The Never List

involved.
    “We’ll have to break in then. He has written us letters, Adele. They were delivered to us today at our hotel.” I scanned her face, searching for a sign of guilt. If she knew anything, she was hiding it well. “And everything in those letters suggests there is information hidden in that house. Papers. Photographs. Perhaps some of his research materials. ”
    At that Adele stood up abruptly and grabbed her purse. She was on board.
    As we marched down the hall, Christine sidled up to me and whispered furiously, “What the hell are you thinking? No way am I going back there without Jim.”
    “Jim would never let us go there at all. We have no choice,” I replied, sorrier than anyone that it was the case. But this was our moment. I felt it. “Jack is telling us something is in there, and I believe him, even if it’s part of his sick game. For this one last time, I think we have to listen to what he has to say.”

CHAPTER 33
    We returned to the rental car in silence, Tracy taking her now-familiar place behind the wheel. This time, though, it didn’t bother me, because in some new and strange way I felt I was the one leading us on.
    Staring out the window on the passenger side as we left the city proper, I wondered what had made me insist on going to the house. I hadn’t had time to prepare myself mentally, and I reminded myself I had sworn never to return to this state, much less to that awful place. I looked at Tracy. She nodded as she shifted the car into drive.
    “You’re right, Sarah. We need to do this.”
    I found the address on Google, and we punched it into the GPS. Amazing how easy it was to find now, when so many had searched for it for so long. There it was, on Google Maps, street view and satellite. I turned to the backseat. Christine’s hands were shaking again, as she ran them up and down her thighs.
    I felt my breath coming a little faster and recognized with annoyance the dizziness that was starting to whirl the thoughts around in my head. If there was one thing I was not going to do, however, it was let Adele see me crack. This time I didn’t bother with any sophisticated stress-reducing techniques. Goddammit , I thought to myself, you are not going to have a panic attack right now. You can’t.
    I held my breath and counted to twenty, squeezing my eyes shut. This was for Jennifer. I had brought her photo along again, and I pulled it out, taking a long look at her face. Then I slipped it back into my pocket as a talisman against the evil of this place.
    I felt my head begin to clear and my breathing return to normal. And then once again, I began to feel that strange sense of elation. Maybe we would find something. Evidence. Explanations. Answers. Something we could use to keep Jack in prison, something that would take us to Jennifer’s body, or maybe, just maybe, something that would explain why this had happened to us. I couldn’t tell what was more important to me at this point.
    When I finally made my escape, I had thought I would never be unhappy again. That there was no room for unhappiness as long as I was free. Why, then, couldn’t I actually be happy?
    Or is it the case that no one ever truly gets over anything? Is there really that much pain and suffering continuing right now at this minute, in millions of hearts, in bodies carrying on the burden of existence, trying to smile through tears for fleeting, passing moments here and there—when they can forget what happened to them, maybe even for whole hours at a time? Maybe that’s what it is to live.
    But I couldn’t think about that now. I had to focus. However doubtful it seemed that we would find anything the FBI had overlooked, I reminded myself that they had been searching for something entirely different. They hadn’t been exploring Jack Derber’swhole existence back then. They had been looking for girls tucked away in crevices. The hard evidence of bodies.
    And back then prostitution rings would have been low on the list of FBI priorities anyway. The Internet hadn’t yet linked together the perverted of the world for more coordinated horrors. Back then it had been serial killer season. That was where the glamour was. That’s what they wanted Jack to be—a mad, lone attacker.
    None of us spoke for the entire forty-minute drive. We just listened to the GPS, its computer-generated voice filling the spaces where we couldn’t connect anymore. Recalculating came the constant refrain, and I could see in all