The investigator found the bankruptcy Rachel had filed nineteen months before the wedding.
He found the $94,000 that had moved out of the children's household accounts in small, patient increments.
He found the emails to a friend in Phoenix in which Rachel described Clare as "the golden one, the lucky one, the one who got the husband and the house and the life," and described Clare's children as "an investment."
He found the neighbor, Mrs. Abernathy, eighty-one years old, who had called child services in October after watching a seven-year-old carry trash to the curb in a snowstorm wearing a summer dress. The case had been closed after a single visit: the house was clean, the wife was articulate, the family was wealthy. Wealthy families don't do that.
And he found Emma's second-grade teacher, Mrs. Delgado, who opened her desk drawer and took out a folded square of paper a child had pressed into her palm at recess in November. Three sentences: Please help me. Rachel hurts me. My brother is hungry.
Mrs. Delgado had mentioned the note to Rachel at pickup that afternoon, framing it as concern. Rachel had smiled and thanked her, and explained that Emma was struggling with her mother's death, that she'd been inventing things, that they were getting her help. Mrs. Delgado had believed her.
"I've had that note in my drawer for three months," she said, and she couldn't look at Thomas when she said it. "I read it every morning. I don't know why I kept it. Maybe I knew."
Everyone had seen something. Nobody had done enough.
On a Thursday afternoon in March, Thomas asked his wife to join him in the study.
Rachel came in smiling, sat down across the desk, crossed her legs. Behind the door to the adjoining room, Frank Colbert waited with a detective from the Denver Police Department.
"I've been doing some reading," Thomas said.