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She had hated him at the time, and hated herself a little, but later, looking back, Hutter had decided that even if that particular boyfriend had been a book, he would’ve been one from the Business & Finance aisle and she would’ve passed him by and looked for something in SF & Fantasy.

Hutter and Daltry stood together in the almost empty parking lot. She could see into the CITGO, through the big plate-glass windows. The Pakistani behind the cash register kept flashing them nervous looks. Hutter had told him he wasn’t under surveillance, that the federal government thanked him for his cooperation, but he almost certainly believed that his phone was tapped and they were eyeing him as a potential terrorist.

“You think you should’ve gone to Pennsylvania?” Daltry asked.

“Depending on how this turns out, I might go tomorrow.”

“Fuckin’ horror show,” Daltry said.

Hutter had been getting voice mails and e-mails all night about the house on Bloch Lane in Sugarcreek. They had the place covered in a tent and you had to wear a rubber suit and a gasmask to get through the door. They were treating the joint like it was contaminated with Ebola. A dozen forensics experts were in there, state and federal, pulling the place apart. They had been excavating bones from one wall of a root cellar all afternoon. The guy who had lived there, Bing Partridge, had melted most of the remains with lye; what he couldn’t destroy he stored, much the way a bee stores honey, in little cells, lightly mudded over.

He had not gotten around to dissolving his most recent kill, a guy named Nathan Demeter from Kentucky—the corpse that Vic McQueen had mentioned on the phone. He had vanished a little more than two months ago, along with his vintage Rolls-Royce Wraith. Demeter had picked up the car in a federal auction, more than a decade before.

Its prior owner was one Charles Talent Manx, former resident at FCI Englewood in Colorado.

Demeter had mentioned Manx in the note he’d written shortly before his death by strangulation; he had misspelled the name, but it was pretty clear whom he was talking about. Hutter had seen a scan of the note, had read it herself a dozen times.

Tabitha Hutter had learned the Dewey decimal system and then organized the books in her Boston apartment according to it. She had a plastic box filled with carefully handwritten recipes, ordered by region and food type (main course, appetizers, desserts, and one category labeled “p.c.s.,” for postcoital snacks). She took private, almost guilty pleasure in defragmenting her hard drive.

She sometimes imagined her own mind as a futuristic apartment with a clear glass floor, clear glass stairs, furniture made out of clear plastic, everything seeming to float: clean, dustless, ordered.

But it wasn’t like that now, and when she tried to think about what had happened in the last seventy-two hours, she felt overwhelmed and confused. She wanted to believe that information brought clarity. Not for the first time in her life, however, she had the disconcerting notion that it was often the opposite. Information was a jar of flies, and when you unscrewed the lid, they went everywhere and good luck to you trying to round them all up again.

Hutter inhaled the mossy-smelling night, shut her eyes, and cataloged the flies:

Victoria McQueen had been abducted at age seventeen by Charles Manx, a man who had almost certainly kidnapped others. He was at that time driving a Rolls-Royce Wraith, the 1938 model. Vic got away from him, and Manx was jailed for transporting her across state lines and murdering an active-duty soldier. In another sense Vic had not escaped him at all. Like so many survivors of trauma and probable sexual assault, she was made a prisoner again and again—of her addictions, of madness. She stole things, did drugs, bore a child out of wedlock, and burned through a string of failed relationships. What Charlie Manx had not been able to do she had been trying to do for him ever since.

Manx had spent close to twenty years locked up in the FCI Englewood Supermax. After drifting in and out of a coma for most of a decade, he had died this past spring. The coroner had estimated his age at ninety—no one knew the exact number, and while he was still cogent, Manx had claimed to be a hundred sixteen years old. The body had been snatched from the morgue by vandals, creating a minor scandal, but there was no question of his death. His heart had weighed 10.2 ounces, a bit light for a man of his size. Hutter had seen a photograph of it.

McQueen claimed she’d been assaulted again, just three days ago, by Charlie Manx and a man in a gasmask, and that these men had driven off with her twelve-year-old son in the back of a vintage Rolls-Royce.

It had been reasonable to doubt her story. She’d been badly beaten—but her injuries might’ve been inflicted by a twelve-year-old struggling for his life. There were tire tracks on the lawn, but they could’ve been made by her motorcycle as easily as by a car—the soft, wet earth held no usable prints. She claimed she’d been shot at, but forensics had failed to recover a single bullet.

Also, more damningly: McQueen had secretly contacted a woman, Margaret Leigh, a heartland hooker and drug addict who seemed to have information about the missing child. When McQueen was confronted about Leigh, she fled on a motorcycle, taking nothing. And had disappeared as if she’d dropped down a mine shaft.

Ms. Leigh had been impossible to locate. She had drifted through a series of shelters and halfway houses in Iowa and Illinois, had not paid taxes or held a job since 2008. Her life had an unmistakably tragic arc: Once she had been a librarian and a beloved if eccentric local Scrabble competitor. Leigh also once held a reputation as something of an amateur psychic, of occasional use to law enforcement. What did that mean?