Dim garage.

One bare bulb screwed to a socket in the rafters.

Parked side by side, a black Ford pickup and a black Camaro.

A chair was positioned between the vehicles. Moth-eaten love seat from another era.

The figure in the chair bucked and screamed through a duct-taped mouth. Body and limbs were pinioned to the chair by more tape.

The eyes above the gag were flickers of terror.

Male captive, barely able to see through swollen lids, unsure, now, if life had gotten better or worse.

Pipe-stem arms. Stringy hair, blond, matted, greasy. His gray T-shirt was blood-caked. Brown stains on his jeans coexisted with more blood — amoebic blotches of red. A crusted yellow circle marked the concrete near his bare feet where urine had settled and dried. The garage stank of gasoline and cleaning fluid and more insect poison and shit.

Several feet in front of the chair, near the rear bumper of the Camaro, lay a bloody ball-peen hammer.

The captive’s right hand was a mangled blob.

Milo rushed toward him. “Police, it’s okay, it’s okay.” He began removing the tape-gag as the boy in the chair convulsed.

Binchy’s eyes had shifted to a corner of the garage. He pointed. “Oh, Lord.”

A band saw, just beyond the nose of the pickup.

As Cory Thurber’s parched, swollen lips were liberated, he made a gagging sound and drooled and struggled to speak. As Milo began freeing his arms, he managed a whimper that began feebly and continued to lose power.

Barely audible: “Heheh-hehehllllp me!”

Milo said, “It’s okay, son, you’re safe, just hold on.”

Once you know what to look for, collecting evidence is a whole new game.

Within ten hours of Trisha Bowker’s arrest, the earliest link between her and Paul Mearsheim was found. The couple had gotten together nine years ago, when Mearsheim had worked as a computer consultant for a school district in Massachusetts and Bowker had served as a teacher’s aide. Shared amorality had been the relational glue.

Both had used sanitized bios to obtain the public-sector positions, a pattern repeated as they traveled westward, Mearsheim’s résumé leaving out several dismissals by financial firms due to “irregularities,” Bowker’s criminal record omitted.

Helping that along was the adoption of a new joint identity: the pseudo-married duo of Paul and Donna Weyland. Bowker, with solid talents as an identity thief, had usurped the personae of a couple who’d perished in a 1958 New Jersey house fire. Claiming matrimony had been a cinch; no one ever bothered to check marriage licenses.

For years, the Weylands had combined gainful employment at various public and private schools with illicitly obtained government handouts and on-the-side schemes, mostly slip-and-fall insurance fraud.

From everything Milo could tell, their first homicide had been Jacqueline, Cory’s mother, a widow enticed into what she thought was legal marriage with Paul as he continued to spend fun time with Bowker.

No murders between Jackie and the brutalities of the current case surfaced, but he was still looking.

The search for biological evidence was complete within forty-eight hours, bloodstains and shreds of flesh in the teeth of the band-saw blade at the Marquette garage matched to Hargis Braun’s DNA. Shotgun cartridges found in a kitchen cabinet were consistent with fragments embedded in the ruins of Braun’s face. The garage floor had been washed with ammonia and insecticide but luminol glowed heavily in one corner of concrete and several feet of the tar-paper walls above. Techs had also discovered blood specks in the bed of the pickup truck and two errant hairs matching Braun’s in the hallway of the still-being-processed Evada house.

Also in the Marquette home were a pair of crotchless leopard-print women’s panties, several wigs including a brunette hairpiece whose strands matched those taken from the A-frame by Milo, and a silver-filigree necklace set with amethysts.

The necklace was confirmed as the one sold to Chet Corvin by Bijan Ahmani, owner of Snowbird Jewelers in Arrowhead Village. Ahmani also picked Donna/Trisha’s brunette-wigged photo from a six-pack lineup, as did Briana Muldrew, assistant manager of the San Bernardino Hampton Inn.

Presented with what Milo chose to share of all that, Trisha Bowker, the DNA-confirmed wearer of the bracelet and the wig, was “enthusiastic” about talking to him, per her public defender, a tired-looking fifty-year-old named Hollick Wilde. Initially surprised by my presence in the County Jail interview room, Wilde recovered and said,“Great! This is at the core a psychological situation. The more insight, the better.”

Bowker read a prepared statement. As she recited, Hollick Wilde smiled with self-satisfaction. That and stilted legalese made clear who’d put it together.

Simple theme: Paul Mearsheim, bad. Trisha, scared and intimidated, an often-unwilling confederate.

She described how Mearsheim had shotgunned and mutilated Braun in the Marquette garage, wrapped the body in thick plastic sheeting, bound it with duct tape, then transported it back to Evada Lane in the pickup. There, shielded by darkness and the quiet of the cul-de-sac, he’d “transferred the object” to the Corvin house.

Milo said, “Why there?”

Trisha Bowker seemed pleased by the question. “Exactly! Because he hated Chet. Chet was always making fun of him.”

“Where are the hands, Trish?”

“I don’t know. He took them somewhere.”

“Where?”

Glance at Wilde.

The PD said, “Honestly. She has absolutely no idea.”

“Okay, let’s move on. Trish, you and Paul go way back.”

Brief, whispered conversation between Wilde and Bowker.

She said, “A bit.”

Milo said, “How long’s a bit?”

“A while, I’m not sure.”

“Nine years is what we’ve learned.”

Hesitation. Trying to figure out where this was going. Another glance at Wilde. He nodded.

She said, “That sounds about right.”

Wilde said, “Milo, all that time points out the severity of Trish’s situation. She suffers from Stockholm syndrome.” To me: “You know better than I, it’s a chronic disease which when untreated, persists.”

Milo said, “Nine years ago. You and Paul were an item when Paul met Jackie.”

Silence from Bowker.

Wilde said, “We’d love to help, but is this relevant?”

Milo said, “Fair enough.” Back to Bowker: “In terms of your relationship, would you say Paul was in charge?”

“Always,” said Bowker. “Control was his total thing. His primary drive. His obsession.” To me: “He had an obsessive, narcissistic personality disorder. He was like a movie director. Domineering and dominative. Like those wigs he made me wear. Everything was a production.”

Milo said, “Wanting you to go brunette.”

“Wanting what he wanted when he wanted.”

“You went brunette when you hung out with Chet Corvin in Arrowhead.”

“It’s what he wanted.”

“Chet or Paul?”

“Um... both, I guess.”

“And here I was thinking blondes had more fun — so Chet liked the wigs, too.”

“Another control freak,” she said. “He put me in negligees. I had to do all sorts of things.”

“Role-playing.”

Pout. Eyelid flutter. “Everyone molds me like I’m clay.”

Milo checked his notes. “When Paul brought the body back to Evada Lane, how did he know he had enough time to position it before the Corvins returned?”