"- We don't have records that Trammel specifically sold it, that I recall, just that his foster daughter recognized its description and he was working with Echavarria."

"So the massacre was... a drug deal that went bad?"

"The account book we found indicated it might have been sold under the name 'slick', 'moses', or 'umbrella', but those could've also just been the codes they were using for their own records."

"I haven't heard of any of those."

"We're still not sure. They were involved in drugs, but we're not sure how much the drugs had to do with what happened that night."

"Well," Walter says, "shall I take you girls shooting?"

"It'd be a great relief if you did."

Oh good she is invited.

The next morning--

"Okay! Hey people. This is Oswald, and everybody's met Mr. Aarons. Mr. Aarons knows Mr. Trammel and thinks that he's a horrible person and that Lacie is in terrible danger. I'm wondering if maybe it's time to contact the police. Is anybody so lucky as to actually know any police."

Mr. Aarons gives a little wave.

"Nice to meet you both. Zoë knows someone with the police, Mr. Walter Kriss, he's been helping."

"He can only help so much; it seems like most of the force isn't willing to touch the case at all. But he did teach me and Carrie how to use shotguns, which was good of him, on account of there's someone stalking us who likes to be reckless with a revolver."

"Figures. If he's a trustworthy person I kind of think we should try to convince him to intervene immediately on the grounds that whatever happened to the people in the photos may well be happening to Lacie right now. - also do you guys still have the photos, I wanted to check if Mr. Trammel is in any of them."

Carrie gets the photos from the room and hands them over, with the gruesome ones face down in a separate stack.

Gonna look through some gruesome photos before she hands them to Oswald, due to who she is as a person.

Oswald sees that Samson Trammel is in about half of these photos, evenly divided between torture and non-torture photos.

"Oh hey, maybe Mr. Aarons can identify more of these people. We picked out Echavarria and Spend but we don't really know who anyone else is."

"Nooot sure Mr. Aarons should be looking through torture photos. You might recognize some people in the party photos, though?"

"Okay. That's Savitree Sirikhan and her boyfriend Daniel Lowman." (Savitree is Thai; Daniel Lowman is white and quite pretty.) "That's George Ayers, my thesis advisor. That's James Holland, Carolyn Hope, Bobby Schroeder..."

Oh good, he's remembering things much better.

He writes down all the names.

"Abraham Buchwald, he's the accountant. Cristobal Vega." (Cristobal Vega is very short.) "Jonathan Brooks. John Hargrove. Charles McGillicuddy..."

"Okay. I think that we should bring a few of the gruesome photos of Mr. Trammel with us to convince Mr. Kriss that Lacie knew about his prior activities, that he therefore had a reason to abduct her, and that he's, you know, the sort of person who does this. And then maybe we can convince him to investigate the house right away? Not all of the photos, though. In case they confiscate them and we need some of them later for other stuff."

"We could try it. He was assigned to investigate the case 10 years ago and never really resolved it. I don't know if he'd want to get that involved again, especially if it meant risking his job... but he did seem pretty set on doing what he could to help us finally close the case. I'll give him a ring and let him know the situation."

"Still not sure a lone policeman will be enough to avoid walking into the exact same trap, especially if his back-up is five, uh, untrained civilians."