Five Days in Summer

match it with Snow’s boat.
    This was where Snow had been hiding Emily Parker all week.
    They would never know exactly why he’d accelerated his plan and motored back to the remote dock in Shoestring Bay on the fourth day instead of the fifth. Geary guessed it was because he saw them closing in. He had tempted fate a little too much, and maybe he even wanted to get caught, but he also wanted to finish the cycle one last time.
    Once the tide had risen on the bay, he would have motored back into Fullers Marsh. It would have been late afternoon or early evening, right about now. He would be just starting his work on Sam Parker.
    “Why was this nut so damn hard to crack?” Geary asked. “We hardly ever missed in the past.”
    “We were never sitting right next to our target before. You can’t focus when what you’re looking at is too close.” Bell slowed the motor as it puttered farther along into the marsh. “Snow was one of the best we’ve seen, don’t you agree?”
    “He was up there.” Geary breathed in the raw salt air. “I sure wish we had a chance to talk to him, though.”
    “As do I, but we’ll have to satisfy ourselves with what little we know.”
    Geary had seen Al Snow’s house for the first time that afternoon. It was one of those mobile homes not meant to travel, planted on a small plot of grass next to an identical plot in a row of plots laid out like graph paper. The house was sided in gray aluminum. There was a stumpy paved driveway, no garage. Thefront door was flanked by windows too close together, like beady eyes. Once the truth was out, it all looked suspicious, but Geary knew that if he had seen Snow’s house before today, it would have blended in to his assumption of the man as a harmless fool. The tiny front lawn was crowded with busy gnomes holding lanterns, pushing wheelbarrows, tending deer. Inside, the house was furnished in innocuous sets — living room set, dining room set, bedroom set — that looked like they’d been plucked from the pages of a sale catalogue. There was not a single photograph displayed in the house, not even of Snow’s daughter. Geary had wandered the small rooms, tending his wounded ego, berating himself for having slipped so ineffectively out of retirement, while Amy Cardoza’s team conducted a thorough search for explanations.
    Geary stood over Amy as she pulled open the flaps of a cardboard box found on a shelf in the bedroom closet. Her pale fingers hesitated as she seemed to understand what she was seeing: Snow had kept trophies. But they weren’t your usual trophies; no baseball statuettes, soccer plaques or commemorative medals. Snow’s trophies were personal, odd details snatched from the scenes of his own crimes. A boy’s bathing suit crusted with sand, the scraped gold buckle from a woman’s shoe, a crushed foam coffee cup with a blot of lipstick at the rim, the bloodied back closure of a bra with the hooks neatly fastened, a black winter cap with a lime green smiley-face button fastened to the side, an old red pincushion with the pins pressed in so deeply they’d been swallowed by puncture holes, the keys to Emily Parker’s car. The box was carted back to the station house, where its contents were carefully sorted and labeled.
    When the box was empty, Amy oversaw the effort to piece together Al Snow’s history so she could concludeher report. Geary was impressed by her ability to move forward. Not once had she mentioned the fact that Snow had nearly killed her, and would have if events hadn’t colluded to bring Will Parker and the police streaming to the boat. Geary knew that for all his bravado, the fact was that lucky breaks solved crimes as often as the most seasoned detectives and profilers. He stared into the empty box, feeling emptied himself, wasted by time, exhausted by his own efforts, when he saw something tucked into a seam where four cardboard flaps overlapped at the bottom. He reached in and nudged the white paper out with his fingernail. It turned out to be the corner of a photograph. The black-and-white scallop-edged photo had been torn and retaped in three different places. It showed little Al Snow at the age of seven or eight, standing apart from a steely-eyed woman. She wore a paisley shift and the tendons on her neck were visibly strained. It was a smileless moment in which two people appeared to have been captured against their will. On the back a tight script identified the reluctant inhabitants of that