The sounds died away. The cloud settled, looking like snow all around her. And her father lay motionless. Then everything went away for a very long time. She ended up spending several months in a psychiatric hospital. Her mother, thank goodness, refused to let them perform insulin therapy on her. She saw it no less barbaric than electroshock. When the doctors told her to just sign her daughter away to them, claiming she would never come out of her stupor, she took her daughter out that very day, brought her home, and made her chicken soup.

Mo felt to the day she died it was the chicken soup that had healed her, and though she never spoke again, she did find her way back to reality, slowly at first, and over time her mother and sister helped her recover.

She and her sister grew even closer. They made up signs, their own secret language, so Mo could talk to her, and while her mother insisted she learn real sign language, she never forgot the language she and her sister made up.

Her good memories hit me, too. Her cousin’s birthday party where she ended up bringing a puppy home because her cousin was angry that it wasn’t a pony. So her aunt gave it to her to teach her son a lesson. The boy had a pony a month later, thus her cousin learned nothing from the experience, but that was okay, because Mo and Bea had a puppy named BB, short for Big Boy, that they served tea to and taught to sneeze on demand. And I now had irrefutable proof that dogs did indeed go to heaven, because that was who Mo saw first when she stepped through me, followed by her sister and then her parents.

* * *

It took me a moment to recover after she passed. I was so happy for her, to be in the place she belonged, with her family again. I was also sad that it took over seventy years for her to be reunited with them, but from what I understood, time didn’t matter much on the other side.

Cookie texted me asking me where I was at.

Right here. Where are you?

Right here. Why can’t I see you? she asked, playing along.

I descended the stairs, still walking a little slower than I’d like, and strolled through the house toward our office.

Garrett was busy in the dining room, scouring a small portion of the text that he felt might be relevant to our situation, namely being held hostage by a group of angry hellhounds. I didn’t dare disturb him, but Osh did. He was in there, too, and he tossed a Cheez-It at him. Garrett didn’t acknowledge the Daeva or his antics.

Osh turned toward me as I walked past, his eyes narrowed. Had he figured out my plan? How could he have? It was a freaking awesome plan. No way would anyone figure it out. Not in a million years.

“So,” Cookie said when I walked in, “I have a plan.”

“Me, too.” I sat in my chair and snatched the file papers out of her hand.

“This is everything I could find out about Colton Ellix. He has the usual. Poor social skills. Very arrogant despite it. He was accused of stalking a girl when he was in high school, but that was long before they took that sort of thing seriously. He told the principal they’d been secretly dating, and when people found out, she accused him of stalking. The principal laughed it off, chalking it up to teenage hormones.”

“What happened with the girl?”

“That’s just it. She disappeared about a month later. She was never found.”

“So, he’s been doing this awhile.”

“I don’t know,” she said, pointing out another report. “He has never, not once, had another report filed on him. No complaints. Just always kept to himself.”

“That doesn’t mean he hasn’t abducted more girls.”

“True, but look at this.” She lifted out a spreadsheet. I was allergic to spreadsheets, so I opted not to touch it. “I have a detailed account of everywhere he’s lived. The high school incident happened in Kentucky. But his family moved around a lot, mostly in close range to other relatives. I get the feeling they were mooches. Once that relative got sick of them, they moved on to the next, claiming one hardship after another until someone new took them in.”

“So, not a stable home life.”

“Not at all, but I’ve searched and searched. There were absolutely no missing persons cases in any town they lived in. At least, not while he lived there. I even widened the search to a hundred miles. Nada. And that’s taking into account when he left his family. He was only sixteen when he moved in with a friend.”

“Still no missing persons?”

“Not one that wasn’t solved. But here’s the most interesting part,” Cookie said, getting excited. “Look at the girl who went missing when he was in high school.”

She showed me a picture of a girl who could have been Faris’s twin. “Wow.”

“Right? I mean, that can’t be a coincidence.”

I sat back and compared their pictures. Every feature was strikingly similar.

“You know what this means?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. Then she shook her head. “Well, no, not really.”

“It means he was relatively new to it. He wasn’t seasoned.”

Her eyes crinkled at the corners as she tried to grasp what I was getting at.

“It means that he made mistakes. Probably a lot of them. Sure, he planned this. Thought it through. Went over every detail with a fine-toothed comb, but I promise you, he screwed up.”

“Of course. He had to have. Repeat killers learn how to avoid mistakes as they go, how to cover their tracks better.”

“They eventually screw up. They all do, but this guy had only done this once. And since he didn’t do it again, I would say he probably didn’t mean to kill the girl the first time. Maybe he genuinely thought that if he could just get her alone, he would win her over. When she either cried and scared him or tried to fight him, he killed her.”