As he turned toward the park, he saw it was already occupied. Not with children, thankfully. He wasn’t fond of children. They were too easily manipulated. It lacked challenge.

No, it was the new girl. Olivia. She was sitting with . . .

He smiled. Olivia was sitting with Gabriel. Well, now, that was interesting.

Footsteps sounded behind him.

“Whatever you’re thinking, bòcan, you can stop right now. This doesn’t concern you. They don’t concern you.”

He turned. Ida and Walter. Of course.

“Gabriel always concerns me.”

“He’s not yours,” Ida said.

Patrick tilted his head. “Technically, yes. He is.”

“No. You know the rules. You have no claim to him. You will not interfere with him.”

“Or with her,” Walter added.

“Mmm.” Patrick eyed Olivia. “I’m surprised you let her stay. I hear the ravens have already come.”

“That’s no concern of yours, bòcan,” Walter said.

Ida fixed her faded eyes on his. “If you wish to be concerned, I’d suggest you take a more active role in the community, instead of wasting your days tapping away on your computer.”

“The only way I’m going to another town meeting is if I start suffering from insomnia.”

“Then that is your choice. Remember it. And don’t interfere.”

Which was, they all realized, like asking the sun not to rise. But he had been warned, and they seemed satisfied, hobbling off to rest their old bones in the diner.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

In that file were all the details of how the Larsens killed four couples. I know my phrasing would not please Pamela. I should say it contained the evidence used to convict the Larsens of killing four couples. I might be her last hope, and even my language choices refused to give her the benefit of the doubt.

The police had only found the Larsens because they were tipped off by an anonymous source—which formed the basis of every “wrongly accused” conspiracy theory to follow. They’d received the tip after the third set of murders. But they’d taken one look at the Larsens—the quiet carpenter husband, the sweet former-teacher wife, the adorable toddler daughter—and tossed the lead aside.

Then, after Jan Gunderson and Peter Evans were killed, someone running through the files had found an eyewitness account of a young couple seen hurrying from the vicinity of the first crime scene. A man and a woman. Midtwenties. Handsome couple. He had shaggy blond hair. She had long dark hair. Wait a minute . . . Didn’t that sound like the couple they’d received the tip about?

The year was 1990. A newfangled piece of crime scene technology was just starting to be used. Something called DNA analysis. The crime scenes had been almost pristine—generic footprints, no hair, no fibers, no fingerprints. The fact that the bodies were left outdoors made the technicians’ work even more difficult. But there had been a few drops of blood found on a rock by the second set of victims. The police speculated that the killer had nicked himself. He’d pulled back his hand in surprise. The first drops spattered on the rock. He bound the hand and didn’t realize he’d left something of himself behind.

Only it wasn’t a him. The DNA matched Pamela Larsen’s.

The eyewitness from the first scene picked the couple out of a lineup. A local sporting goods store clerk ID’d Todd Larsen as a man who’d liked hunting knives. He’d bought four, all in the year of the killings. Three of the four murders had taken place on Fridays. That was the Larsens’ “date night” when they left little Eden at Grandma’s house.

Then there was the witchcraft.

Investigators had discovered a cache of occult material in the Larsen home. A locked cedar chest filled with candles and dried herbs, a silver dagger and chalice.

That box sealed the Larsens’ fate.

“That was the evidence I used to argue for an appeal,” Gabriel said. “The box of witchcraft supplies. Pamela Larsen had admitted to being a practicing Wiccan and everything in the box supported her claim. Simple paganism. Burning incense and making herbal teas, not sacrificing cats in the basement. The jury had failed to understand the distinction. I hoped things would have changed.”

“They hadn’t?”

He paused. Stretched his legs. Considered the question. “Yes, they had,” he said, as if reluctantly admitting to a failure. “The overall distinction was recognized by the appellate court. The average Wiccan is extremely unlikely to commit ritual human sacrifice. However, the key words there are average and unlikely. Just because the tenets of a religion prohibit something does not mean none of its adherents ever break that prohibition. It didn’t help that Pamela was a solo practitioner, with no coven to support her claim to be a Wiccan.”

“What rituals did they think were being performed with the murders?”

“No two experts could agree. In the end, they decided they were chasing a classification where none existed. If you read the accounts of so-called occult murders, you’ll find that in most cases, the killers were following no recognized branch of anything. They pulled in aspects from old books and modern movies and everything in between.”

“In other words, they made it up.”

“Exactly.”

“So that was the basis of your appeal attempt? That a jury of that time was likely to be prejudiced against Wiccans? That’s flimsy.”

“Thank you.”

“I don’t need to be a lawyer to know it was flimsy. Pamela didn’t like it, either. She thought there were better grounds.”

“She did.”

“What were they?”

“You can’t tell? Clearly she expected the answer to leap from the file.”

I flipped through it again. “She said it was about the fourth pair of murders—Jan Gunderson and Peter Evans—that there was a reason Pamela and Todd couldn’t have committed them. There’s no alibi, which would be the obvious answer. All of the elements of the fourth pair were found in at least one of the previous ones.”

“So what is different?”

“Only the day of the week. This couple wasn’t murdered on a Friday.”

“Exactly.”

He settled back.

“Um, okay . . . It’s a minor deviation, sure, but hardly grounds for an appeal.”