Olympia’s expression was a cracked veneer of shame. Saffy had her answer. The room smelled like Christmas candles and smoked meat. A sudden wave of understanding broke over Saffy’s body, the recognition simmering. A patch of orange fur, stuck bloody to Saffy’s palm; Lila’s giant eleven-year-old eyes, a handful of crumbling oatmeal raisin cookies. The way the squirrels laid in death, one, two, three with the fox, arms stretched deliberately above their heads in surrender. Moretti’s finger hooked through the eye socket of that skull. Fur, skin. The way death peeled itself deliberately from a bone.
*
The Fitzgeralds’ bathroom was papered in peeling pink. Mrs. Fitzgerald had lined the counter with little figurines—angels and shepherds, porcelain cherubs. A bowl of potpourri sat by the faucet, old and crunchy, a layer of dust gathered on the petals. Saffy ran the water cold, splashed it onto her face.
As the years faded, Saffy remembered less and less about her mother. The tiny things had slipped away without saying goodbye. Her mother’s favorite shoes were red patent leather. Saffy could not recall the shape. She remembered dark lipstick, but not the slope of her mother’s canine teeth. These tiny reckonings seemed unfair, as Saffy leaned both hands against the faux marble counter. In the mirror, she still saw bits of her mother, except her mother had been white, and for that reason, Saffy would always resemble her father to everyone else. When people asked where she was from—no, where she was really from—Saffy would tell them. My father is from India. No, I’ve never been. Yes, I’d like to go someday. And every time, she would feel an exhaustion that reached her very bones.
Saffy wished her mother were here now. She would have words for this change, riling ferocious from Saffy’s gut. A monster, roaring the sound of that name: Ansel Packer.
Saffy still kept the photo frame, with her mother’s handwriting inside. It sat now on her nightstand—the glass polished clean. Felix culpa, her mother had written. The happy fault. The horrible thing that leads to the good. As Saffy fled the Fitzgeralds’ house without goodbye or explanation, she wondered about her father; if he had grown up learning religious phrases similar to those she’d been forced to study in the Bible as a foster child. For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit evil to exist at all.
*
“We have a lead,” Saffy said, breathless.
Moretti looked worn, her hair uncharacteristically mussed as they sat in the late-night hush of the station. The bullpen was blissfully abandoned. Moretti had sent Kensington home, after he’d sulked over and plopped the day’s reports onto the conference room table. The tip lines had exploded since the press conference, and Kensington had spent the day listening to a series of unhinged townie theories. The girls were kidnapped by a serial killer from the seventies, the girls were members of a Satanic cult, the girls had fought, then murdered one another. The tip line was necessary, Moretti had lectured to a cranky Kensington, who’d taken a flask from his jacket and swigged it blatantly. They had to check every box.
But now, Saffy had this. Something real.
Ansel Packer.
Saffy’s clothes still carried the mildew stench of the Fitzgeralds’ house. Beneath the glow of the desk lamp, she detailed Olympia’s statement, explaining what she knew of Ansel Packer as a boy.
“He exhibits all the traits of our perpetrator. Explosive, but not consistently so. Fragile with his masculinity, always trying to prove it. Socially competent enough to avoid calling attention to himself. It makes sense—I’ve seen him before, humiliated. Those animals in the yard, also buried by a creek. He kills in threes, Sergeant.”
Moretti eyed Saffy with a doubt that felt horribly akin to pity.
“So you had personal relationships with them both,” she said slowly. “The victim and the suspect.”
“Yes,” Saffy admitted. There were very few cases in their department that did not carry similar conflicts—the Adirondacks were small.
“There is a difference,” Moretti said gently, “between believing something is true and having the facts to prove that it’s true. It doesn’t matter what you suspect. It doesn’t matter what you think, unless you build a case that can stand up in court.”
Even as the surety rushed through her veins, Saffy could not speak of the fox. She had never told anyone what Ansel had done, how that corpse had globbed onto her bedsheets—it felt too raw, too personal to divulge. The incident lived inside her, a private bubble of shame that she poked on her worst days, just to see if it had changed shape. It never did.