Throughout the classroom, little hands began to draw. Some rendered images of family vacations. Mickey Mouse, or the approximation of some happy little rodent, appeared on at least two. Some girls drew rainbows and horses.

“After we finish,” the teacher went on, “we’ll have one of the class moms take them to laminating, and that way we can use them as placemats.” She stopped at Madison Foster’s desk. The little girl was drawing the picture of a house with a pointed roof, a brick chimney, and a row of fir trees.

“Maddie, that’s lovely. Where is that place?”

Maddie, a sullen girl with missing front teeth and a slept-on ponytail, looked up, her hand still moving the black crayon as she colored a curlicue of smoke.

“Ms. Marshall! That’s my house!”

The teacher put her hand on Maddie’s shoulder. “Oh, of course it is!”

The truth was far from the depiction on the paper. Maddie lived with her mother and four brothers in a single-wide mobile home at the end of a long driveway from the main road. Half the time there was no heat, and for sure there was no chimney. No row of fir trees. Just a front yard littered with appliances, a Frigidaire graveyard.

The teacher heard one of the boys in the back laughing, and she turned around. Jeremy Wagner was standing next to Max Castile’s desk and pointing.

“What’s that? You’re gonna be in trouble, Max. Here comes the teacher.”

Max looked up and threw his crayons to the floor, sending them rolling down the aisle. He flipped over his paper.

“Max, what in the world?” Ms. Marshall put her hand on her hips. “Why did you do that?”

Max didn’t say anything, but Jeremy jumped right in.

“Ms. Marshall, Max drew a gross picture!”

“Max, may I see your paper?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “You can’t. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“Let me see it.”

Max, a boy never given too much emotion, started to cry. His tears only seemed to fuel Jeremy’s rant and the growing interest of other kids in the classroom.

“Max’s in trouble! Max’s gonna get a talking-to. Nasty picture. Nasty!”

Sally Marshall tugged at the corner of Max’s paper and eased it off his desk. She flipped it over and let out a gasp.

Slumped in a small, steel-framed, plastic-upholstered chair across from the receptionist’s impeccably buffed counter, the boy with tousled hair, brown eyes, and the shrunken countenance of a kid in trouble just stared at a map of the states. It was decorated with a border of presidential portraits that ended with William Jefferson Clinton. All matted fur and cheap yellow marble eyes, the school mascot, a stuffed lynx, gave him the evil eye.

It was not as good as the hunting trophies his dad had hung in the log house. Not near as convincingly alive.

He wasn’t sure what the principal and Ms. Marshall were saying, but he knew it was all about him.

And the voice, from the principal, was harsh, despite the attempt to keep his words low. “We need to reach his parents.”

“I’ve tried.”

“Obviously, Sally,” the principal said, “you’ve neglected to update the boy’s contact information with their cell numbers. People change their numbers about once a year. We’ll need to call the authorities. State law.”

“I know,” Ms. Marshall said, her voice now brittle. “I understand protocol.”

She emerged from the principal’s office and knelt low in front of Max.

“Honey, we’ve tried to reach your mom and dad, but no one’s home. Do you know where they are?”

The boy shrugged. “I dunno. My dad’s off on Mondays.”

“Do you know if they have a cell phone?”

He shook his head. “They have cell phones, but I don’t know the number.”

Composed now, the teacher spoke directly into Max’s eyes.

“Since we can’t reach your parents, we have to call the police to come in. They have people who might be able to help you.”

“What did I do? I didn’t mean it.”

She held out her hand. “I know. Let’s go and wait in the nurse’s office until the officers get here.”

“Is it because of what I colored?”

The teacher nodded. “That’s right. They’ll need to ask you a few questions about what you colored.”

The call came into the Sheriff’s Office at 1:03 P.M. A dispatcher logged the time and routed it to the investigative unit. Josh Anderson, who had made three calls to Serenity since the morning, looked at the blinking red light and swallowed a piece of black licorice that had made his front teeth the same color.

He picked up, but it wasn’t her.

Kendall watched as he scribbled a few illegible notes on a desk pad. As he always did. She’d seen him unfold an eighteen-inch paper and fight through his chicken scratches to come up with the answer a prosecutor sought. No BlackBerry notes. Not even a steno pad. Josh Anderson was too young to be so old-school.

She looked at the pad.

Max Castile, 8, sexual abuse. The words were circled for emphasis. She noticed another name on the paper: Trey Vedder, Port Orchard Marina.

“Josh, what’s going on?” she asked.

He looked up. “Teacher and principal reported a disturbing drawing. It falls under guidelines. They report, and we follow up.”

“What did he draw?”

Josh reached for his jacket. “Don’t know yet. Reporting teacher said was that it was sexual. I believe her exact words were ‘horrifically sexual.’ One thing you should know, Kendall…”

“What’s that?”

Josh looked worried. “The boy in question is Serenity’s nephew. A nice kid. I met him once.” He picked up his car keys and started for the hallway.

“Where are you going now?” she asked.

“I’ll follow up on the call that came in from the marina. Kid says he’s seen something ‘freaky’ down there. You handle the sex case. You handle those better than I would anyway, conflict of interest or not.”

Chapter Fifty-eight

April 6, 10:50 a.m.

Key Peninsula

Kendall Stark caught her breath when she laid eyes on Max’s drawing on top of Principal Al Judson’s desk. Judson was a stoop-shouldered man of about fifty-five with sparse white hair. He had the sour demeanor of a man with indigestion or one who longed for any other job than the one he held.

“You can see our concern,” he said.

“I do,” she said, meeting his gaze before looking back down at the paper.

It was a mostly black-and-white rendering, although there were splashes of red in three places. Max, who was left-handed, had smudged some of the imagery. It showed a woman supine on what Kendall figured was a bed. The drawing, with its mix of perspective, had a kind of surreal look. Next to the woman, at the foot of the bed, was a man standing. He was holding a knife. Like the woman, he was nude. Between his legs was a depiction of a penis.

There were splashes of blood on the blade and at the point where the female figure’s two legs converged.

“What’s with her arms?” she asked. “It looks like they’re tied above her head.”

“Sick, isn’t it?” Principal Judson said.

“If it is what we think it is,” Kendall said.

“Maybe it’s from a video game,” the principal said. “I know they have an Xbox, because the boy traded games and got in trouble for it.”

Kendall nodded at the possibility, although she’d never known an Xbox game to have such abhorrent imagery. She wondered if Cody had seen such things.

“Or maybe some porn he saw when an adult carelessly left the TV on,” Al Judson said.

“That’s more than porn,” Kendall said, her expression grim. “But I know there has to be an explanation.”

There was another detail that eluded the detective for a moment because it was so faint, as if it had been erased or smudged away.

The woman on the bed wore a crown.

Kendall said nothing more as she took the paper and rolled it into a tube. She put it inside a glassine bag and marked her initials, the date, and the Castile surname. She made her way toward Max in the nurse’s office.