets. He was distracted, not paying attention to the fact that Emmy was trailing him from several yards away.

He did a cursory look to the left and right before he opened the doors to the auditorium.

Another angle showed Dale walking across the lobby toward another set of doors.

Seconds later, Emmy jogged through, catching the door before it closed.

Emmy stopped the video. “There weren’t any cameras behind the stage.”

Jude let her appreciation show. “You didn’t confront him. You followed him instead. That shows damn good instincts.”

“Well,” Emmy shrugged it off. “Maybe not. Dale looks a hell of a lot better for this right now than Adam Huntsinger.”

Cole asked the obvious question. “Why didn’t y’all think Dale was the murderer?”