“I’m sane, I think. Do I seem sane?”

“All things considered, yes. But you’re still allowed to have feelings. You’d be insane if you didn’t.”

“I feel sad that the families will never know what happened to their daughters. That they’re going to spend their whole lives like my grandmother spent a big chunk of hers.”

“That makes sense.”

“But when it comes to him? I don’t feel a damn thing. But maybe that’s . . . I don’t know. Sometimes we think the absence of a feeling is a scab when really it’s an open wound.”

“That’s a good one. Where’d you hear that?”

“You. When I was seventeen. I rolled my eyes because I was a little tired of all the AA speak.”

“That’s not AA speak. That’s Marty speak.”

“How would you know? You don’t remember saying it.”

“Let’s not get bogged down in a lot of specifics.”

His smile seems genuine, and warm, but it fades quicker than his smiles usually do, and the unanswered question fills the air between them like a smoke cloud.

“Should I feel something, Marty?”

“You’re not a cop. You’re not a judge. And you’re not a lawyer.”

She didn’t expect this turn in the conversation and knows that if she speaks now, she won’t be able to keep the anger from her voice. “I see. So you think I’m playing judge, jury, and—”

“No, no, no,” he says quickly, hands out as if he’s afraid the bench between them is about to shoot up into the air. “I’m not saying that at all.”

“What, then?”

“Charley, you don’t experience these people at the level of a case file. You lost your mother to monsters like this guy. You lost your childhood to people like this guy. It’s like . . . When you talk to guys who’ve been in combat, they all tell you the same thing. They knew who the enemy was. The enemy was the one who would shoot them if they didn’t shoot first.

“That’s what you’ve been in for most of your life, Charley. A combat situation with sick fucks who abduct people off the street so they can use them as their twisted playthings. Everything your dad did to make money off you put you in their line of sight again and again. I mean, Jesus, who knows how many obsessed fans like Jason Briffel were out there waiting to strike?

“My point is, no one who knows everything about you, about this . . . situation, is going to expect you to slow down and humanize them for the greater good of I don’t know what. They’re monsters, Charley. Human fucking monsters. The Bannings. This guy, whoever he was. None of these people turned to crime because their circumstances were mean and they needed to put food on the table. And honestly, if you ask me, Dylan Cody’s not that far off. You ever heard that line about staring too deeply into the abyss?”

“We’re supposed to call him by his real name now,” Charley says. “Cole’s orders.”

“I’m happy to say I don’t remember what it is.”

She doesn’t tell him. She likes him not knowing.

And she’s not sure she agrees with Cole’s directive.

Calling Dylan by his birth name puts him in league with her; reminds her that his family was a victim of the Bannings, too.

“There’s another thing,” she says. She’s speaking before she’s collected her thoughts, which makes her nervous. She feels like that’s a luxury she lost months ago.

“Yeah?”

“Something about the way we were doing it this time made it easier.”

“Well, I bet it’s more efficient.”

“Totally. But that’s only part of it.”

“What’s the other part of it?”

“There was so much around me. So much support. Logistical support, I mean. It almost felt like I was just the scalpel in somebody’s hand, and the hand wasn’t mine. If it always feels like that, like I’ve got no responsibility for any of it, who knows what I might do?”

“Well, as long as you do it to one of those sick fucks, I can’t say I’m going to lose any sleep over it.”

Will I, though?

She can’t imagine this strange new life without Marty in it, and this makes her feel guilty all over again for how quickly she abandoned him after Luanne died.

Still, she sometimes worries Marty’s perpetual quest for moral clarity can result in oversimplifications. She remembers eating lunch at this same bench years ago, when she was a teenager, before they made an arduous hike to some old ruined limekilns buried in the redwoods near the top of the mountain. Upon their sweaty arrival, he lectured her for close to twenty minutes about how the limekilns used to work, and he did so with the same casual confidence he’s just used to put her mess of feelings into neat, labeled boxes. But sometimes matters of the head and matters of the heart are not as predictable and knowable as old machinery.

Does Marty know this?

Before she can answer the question, her cell phone buzzes. It’s a text from Luke.

Need you at home.

She texts back, Everything OK?

Not sure. Need your brain for something.

It’s not entirely frightening, but it’s not exactly reassuring, either. She writes back, Marty’s with me.