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even applied his faith to his work. He’d discovered soon after starting as a police officer that he had a gift for talking to people and a knack for getting criminals to trust him and even break down and confess their crimes. Those who protested their innocence by saying how godly they were would get a dose of Biblical verse from him, particularly Proverbs 28:13: “ Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them, finds mercy.” And it often worked.
    W hen his former employer called and asked him to return to the rail yard, he declined, though it meant living with the large pay cut to continue on his road to a career in law enforcement. He’d never regretted the decision and believed he’d been given a sign that his path was preordained when his former employer subsequently went out of business.
    Although he’d surprised her when he said he was going to try to get onto the Garland police force, Julie supported his decision. She wasn’t worried even after she attended a seminar at the academy for wives and girlfriends of the cadets in which they were told what to expect—the long hours, the dangers, the emotional toll of dealing with all the misery and suffering created by criminals, even other women who were attracted to police officers, married or not. The divorce rate for police officers, they were warned, was horrendous. However, Julie didn’t worry about her husband’s faithfulness or his ability to deal with the pressures of the job. She was proud of him and knew he loved his work.
    In fact, if there was one thing that bothered him, it was when there was no action. He wanted to protect people and “save the world,” and he’d get antsy if at any particular moment it didn’t need saving.
    Thirteen years after he got his first paycheck as a police officer, he entered the “murder closet.” Later he would come to believe that divine providence had moved him that day when alone in that small, sad room, Sweet began looking through the file boxes. He found one in which three young black children had been found dead in an abandoned freezer. The original investigator concluded that they’d crawled in and were accidentally trapped. But looking at the photographs of their bodies—packed into the small space like sardines—Sweet thought there was no way they got in by themselves. Someone just hadn’t cared enough about those children to look any further.
    He was still thinking about that case when he noticed a box labeled with a name he recognized: Roxann Reyes. Even before he opened it, he was aware of some of what it would contain. He’d been working the late shift as a patrol officer in the same area of Garland where she’d last been seen and was briefed about the case before he went out on patrol that night. He knew that Roxann was a three-year-old girl who’d been abducted and murdered in November 1987. With two little girls of his own, the crime had struck him harder than many others and still weighed on his heart now as he opened the box and pulled out the first file.
    The exact elements of the case had blurred in the time since he first heard about the child’s disappearance. But now as he read, they returned in vivid detail. Roxann had been picking wildflowers one afternoon with her friend, six-year-old Julia Diaz, when a man approached them on a street behind the low-rent, crime-ridden apartment complex Roxanne’s mother, Tammy, managed. The monster took Roxann fifteen miles to a remote location near the small town of Murphy, Texas, where he raped and strangled her. He then dumped her body in the woods where her remains were found a year later.
    At the time it occurred, Roxann’s abduction had reminded Sweet of a similar case two years earlier: the January 1985 disappearance of five-year-old Christi Meeks, who disappeared in Mesquite, Texas while playing hide-and-seek outside of an apartment complex, and the February 1986 abduction of Christie Proctor