Moonlight Mile

Chapter Nine

Kenneth James Hendricks had several aliases. He’d been known, at various times, as KJ, K Boy, Richard James Stark, Edward Toshen, and Kenny B. He was born in 1969 in Warrensburg, Missouri, the son of an aircraft mechanic stationed with the 340th Bombardment Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base. From there, he’d bounced all over the United States – Biloxi, Tampa, Montgomery, Great Falls. First juvenile arrest occurred in King Salmon, Alaska; the second in Lompoc, California. At eighteen, he was arrested in Lompoc on charges of assault and battery and charged as an adult. The victim was his father. Charges dropped by alleged victim. Second arrest as an adult, two days later. Assault and battery again, same victim. This time his father pressed charges, maybe because his son had tried to cut off his ear. Kenny had been halfway through the job when his father’s shrieks alerted a neighbor. Hendricks did eighteen months for the assault, plus three years’ probation. His father died while he was in prison. Next arrested in Sacramento for loitering in an area known to be popular among male prostitutes. Six weeks later, still in Sacramento, his third assault arrest. This one for pummeling a man at the Come On Inn along I-80. The victim, a Pentecostal deacon and prominent political fund-raiser, had a hard time explaining how he’d come to be naked in a motel room with a male prostitute, so he refused to press charges. The State of California revoked Kenny’s parole anyway, for being under the influence of alcohol and cocaine during his arrest.

When he got out of prison in 1994, he’d picked up a Waffen SS tattoo at the base of his neck, courtesy of his new best buddies in the Aryan Brotherhood. He’d also picked up a dedicated criminal trade-all his arrests for the next several years were for suspicion of identity theft. The more sophisticated personal computers grew, the more sophisticated Kenny grew with them. Couldn’t quite tame the old ways, though, and in ’99 he was picked up for rape and battery of a minor in Peabody, Massachusetts. She was seventeen or sixteen, depending on which time of night the rape actually occurred. Kenny’s lawyer fought hard on the issue. The DA realized that if he put the victim on the stand, what was left of her would just get chewed to the marrow. Kenny ended up pleading to the reduced charge of sexual battery on an adult. Because the state took rape so seriously, he was given two years, less time than he’d done in ’91 for snorting a couple of lines of Sacramento blow and chugging a six of Bud. Final arrest was in 2007. He was caught receiving fifty grand worth of TVs he’d purchased with a stolen identity. The plan had been to sell them out the back door for five hundred dollars less than he’d paid using the corporate credit card of one Oliver Orin, owner of the Ollie O’s chain of sports bars, several of which had just finished structural renovations. I had to hand it to him-if anyone could order fifty K worth of plasma TVs without raising an eyebrow it would be a guy like Oliver Orin. Because of his priors, Kenny was convicted and sentenced to five years. He served just short of three. Since then, no convictions.

“But a nice man, all the same,” Angie said.

“A charmer, no doubt.”

“Just needs snuggle-time, a good hug.”

“And free weights.”

“Well, of course,” Angie said. “We’re not barbarians.”

We were in the spare bedroom/closet where we keep the home office desk. It was a little past nine and Gabby had dropped off around eight. Since then, we’d been digging deeper into Kenny Hendricks’s history.

“So this is Helene’s boyfriend.”

“ ’Tis.”

“Oh, well, it’s all fine, then.”

She sat back and blew air up at her eyebrows, a sure sign she was about to pop.

“God knows I never expected Helene to be a good parent,” she said, “but I didn’t expect even that crack whore to be this retarded with her child.”

“There, there,” I said, “she strikes me more as a tweeker than a crackhead. Technically that would make her a meth whore.”

Angie shot me the darkest look she’d shot me in months. Playtime was over. The elephant in the middle of our relationship that neither of us talked about was the actions we’d taken back when Amanda McCready disappeared the first time. When Angie was faced with choosing between the law and a four-year-old’s well-being, her reaction at the time could be summed up thusly: Fuck the law.

I, on the other hand, had taken the high road and helped the state return a neglected child to her neglectful parent. We broke up over it. Went nearly a year without speaking. Some years are longer than others; that year was about a decade and a half. Since we’d reconciled, we hadn’t said the names Amanda or Helene McCready in our home until three days ago. In those three days, every time one of us mentioned one of those names, it felt like someone had pulled the pin from a grenade.

Twelve years ago, I’d been wrong. Every day that had passed since, roughly 4,400 of them, I was sure of that.

But twelve years ago, I’d been right. Leaving Amanda with kidnappers, no matter how vested they were in her welfare, was leaving her with kidnappers. In the 4,400 days since I’d taken her back, I was sure this was true. So where did that leave me?

With a wife who was still certain I’d fucked up.

“This Kenny,” she said, tapping my laptop, “do we know where he lives?”

“We know his last known address.”

She ran her hands through her long, dark hair. “I’m going to step out on the porch.”

“Sure.”

We put our coats on. Out on our back porch, we carefully closed the door and Angie opened the top of the barbecue grill where she kept a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She swore she only smoked a couple a day, but there were days I’d noticed the pack was a lot lighter than it should have been. So far she’d kept evidence of the vice from Gabby, but the clock was ticking and we both knew it. Yet as much as I’d love my wife to be vice-free, I normally can’t stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus, they suck the life right out of a party. Angie knows I’d love it if she didn’t smoke, and Angie would love it if she didn’t smoke. But, for now, she smokes. I, for my part, deal with it and stay off her ass.

“If Beatrice isn’t crazy,” she said, “and Amanda really is missing again, we’ve got a second chance.”

“No,” I said, “we do not.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“Yes, I do. You were going to suggest that if we somehow manage to locate Amanda McCready, then this time we can make up for the sins of the past.”

She gave me a rueful smile as she blew smoke out over the railing. “So you did know what I was going to say.”

I took a vicarious whiff of secondhand smoke and planted a kiss on my wife’s collarbone. “I don’t believe in redemption.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in closure.”

“That either.”

“So what do you believe in again?”

“You. Her. This.”

“Babe, you’ve got to find more balance.”

“What’re you, my sensei?”

“Hai.” She gave me a small bow. “I’m serious. You can either sit around the house brooding on what happened to Peri Pyper and how you helped a classic d-bag like Brandon Trescott avoid any responsibility for his actions, or you can do some good.”

“And this is good, uh?”

“You’re damn right it is. Do you believe a guy like Kenny Hendricks should be around Amanda McCready?”

“No, but that’s not enough to go mucking around in people’s lives.”

“What is?”

I chuckled.

She didn’t. “She’s missing.”

“You want me to go after Kenny and Helene.”

She shook her head. “I want us to go after Kenny and Helene. And I want us to find Amanda again. I might not have much free time.”

“You don’t have any.”

“Okay, any,” she admitted, “but I still have mad computer skills, m’ man.”

“Did you say mad computer skills?”

“I’m reliving the early aughts.”

“I remember the early aughts-we made money then.”

“And we were prettier and your hair was a lot thicker.” She put both palms on my chest and stood on tiptoe to kiss me. “No offense, babe, but what else are you doing these days?”

“You’re a cold bitch. I love you. But you’re a cold bitch.”

She gave me that throaty laugh of hers, the one that slides through my blood.

“You love it.”

Half an hour later Beatrice McCready sat at our dining-room table. She drank a cup of coffee. She didn’t look quite as broken as she had the other day, quite as lost, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t.

“I shouldn’t have lied about Matt,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I held up a hand. “Beatrice, Jesus. No apology necessary.”

“He just… It’s one of those things you know you probably won’t get over but you still got to function, go about your day. Right?”

“My first husband was murdered,” Angie said. “That doesn’t mean I know about your grief, Bea, but I did learn that having one moment in a given day, just one second, when you’re not grieving? That’s never a sin.”

Beatrice gave that a soft nod. “I… Thank you.” She looked around our small dining room. “You have a girl now, uh?”

“Yes. Gabriella.”

“Oh, that’s a pretty name. Does she look like you?”

Angie looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded.

“More me than him, yeah,” she said. She pointed to a picture of Gabby that sat atop the credenza. “That’s Gabby.”

Beatrice took the photo in and eventually smiled. “She looks feisty.”

“She’s that,” Angie said. “They say the terrible twos?”

Beatrice leaned forward. “Oh, I know, I know. It starts at eighteen months and it goes until they’re three and a half.”

Angie nodded vigorously. “She was a monster. I mean, God, it was-”

“Awful, right?” Beatrice said. She looked as if she were about to tell us an anecdote about her son but caught herself. She looked down at the table with a strange smile on her face and rocked a bit in her chair. “But they grow out of it.”

Angie looked at me. I looked back at her, clueless about what to say next.

“Bea,” she said, “the police said they investigated your claim and found Amanda in the house.”

Beatrice shook her head. “Since they moved, Amanda calls me every day. Never missed until two weeks ago. Right after Thanksgiving. I haven’t heard from her since.”

“They moved? Out of the neighborhood?”

Bea nodded. “About four months ago. Helene owns a house in Foxboro. A three-bedroom.”

Foxboro was a suburb, about twenty miles south. It wasn’t Belmont Hills or anything, but it was a tall step up from St. Bart’s Parish in Dorchester.

“What’s Helene do for work these days?”

Beatrice laughed. “Work? I mean, last I heard, she was working the Lotto machine at New Store on the Block, but that was a while ago. I’m pretty sure she managed to get fired from there just like every other place. This is a woman who managed to get fired from Boston Gas back in the day. Who gets fired from a utility?”

“So, if she’s not working much…”

“How’s she afford a house?” She shrugged. “Who knows?”

“She didn’t get anything from the city in those lawsuits, did she?”

She shook her head. “It all went into a trust for Amanda. Helene can’t touch it.”

“Okay,” Angie said. “I’ll pull the tax assessment on the property.”

“What about the restraining orders against you?” I asked as softly as I could.

Beatrice looked over at me. “Helene works the system. She’s been doing it since she was a teenager. Amanda was sick a couple years ago. The flu. Helene had some new guy, a bartender who fed her free drinks, so she kept forgetting to check on Amanda. This is when they were in the old place by Columbia Road. I still had a key and I started letting myself in to care for Amanda. It was either that or let her catch pneumonia.”

Angie glanced at the photo of Gabby and then back at Bea. “So Helene found you there and filed the restraining order.”

“Yeah.” Bea fingered the edge of her coffee cup. “I drink more than I used to. Sometimes I get stupid and drunk-dial.” She looked up at me. “Like I did with you the other night. I’ve done it with Helene a few times. After the last time, she filed for another restraining order. That was three weeks ago.”

“What made you, I don’t want to say ‘harass’ her, but…?”

“ ‘Harass’ is okay. Sometimes I like harassing Helene.” She smiled. “I had talked to Amanda. She’s a good kid. Hard, you know? Way older than her years, but good.”

I thought of the four-year-old I’d returned to that house. Now she was “hard.” Now she was “way older than her years.”

“Amanda asked me to check the mail at the old place, just some stuff that the PO forgot to forward. They do that all the time. So I went by there and it was mostly junk mail.” She reached into her purse. “Except for this.”

She handed me a piece of ivory paper: a Commonwealth of Massachusetts Birth Certificate, Suffolk County, for Christina Andrea English, DOB 08/04/93.

I handed it to Angie.

“Similar age,” she said.

I nodded. “Christina English would be a year older.”

We were thinking the same thing. Angie laid the birth certificate beside her laptop and her fingers danced across the keyboard.

“How did Amanda react when you told her you’d found this?” I asked Bea.

“She stopped calling. Then she disappeared.”

“So you started calling Helene.”

“And demanding answers. You’re fucking right I did.”

“Good for you,” Angie said. “I wish I’d been with you.”

I said, “So you called Helene?”

She nodded. “A bunch. And left several angry messages.”

“Which Helene saved,” Angie said, “and brought before a judge.”

Beatrice nodded. “Exactly.”

“And you’re sure Amanda is not at the Foxboro house.”

“Positive.”

“Why?”

“Because I staked it out for three days.”

“Staked it out.” I grinned. “With a restraining order on you. Damn. You’re hardcore, Bea.”

She shrugged. “Whoever the police talked to, it wasn’t Amanda.”

Angie looked up from the computer for a second, her fingers still hitting the keys. “No local grammar school records on Christina English. No social. No hospital records.”

“What’s this mean?” Bea asked.

“It means Christina English could have moved out of state. Or-”

“I got it,” Angie said. “DOD 9/16/93.”

“-she’s dead,” I finished.

“Car crash,” Angie said. “ Wallingford, Connecticut. Both parents deceased same date.”

Bea looked at us, confused.

Angie said, “Amanda was trying to assume Christina En-glish’s identity, Bea. You interrupted. There’s no Massachusetts death certificate on file. There might be a Connecticut death certificate-I’d have to dig deeper-but there’s a solid chance someone could pretend to be Christina English and the state would never be the wiser. You could get a social security card, forge an employment history, and someday, if you felt like it, fake an injury at your nonexistent job and collect state disability.”

“Or,” I said, “she could wrack up six figures on multiple credit cards in a thirty-day period and never pay them off because, well, she doesn’t exist.”

“So either Amanda’s working for Helene and Kenny in a fraud operation…” Angie said.

“Or she’s trying to become someone else.”

“But then she’d never get the two million the city owes her next year.”

“Good point,” I said.

“Though,” Angie said, “just because she assumes a new identity doesn’t mean she forfeits her authentic one.”

“But I intercepted the birth certificate,” Bea said, “so she can’t be anyone but herself anymore. Right?”

“Well, the Christina English identity is probably done for,” I said.

“But?”

“But,” Angie said, “it’s like avatars in computer games. She could have several if she’s really smart. Is Amanda really smart?”

“Off the charts,” Bea said.

We sat in silence for a minute. I caught Bea staring at the photo of Gabriella. We’d taken it last autumn. Gabby sat in a pile of leaves, arms stretched wide as if posing for the top of a trophy, her megawatt smile as big as the leaf pile. A million pictures just like it adorned mantels and credenzas and buffet tables and the tops of TVs across the globe. Bea kept staring at it, falling into it.

“Such a great age,” she said. “Four, five. Everything’s wonder and change.”

I couldn’t meet my wife’s eyes.

“I’ll take a look,” I said.

Angie gave me a smile bigger than Suffolk County.

Bea reached her hands across the table. I took them. They were warm from the coffee cup.

“You’ll find her again.”

“I said I’ll take a look, Bea.”

The gaze she fixed on me was evangelical. “You’ll find her again.”

I didn’t say anything. But Angie did.

“We will, Bea. No matter what.”

After she left, we sat in the living room and I looked at the photo of Bea and Amanda in my lap. It had been taken a year ago at a K of C function hall. They stood in front of a wood-paneled wall. Bea looked at Amanda and love poured out of her like a flashlight beam. Amanda looked right at the camera. Her smile was hard, her gaze was hard, her jaw slightly skewed to the right. Her once-blond hair was a cherry brown. She wore it long and straight. She was small and slim and wore a gray Newbury Comics T-shirt, a navy blue Red Sox warm-up jacket, and a pair of dark blue jeans. Her slightly crooked nose was sprayed with a light dusting of freckles, and her green eyes were very small. She had thin lips, sharp cheekbones, a squared-off chin. There was so much going on in her eyes that I knew the picture could not do her justice. Her face probably changed thirty times in fifteen minutes. Never quite beautiful but never less than arresting.

“Whew,” Angie said. “That kid is no kid anymore.”

“I know.” I closed my eyes for a second.

“What’d you expect?” she said. “Helene for a mother? If Amanda avoids rehab until her twentieth birthday, she’s a raging success.”

“Why am I doing this again?” I asked.

“Because you’re good.”

“I’m not this good,” I said.

She kissed my earlobe. “When your daughter asks what you stand for, don’t you want to be able to answer her?”

“That’d be nice,” I said. “It would. But this recession, this depression, this whatever the fuck-it’s real, honey. And it’s not going away.”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “It is. Someday. But where you stand, right here, right now? That’s forever.” She turned on the couch, brought her legs up and held them by the ankles. “I’ll join you for a couple-three days. That’d be fun.”

“Fun. How you going to-?”

“PR owes me for last summer when I watched the Beast. She’ll watch Gabby while I gallivant with you for a couple days.”

The Beast was the son of Angie’s friend Peggy Rose-or PR. Gavin Rose was five years old and, to the best of my knowledge, never slept and never stopped breaking shit. He also enjoyed screaming for no good reason. His parents thought it was cute. When PR’s second child was born last year, the birth coincided with the death of her mother-in-law, which is how Angie and I ended up with the Beast for five of the longest days known to man.

“She does owe us,” I said.

“Yes, she does.” She looked at her watch. “Too late to call now, but I’ll try her in the morning. You can check back in during the afternoon, see if you got a partner.”

“It’s sweet of you,” I said, “but it’s not going to bring in any more money. And that’s what we need. I could find day labor. There’s always ways to scoop up, I dunno, something. The docks? I could unload cars from the ships over in Southie. I could…” I stopped talking, hating the desperation I heard in my own voice. I leaned back on the couch and watched wet snow spit against the window. It eddied under the street lamps and swirled along the telephone lines. I looked over at my wife. “We could go broke.”

“It’ll take you a couple days, a week tops. And if, in that time, Duhamel-Standiford calls and offers you another case, you walk away. But for now, you try to find Amanda.”

“Soup-kitchen broke.”

“Then we eat soup,” Angie said.

Chapter Ten

Until three weeks ago, Amanda McCready had attended the Caroline Howard Gilman School for Girls. The Gilman was tucked on a side street just off Memorial Drive in Cambridgeport, a few oar pulls up the Charles River from MIT. It had started out as a high school for daughters of the upper crust. Its 1843 mission statement proclaimed, “A necessity in confounding times, the Caroline Howard Gilman School for Girls will turn your daughter into a young lady of impeccable manners. When her husband takes her hand in marriage, he will shake yours in thanks for providing him with a wife of unparalleled breeding and substance.”

The Gilman had changed a bit since 1843. It still catered to the wealthy, but its student body had become known less for their manners than for their lack of them. Now, if you had the money and connections to send a child to the Winsor or St. Paul ’s but the child had a history of either significant underachievement or, worse, behavioral problems-you sent her to the Gilman.

“We don’t like being characterized, however charitably, as a ‘therapeutic’ school,” the principal, Mai Nghiem, told me as she led me to her office. “We’d prefer to think we’re the last outpost before that option. A good number of our young women will go on to Ivies or the Seven Sisters; their journeys are just a bit less traditional than those of some of their counterparts. And because we do get results, we get healthy funding, which allows us to enroll intelligent young women from less privileged backgrounds.”

“Like Amanda McCready.”

Mai Nghiem nodded and led me into her office. She was in her mid-thirties, a small woman with long, straight hair so black it was nearly blue. She moved as if the floor beneath her feet was softer and smoother than the floor beneath mine. She wore an ivory off-the-shoulder blouse over a black skirt and pointed me to a seat as she walked behind her desk. When Beatrice had called her at home last night to arrange this appointment, she’d been reluctant, but as I knew from personal experience, Beatrice could wear reluctance down pretty quick.

“Beatrice is the mother Amanda should have had,” Mai Nghiem said. “Woman’s a saint.”

“Preaching to the choir.”

“I don’t mean to be impolite, but I’m going to have to multitask during this conversation.” Mai Nghiem scowled at her computer screen and tapped a couple of keys.

“Not a problem,” I said.

“Amanda’s mother called us and said Amanda’d be out of school a couple of weeks because she’d gone to visit her father.”

“I wasn’t aware she knew her father.”

Mai’s dark eyes left the screen for a moment, a grim smile on her face. “She doesn’t. Helene’s story was BS, but unless a parent has shown violent proclivities toward a child- and we’ve documented those proclivities-there’s not a lot we can do but take them at their word.”

“Do you think Amanda could have run away?”

She gave it some thought and shook her head. “This is not a kid who runs away,” she said. “This is a kid who wins awards and more awards and gets a scholarship to a great school. And flourishes.”

“So she flourished here.”

“On an academic level, absolutely.”

“On a nonacademic level?”

Her eyes went back to the screen and she blasted out a few sentences on the keyboard using only one hand. “What do you need to know?”

“Everything. Anything.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Sounds like she was a practical kid.”

“Very.”

“Rational?”

“Exceptionally.”

“Hobbies?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Hobbies. Things she liked to do besides be rational all the time.”

She hit RETURN and sat back for a moment. She tapped a pen on her desk and looked up at the ceiling. “She liked dogs.”

“Dogs.”

“Any kind, any shape. She volunteered at Animal Rescue in East Cambridge. An act of community service is a prerequisite for graduation.”

“What about the pressure to fit in? She’s a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. The girls here drive Daddy’s Lex. She doesn’t even get Daddy’s bus pass.”

She nodded. “Her freshman year, I seem to remember, some of the girls got a little cruel. They taunted her about her lack of jewelry, her clothes.”

“Her clothes.”

“They were perfectly acceptable, don’t get me wrong. But they were from Gap or Aéropostale, not Nordstrom or Barneys. Her sunglasses were Polaroids you’d buy at CVS. Her classmates wore Maui Jim and D &G. Amanda’s bag was Old Navy…”

“The other girls had Gucci.”

She smiled and shook her head. “More like Fendi or Marc Jacobs, maybe Juicy Couture. Gucci skews a bit older.”

“How tragically unhip of me.”

Another smile. “That’s the thing- we can joke about it. To us, it’s silly. To fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls, though?”

“Life and death.”

“Pretty much.”

I thought of Gabby. Was this the world I was raising her for?

She said, “But then the harassment just stopped.”

“Just stopped.”

Another nod. “Amanda’s one of those rare kids who truly doesn’t seem to care what you think. Compliment her or criticize her, you get the same even gaze coming back at you. I wonder if the other girls got tired of throwing paint at her when none of it would stick.” A bell rang and she looked out her window for a moment as a dozen teenage girls flowed past. “You know, I misspoke at the outset.”

“How so?”

“I said Amanda wouldn’t run away and I believe that she wouldn’t physically run away. But… well, she was, in another sense, running away all the time. That’s what brought her here. That’s what got her straight A’s. She was putting more distance between herself and her mother every day of her life. Are you aware that Amanda orchestrated her own admission to this school?”

I shook my head.

“She applied, she filled out the financial aid forms, even applied for some rare and rather obscure federal grants. She started doing all her prep work in the seventh grade. Her mother never had a clue.”

“That could be Helene’s epitaph.”

She gave Helene’s name a soft roll of her eyes. “When I met with Amanda and her mother for the first time, Helene was actually annoyed. Here was her daughter, set to attend a reasonably prestigious prep school on full financial aid, and Helene looked around this office and said, ‘Public school was good enough for me.’ ”

“Sure, she’s a poster child for Boston public schools, ol’ Helene is.”

Mai Nghiem smiled. “Financial aid, scholarships-they cover just about everything if you know how to look for the applicable ones, and Amanda did. Tuition, books, covered. But never fees. And fees add up. Amanda paid hers every term in cash. I remember one year, forty dollars of it was paid in coins she’d earned from a tip jar at a doughnut shop. I’ve met few students in my career who were given less by their parents yet worked so hard you knew nothing would stop them.”

“But something has derailed her. At least recently.”

“That’s what troubles me. She was going to Harvard. On a full ride. Or Yale. Brown. Take your pick. Now, unless she comes back real quick, and erases three weeks of missed exams, missed papers, gets her GPA all the way back up to above-flawless, where’s she going to go?” Another shake of her head. “She didn’t run.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate.”

She nodded. “Because now you have to assume she was taken. Again.”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Again.”

An incoming mail message dinged on her computer and she glanced at the screen, gave whatever she saw there an almost imperceptible head shake. She looked back at me. “I grew up in Dorchester, you know. Just off the Ave. In between Savin Hill and Fields Corner.”

“Not far from where I grew up.”

“I know.” She tapped the keyboard a couple of times and sat back. “I was a junior at Mount Holyoke when you found her the first time. I was obsessed with the case. I used to hurry back to my dorm to see the six o’clock news every night. We all thought she was dead, that whole long winter and into the spring.”

“I remember,” I said, wishing I didn’t.

“And then-wow-you found her. All those months later. And you brought her home.”

“And what’d you think?”

“About what you did?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You did the right thing,” she said.

“Oh.” I almost smiled in gratitude.

She met my eyes. “But you were still wrong.”

At Amanda’s locker, I stared at textbooks that were stacked tallest to shortest, the edges of their spines precisely aligned to the edge of the shelf. A Red Sox jersey hung from a hook on the door, dark blue with red piping, a red 19 on the back. Otherwise, nothing. No pictures taped to the door, no decals on the wall, no array of lip gloss or bracelets.

“So she likes dogs and the Red Sox,” I said.

“Why do you say the Red Sox?” Mai asked.

“She’s wearing a Sox warm-up jacket in a photo I have.”

“I’ve seen her wear this jersey a lot. Sometimes a T-shirt. And I’ve seen the warm-up jacket. But I’m a fan, you know? I can talk till I’m blue about the farm system and the logic-or lack thereof-behind Theo’s latest trade, et cetera.”

I smiled. “Me, too.”

“Amanda, though? Couldn’t. I tried to engage her half a dozen times until I realized, looking in her eyes one day, that she couldn’t name the starting rotation. She couldn’t tell you how many seasons Wakefield was with the team or even how many games out of first they were this week.”

“So a fair-weather fan?”

“Worse,” she said, “a fashion fan. She liked wearing the colors. That’s all.”

“The heathen,” I said.

“She was the perfect student,” Stephanie Tyler said. “I mean, per-fect.” Miss Tyler taught AP European History. She was about twenty-eight. She had ash-blond hair cut in a bob and not a strand of it out of place. She had the look of someone used to being tended to. “She never spoke out of turn and always came to class prepared. You never caught her tweeting or texting in class, playing video games on her BlackBerry or what-have-you.”

“She had a BlackBerry?”

She gave it some thought. “Amanda, no, come to think of it. She had a regular old cell. But you’d be amazed how many of these girls have BlackBerrys. Freshmen, too. Some have cell phones and BlackBerrys. The juniors and seniors drive BMW 5 series and Jaguars .” The outrage made her lean forward, as if we were conspiring. “High school’s a whole new world, don’t you find?”

I kept my face noncommittal. I wasn’t sure if high school was much different than it had ever been; only the accessories were.

“So Amanda…”

“Per-fect,” Miss Tyler said again. “Showed up every day, answered when called upon, usually correctly, went home at day’s end, and prepared for tomorrow. You can’t ask for more.”

“Any friends?”

“Just Sophie.”

“Sophie?” I said.

“Sophie Corliss. Her father’s the local fitness guy? Brian Corliss. He gives advice on the Channel 5 news sometimes.”

I shook my head. “I only watch The Daily Show .”

“So how do you get your news?”

“I read it.”

“Right,” she said with a sudden glazing of the eyes. “Anyway, a lot of people know who he is.”

“Uh, okay,” I said. “And his daughter?”

“Sophie. She and Amanda were like twins.”

“They looked alike?”

Stephanie Tyler cocked her head slightly. “No, but I had to remind myself who was who. Isn’t that strange? Amanda was shorter and fairer-skinned, Sophie was darker and much taller, but I had to keep remembering those differences.”

“So they were tight.”

“Since first period, first day, freshman year.”

“What did they bond over?”

“They were both iconoclasts, though with Sophie, I think it was more a matter of fashion than nature. It was like… Amanda’s an outsider because she doesn’t know any other way to be, which makes other kids respect her. Sophie, though, she chose to define herself as an outsider, which makes her…”

“A poseur,” I said.

“A bit, yeah.”

“So other kids respected Amanda.”

Miss Tyler nodded.

“Did they like her?”

“No one disliked her.”

“But.”

“But no one really knew her either. I mean, other than Sophie. At least, no one I can think of. That kid’s an island.”

“Great student,” Tom Dannal said. Dannal taught AP Macroeconomics but looked like the football coach. “One in a million, really. Everything we say we want our kids to be, you know? Polite, focused, smart as a whip. Never acted up or gave anyone a minute’s trouble.”

“I keep hearing this,” I said. “The perfect kid.”

“Right,” he said. “And who the fuck wants that?”

“Tommy,” Mai Nghiem said to him.

“No, no, really.” He held up a hand. “I mean, Amanda, okay, she was nice. She could be pleasant and personable. But, you know that saying about there being no there there? That’s her. I had her in microec last year and macroec now, and she was my best student in both. And yet? Couldn’t tell you thing-one about her outside of her work. Not one. You ask her a personal question, she turns it back on you. Ask her how things are going, you get, ‘Fine. You?’ And she always seemed fine. She did. Always seemed content. But you’d look in her eyes and you’d get the impression she was approximating human behavior. She’d studied people, learned how to walk and talk like one, but she was still outside looking in.”

“You’re saying she was an alien.”

“I’m saying she was one of the loneliest people I’ve ever known.”

“What about her friend?”

“Sophie?” A cold chuckle. “ ‘Friend’ is a generous word.”

I looked over at Principal Nghiem. She gave me a small shrug.

“I heard from another faculty member that Amanda and Sophie were pretty much joined at the hip.”

“I’m not saying they weren’t. I just said ‘friends’ wasn’t how I’d describe the relationship. It was a bit more Single White Female than that.”

“On whose end?”

“Sophie’s,” Mai Nghiem said, nodding to herself. “Yeah, now that Tom mentions it. Amanda was oblivious, I think, but Sophie clearly idolized her.”

“And the more Amanda didn’t notice,” Tom Dannal said, “the higher Sophie pushed her up the pedestal.”

I said, “So, I guess I got a new million-dollar question.”

Tom nodded. “Where’s Sophie? Right?”

I looked over at Principal Nghiem.

“She dropped out.”

My eyes widened. “When?”

“Beginning of the school year.”

“And you don’t think there could be a connection?”

“Between Sophie Corliss deciding not to come back for senior year and Amanda McCready not showing up for classes after Thanksgiving?”

I looked around the empty classroom and tried not to let my frustration show. “Anyone else I can talk to?”

In the student lounge, I met with seven homeroom classmates of Amanda and Sophie. Principal Nghiem and I sat in the center of the room with the girls arrayed before us in a half-circle.

“Amanda was just, ya know,” Reilly Moore said.

“I don’t,” I said.

Giggles.

“Like, ya know.”

Eye rolls. More giggles.

“Oh,” I said, “she was like ya know. Now I get it.”

Blank stares, no giggles.

“It’s, like, if you were talking to her,” Brooklyn Doone said, “she, like, listened? But if you waited for her to tell you stuff, like, who she dug or what apps were on her iPad or like that? You’d, like, wait a long time.”

The girl beside her, Coral or Crystal, rolled her eyes. “For, like, ever.”

“Like, ev-er,” another girl said, and they all nodded in agreement.

“What about her friend, Sophie?” I asked.

“Ewww!”

“That daggy bee-atch?”

“That chick was wannabe-dot-com.”

“Dot- org .”

“I’m sayin’.”

“I heard she, like, tried to list you as her friend on her Face-book page.”

“Ewww!”

“I’m sayin’.”

After my daughter was born, I’d considered buying a shotgun to ward off potential suitors fourteen or so years up the road. Now, as I listened to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language, I thought of buying the same shotgun to blow my own fucking head off.

Five thousand years of civilization, more or less, twenty-three hundred years since the libraries of Alexandria, over a hundred years since the invention of flight, wafer-thin computers at our fingertips, which can access the intellectual riches of the globe, and judging by the girls in that room, the only advance we’d made since the invention of fire was turning like into an omni-word, useful as a verb, a noun, an article, the whole sentence if need be.

“So none of you knew either of them well?” I tried.

Seven blank stares.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

The world’s longest silence broken only by some fidgeting.

“ ’Member that guy?” Brooklyn said eventually. “He looked kinda like Joe Jonas.”

“Like, he’s so, like, hot.”

“The guy?”

“Joe Jonas. Duh.”

“I think he looks, like, so queer.”

“Uh-ah.”

“Uh-huh.”

I focused on the one who’d brought it up. “This guy-he was Amanda’s boyfriend?”

Brooklyn shrugged. “I dunno.”

“What do you know?”

This annoyed her. Sunshine probably annoyed her. “I dunno. I just saw her with some guy once at South Shore.”

“ South Shore Plaza? The mall?”

“Uh,” she pulsed her eyes at my cluelessness, “yeah.”

“So you were at the mall and-”

“Yeah, like, me and Tisha and Reilly.” She indicated two of the other girls. “And we ran into them coming out of Diesel. They didn’t buy anything, though.”

“They didn’t buy anything,” I said.

She looked down at her nails and crossed her legs and let out a sigh.

“Anything else?” I asked the room.

Nothing. Not even blank stares. They’d all decided to investigate their nails or their shoes or their reflections in the windows.

“Well, thank you,” I said. “You’ve all been very helpful.”

“Whatever,” two of them said.

On the front steps, I exchanged business cards with Principal Nghiem and shook her small, smooth hand.

“Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been a huge help.”

“I hope so. Good luck.”

I started down the stairs.

“Mr. Kenzie.”

I looked back up at her. The sun had popped out, hard and strong. It turned last night’s snow into a brook that gurgled as it rushed along the gutters toward the sewer grate.

Mai shaded her eyes. “Those exams she missed? Those overdue papers? If you get her back here soon, we’ll find a way to make up all that work. Without damage to her academic file. She’ll get that scholarship to a great school, I promise.”

“I just have to find her soon.”

She nodded.

“So,” I said, “I’ll find her soon.”

“I know you will.”

We acknowledged the gravity of the situation with the briefest of nods, and I felt something else in the exchange, too, something a little warm and a little wistful and better left unacknowledged and unexamined.

She turned back and entered the school, and the heavy green door closed behind her. I walked up the street to my Jeep. As I clicked the remote to unlock the door, a girl came out from behind it.

She was one of the seven I’d just interviewed. She had dark eyes pooled in shadow and lank dark hair and skin as white as Styrofoam. Of the seven girls in the room, she was the only one who’d said nothing.

“What’re you going to do if you find her?”

“Bring her home.”

“What home?”

“She can’t stay out there by herself.”

“Maybe she’s not by herself. Maybe ‘out there’ ain’t so bad.”

“It’s pretty bad sometimes.”

“Have you seen where she lives?” She lit a cigarette.

I shook my head.

“Well, break in sometime, m’ man. Check out the microwave for starters.”

“The microwave.”

She repeated it as she blew a series of smoke O’s out of her mouth. “The mi-cro-wave. Yes.”

I looked in her dark eyes, which were fringed by even darker eye shadow. “Amanda doesn’t strike me as the kind of girl who takes friends by her house.”

“I never said it was Amanda who brought me into her house.”

It took me a few seconds. “You went there with Sophie?”

The girl said nothing, just chewed the left corner of her upper lip.

“Okay. So is Sophie still there?”

“Might be,” the girl said.

“And Amanda-where’s she?”

“I honestly don’t know. Swear.”

“Why are you talking to me if you don’t want me to find her?”

She crossed her arms so that her right elbow was cupped in her left palm as she took another drag. A smattering of pink scars rose up her inner arms like railroad ties. “I heard a story going around about Amanda and Sophie. I heard five people went into a room over Thanksgiving. You with me so far?”

“Yeah, I think I can follow.”

“Two people in that room died. But four people walked back out.”

I chuckled. “What are you smoking besides that cigarette?”

“Just remember what I said.”

“Could you be more cryptic?”

She shrugged and bit a nail. “Gotta go.”

As she walked past me, I said, “Why talk to me?”

“Because Zippo was a friend of mine. Last year? He was more than a friend. First more-than-a-friend I ever had.”

“Who’s Zippo?”

Her façade of apathetic cool collapsed and she looked about nine years old. Nine years old and abandoned by her parents at the mall. “You’re serious?”

“I am.”

“Christ,” she said, and her voice cracked. “You don’t know anything.”

“Who’s Zippo?” I said again.

“Buzzer’s buzzed, man.” She flicked her cigarette to the street. “Gots to get my education on. You drive safe.”

She walked up the street as the melted snow continued to rush along the gutters and the sky turned to slate. As she vanished through the same door Principal Nghiem had gone through, I realized I’d never gotten her name. The door closed, and I climbed in my Jeep and drove back across the river.

Chapter Eleven

While I’d spent the morning interviewing annoying prep-school girls, Angie’s friend, PR, had agreed to watch Gabby for a few afternoons. So it was that my wife joined me on casework for the first time in almost five years, and we drove north of the city to meet Sophie Corliss’s father.

Brian Corliss lived in Reading on a maple-lined street with wide white sidewalks and lawns that looked like they shaved twice a day. It was a solidly middle-class section of town, leaning toward upper maybe, but not to an elitist degree. The garages were two-car, not four, and the cars were Audis and 4Runner Limiteds, not Lexuses and BMW 740s. All the houses looked well cared for, and all were adorned with Christmas lights and decorations. None more so than the Corliss house, a white Colonial with black shutters and window trim, a black front door. White icicle lights dripped from the gutters, porch posts, and railings. A wreath as big as the sun hung above the garage door. In front of the bushes on the front lawn stood a manger replica and figures of the three kings, Mary, Joseph, and a menagerie of animals arrayed around an empty cradle. To their right stood a somewhat incongruous menagerie of snowmen, elves, reindeer, Santa and Mrs. Claus, and a leering Grinch. On the roof, a sled sat by the chimney and more lights spelled out MERRY CHRISTMAS. The mailbox post was a candy cane.

When we pulled up the driveway, Brian was in his garage, unloading groceries from the back of an Infiniti SUV. He greeted us with a wave and a smile as open as a heartland prairie. He was a trim man who wore a denim Oxford unbuttoned over a white T tucked into a pair of sharply pressed khakis. His canvas safari jacket was maroon with a black leather collar. He was in his mid-forties and looked to be in exceptional shape. This made sense, because he’d made his living the last ten years first as a fitness trainer and then as a fitness guru. He traveled New England speaking to small companies about how they could raise their productivity by getting their employees into better shape. He’d even written a book, Lose the Fat and All That, which had become a local bestseller for a few weeks, and a cursory study of his Web sites (he had three) and his autobiography suggested he hadn’t neared his career ceiling yet. He shook our hands, not overdoing the grip the way a lot of workout fiends do, and thanked us for coming and apologized for not being able to meet us halfway.

“It’s just the city traffic, you know? After two, forget about it. But I mentioned it to Donna and she said, ‘But won’t the detectives have to drive back in that same traffic?’ ”

“Donna’s your wife?”

He nodded. “She had a point. So I feel guilty.”

“But we’re imposing on you,” I said.

He waved that off. “You’re not imposing at all. If you can help bring my daughter back to me, you’re most definitely not imposing.”

He lifted a grocery bag off the floor of the garage. There were six of them, and I reached for two. Angie took two more.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I can get them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Angie said. “It’s the least we can do.”

“Jeesh,” he said. “You’re very kind. Thank you.”

He closed the hatch of the Infiniti and I was mildly surprised to see one of those moronic 9/11 Terrorist Hunting Permit decals on the rear window. I suppose I should have felt safer knowing that if Bin Laden dropped by to borrow a cup of sugar, Brian Corliss was ready to put out his lights for America, but mostly I just felt annoyed that the thousands who had died on September 11 were being exploited for a dumb fucking decal. Before my mouth could get me into trouble, though, we were following Brian Corliss up the path to the black front door and entering his two-hundred-year-old house.

We stood by the granite kitchen counter as he unloaded the groceries into the fridge and cabinets. The first floor had been gut-remodeled so recently you could smell the sawdust. Two hundred years ago, I doubt the builder had seen the need to go with the sunken living room or the pressed copper ceiling in the dining room or the Sub-Zero in the kitchen. All the window frames were new and uniform eggshell. Even so, the house had a mismatched feel. The living room was white on white-white couch, white throw rugs, off-white fireplace mantel, ash-white logs in the ivory metal log basket, a huge white Christmas tree towering over it all from a corner. The kitchen was dark-cherrywood cabinets and dark granite counters and black granite backsplash. Even the Sub-Zero and the chimney hood above the stove were black. The dining room was Danish Modern, a clean, blond hard-edged table surrounded by hard-edged high-backed chairs. The ultimate effect was of a house that had been furnished from too many catalogs.

Framed pictures of Brian Corliss and a blond woman and a blond boy sat on the mantel, on the shelves of a credenza, on top of the fridge. Collages of them hung on the walls. You could follow the boy’s growth from birth to what looked like four. The blond woman was Donna, I assumed. She was attractive the way sports bar hostesses and pharmaceutical reps are-hair the color of rum and lots of it, teeth as bright as Bermuda. She had the look of a woman who kept her plastic surgeon on speed dial. Her breasts were prominently displayed in most of the photos and looked like perfect softballs made of flesh. Her forehead was unlined in the way of the recently embalmed and her smile resembled that of someone undergoing electroshock. In a couple of the photos-just a couple-stood a dark-haired girl with anxious eyes and an unsure, fleshy chin: Sophie.

“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.

“It’s been a few months.”

Angie and I looked across the counter at him.

He held up both palms. “I know, I know. But there were extenuating…” He grimaced and then smiled. “Let’s just say parenting is not easy. You have any kids?”

“One,” I said. “Daughter.”

“How old?”

“Four.”

“Little child,” he said, “little problems. Big child, big problems.” He looked across the counter at Angie. “And you, miss?”

“We’re married.” Angie tilted her head toward me. “Same four-year-old.”

That seemed to please him. He smiled to himself and hummed under his breath as he put a dozen eggs and a half-gallon of skim milk into the fridge.

“She was such a happy child.” He finished emptying the bag and folded it neatly before putting it under the counter. “A joy every day. I fully admit I was unprepared for the day she turned into such a Sullen Sally.”

“And what turned her into… that?” Angie asked.

He peered at the eggplant he pulled from the next bag, frozen for a moment. “Her mom,” he said. “God rest her. But, yes, she…” He looked up from the eggplant as if surprised to find us there. “She left.”

“How old was Sophie when she left?”

“Well, she left with Sophie.”

“So, she left you. She didn’t leave Sophie.” Angie glanced at me. “I’m a little lost, Brian.”

Brian put the eggplant into the crisper drawer. “I regained custody when Sophie was ten. She-this is hard-Sophie’s mother? She developed a chemical dependency. First on Vicodin, then on OxyContin. She stopped acting like a responsible adult. Then she left me and went to live with someone else. And they created a wholly unfit environment for a child to grow up in, believe me.” He looked at both of us, waiting, it appeared, for an indication of agreement.

I gave him my best empathetic nod and commiserating gaze.

“So I sued for custody,” he said, “and eventually I won.”

“How many years was Sophie with her mother before that?” Angie asked.

“Three.”

“Three…”

“Sophie’s mother was addicted to painkillers throughout that time?” I asked.

“Eventually. I mean, she stopped, or claimed she did. For the full three years.”

“So what created the unsafe environment?”

He gave us a warm smile. “Nothing I feel comfortable discussing right now.”

“Okay,” I said.

Angie said, “So you brought Sophie back here when she was ten?”

He nodded. “And at first it was a little awkward, because I hadn’t been a permanent fixture in her life for six years, but then, I’ll tell you something, we figured it out. We found our rhythm. We did.”

“Six years,” Angie said. “I thought you said three.”

“No, no. Her mother and I separated when Sophie was just turning seven and then I had to fight three years for custody, but the six years I’m talking about were the first six years of her life. I was overseas during most of that. And Sophie and her mother were here.”

“So really,” Angie said with an edge in her voice I wasn’t real keen on, “you missed her whole life.”

“Huh?” His open face closed and darkened.

“Overseas, Brian?” I said. “As in military?”

“Affirmative.”

“Doing what?”

“Protecting this country.”

“No doubt,” I said. “And thank you. Sincerely. Thank you. I’m just wondering where you served.”

He closed the fridge door and folded and stowed the last of the paper bags. He gave me that warm, warm smile of his. “So you can second-guess the gravity of my contribution?”

“Definitely not,” I said. “It’s just a question.”

After an awkward few seconds, he held up a hand and smiled wider. “Of course, of course. I apologize. I was a civil engineer with Bechtel in Dubai.”

Angie kept her voice light. “I thought you said you were in the military.”

“No,” he said, his eyes fixed on nothing. “I agreed to your partner’s description when he said as in the military. When you’re in the Emirates, working for a government friendly to ours, you may as well be in the military. You are most certainly a target of any jihadist who decides to blow you into meat scraps because you symbolize his cockeyed idea of Western corruption and influence. I didn’t want my daughter growing up in that.”

“So why take the job in the first place?”

“I’ll tell you, Angela, I’ve asked myself that a thousand times, and the answer’s not one I’m proud of.” He gave us the hapless shrug of a charming child. “The money was too good to pass up. There. I admit it. The tax break, too. I knew if I worked my tail off for five years, I’d come home with a king’s ransom I could put toward my family and toward building my personal-training enterprise.”

“Which you obviously did,” I said. “And quite well.” I was good cop, today. Maybe even kiss-ass cop. Whatever works, says I.

He looked from his kitchen bar at his living room like a modern-day Alexander with no worlds left to conquer. “So, yes, it was not the greatest idea to think I could hold a family together while I was six thousand miles away. And I own that failure. I do. But when I returned, I came home to a wife with substance abuse issues and a value system I found”-he shrug-winced-“distasteful. We fought a lot. I couldn’t get Cheryl to see how destructive she was being to Sophie. And the more I tried to get her to see the truth, the more she retreated into denial. One day, I came home to an empty house.” Another wince, another shrug. “I spent the next three years fighting for my rights as a father and, eventually, I won. I won.”

“You got sole custody?”

He led us into the sunken living room. Brian and I took seats on the sofa, while Angie sat on the love seat across from us. On the coffee table between us was a white copper bucket filled with bottled water. Brian offered us the bottles and we each took one. The labels advertised Brian’s weight-loss book.

“Once Cheryl died, I did, yes.”

“Oh,” Angie said, her eyes wider than usual, her jaw working to mask her frustration, “your wife died. And then you, uh, won custody?”

“Exactly. She contracted stomach cancer. I’ll go to my grave knowing it was the drugs that did it to her. You can’t abuse your body that way and expect it to continually repair itself.”

I noticed that the skin closest to his eyes, where the crow’s feet should have been, was whiter and tighter than the rest of his face. Circles the size of sand dollars indented the flesh. Like his wife, he’d had work done. Apparently his body didn’t repair itself continually.

“So you received sole custody,” Angie said.

He nodded. “Thank God they were living in New Hampshire. If it had been Vermont or here? I’d probably have had to fight another three years.”

Angie looked over at me. I gave her my flattest gaze, the one I reserve for situations that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Brian, excuse me for jumping to conclusions,” she said, “but are we talking about a same-sex-marriage issue?”

“Not marriage.” He placed the tip of one index finger on the coffee table and bent it until the flesh turned a pink-lemonade shade. “Not marriage. Not in New Hampshire. But, yes, a domestic partnership of that nature was being enacted in full view of my daughter. If they’d been allowed to marry, who knows how long the custody fight could have worn on?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

Angie said, “Did your ex-wife’s partner-?”

“Elaine. Elaine Murrow.”

“Elaine, thank you. Did Elaine legally adopt Sophie?”

“No.”

“She ever begin proceedings in pursuit of that?”

“No. But if they had found the right activist judge? And that’s not hard around here. Who’s to say they couldn’t have turned my attempt to regain custody into a test-case to overturn the entire idea of biological parental rights?”

Angie gave me another careful look. “That seems a bit of a stretch, Brian.”

“Does it?” He twisted the cap off his water. He took a long swig. “Well, not to me. And I lived it.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “So once Sophie came to live with you and you two ironed out the bumps, things were good?”

“Yeah.” He placed the water bottle on the coffee table and for a moment his face glowed with some distant memory. “Yeah. For about three years, things were very good. Sure, she had some issues over the passing of her mother and the move from New Hampshire, but generally? Things were very fine between us. She was respectful, she made her bed every morning, she seemed to take to Donna, she performed well in school.”

I smiled, feeling the warmth of his memories. “What’d you guys talk about?”

“Talk about?”

“Yeah,” I said. “My daughter and I, we both like cameras, you know? I got this black SLR and she’s got this pink baby-digital and we-”

“I mean”-he shifted a bit on the couch-“we were more about doing things together. Like, well, I got her jogging and doing a yoga-Pilates fusion with Donna that really helped them bond. And she used to come to the fitness center I run in Woburn. The one that started my company? That’s where we broadcast our Sunday-morning show and do the mail order. She was great helping out. Just great.”

“And then?”

“War,” he said. “One day, no rhyme or reason to it. I’d say black, she’d say white. I’d serve chicken for dinner, she’d tell us she’d become a vegan. She started doing her chores sloppily or not at all. Once BJ was born, it got out of control.”

“BJ?”

He indicated the small boy in the photos. “Brian Junior.”

“Ah,” I said. “BJ.”

He turned to face me, his hands clasped at his knees. “I’m not a taskmaster. I only have a few rules in this house, but they’re firm rules. You understand?”

“Of course,” I said. “With a kid, you’ve got to have rules.”

“So, okay.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “No profanity, no smoking, no boys over when I’m not home, no drugs or alcohol, and I’d like to know what you’re doing on the Internet.”

“Perfectly reasonable,” I said.

“Plus, no dark lipstick, no fishnet stockings, no friends with tattoos or nose rings, no junk food, processed food, or sodas.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Right,” he said, as if I’d said “Atta boy.” He leaned forward a bit more. “The junk food contributed to her acne. I told her that, but she didn’t listen. And all the sugar contributed to her hyperactivity and inability to concentrate in school. So her grades went down and her weight went up. It was a terrible example for BJ.”

“Isn’t he, like, three?” Angie asked.

Wide eyes and rapid nodding. “A very impressionable three. You don’t think this starts early, the national obesity crisis? And then let’s consider the national learning crisis we have. Angela, it’s all connected. Sophie, with her self-indulgence and her constant fits of drama, was setting a terrible example for our son.”

“She’d entered puberty, though,” Angie said. “And she was in high school. Everything that does a number on a girl’s head.”

“Which I appreciated.” He nodded. “But plenty of recent studies have shown that it’s our coddling of pubescent children in this country that contributes to an extended adolescence and arrested development.”

“I still can’t believe they canceled that show,” I said. “It was genius.”

“What?”

“My bad,” I said. “I was thinking of something else.”

Angie would have shot me if she could have cleared the room of witnesses.

“Go on,” I said.

“So, yes, Sophie was going through puberty. I get that. I get it. I do. But there are still rules to adhere to. Yes? She refused. I finally drew a line in the sand-lose ten pounds within forty days or leave the house.”

Something groaned below us, something mechanical, and then we heard the heat begin venting from the baseboards.

“I’m sorry,” Angie said. “I missed something. You made your daughter’s food and shelter conditional on her going on a diet?”

“It’s hardly that simple.”

“Then I’m missing a complicated wrinkle?” Angie nodded. “So, okay, what is that wrinkle, Brian?”

“The issue was not whether I would withhold certain things if-”

“Food and shelter,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “It was not about withholding those things if she refused to diet. It was about threatening to withhold those things if she didn’t regain her self-respect and live up to our expectations. It was about turning her into a strong, proud, American woman with worthwhile values and authentic self-esteem.”

“How much self-esteem do you gain living on the streets?” Angie asked.

“Well, I didn’t think it would come to that. Obviously, I was wrong.”

Angie looked off at the kitchen, then to the foyer. She blinked several times. She slipped her bag strap back over her shoulder and came off the couch. She gave me a helpless smile, her lips tight against her teeth. “Yeah, I just can’t. I can’t sit here anymore. I’m going to go out front and wait for you. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

She offered her hand to a baffled Brian Corliss. “A pleasure meeting you, Brian. If you see smoke floating past your window, don’t call the fire department. It’s just me having a cigarette in your driveway.”

She left. Brian and I sat in her wake, the heat hissing its way into the house.

“She smokes?” he said.

I nodded. “Loves cheeseburgers and Cokes, too.”

“And she looks like that?”

“Like what, dude?”

“That good? She’s, what, mid-thirties?”

“She’s forty- two .” I won’t deny I enjoyed the look of shock on his face.

“She’s had some work done?”

“God, no,” I said. “It’s just genes and a shitload of nervous energy. She bikes a lot, too, but she’s no fanatic.”

“You’re saying I’m a fanatic.”

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s your job and it’s your life choice. Good for you. I hope you live to a hundred and fifty. I just notice people sometimes mistake their life choices for their moral ones.”

We said nothing for a moment. We each took a drink of water.

“I kept thinking she’d come back.” His voice was soft.

“Sophie.”

He stared at his hands. “After a few years of her acting up while we tried to raise a toddler ? I just thought, you know, I’d get back to old-school logic. In the old days, kids didn’t have eating disorders and they didn’t have ADHD and they didn’t talk back or listen to music that glorified sex.”

I gave that a bit of involuntary frown. “I don’t think the old days were all that, man. Go listen to Wake Up, Little Susie or Hound Dog and tell me again what they were singing about. ADHD, eating disorders? Do you remember eighth grade? Come on, Brian. Just because it wasn’t treated doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.”

“Okay,” he said. “What about the culture? You didn’t have all these magazines and reality TV shows that glorify the stupid and the craven. You didn’t have ’Net porn and instant, viral communication-without any context whatsoever-of the most insipid ideas. You weren’t sold the concept that not only could you become a superstar of something , but you were entitled to. Forget the fact that you have no idea what that something is, and shelve the uncomfortable fact that you possess no talent. So what? You deserve everything.” He looked at me, suddenly forlorn. “You have a daughter? Well, let me tell you something, we can’t compete with that .”

“That?”

“That.” He pointed at his windows. “The world out there.”

I followed his gaze. I considered mentioning that the World Out There didn’t kick her out of her own home, the World In Here did. But I said nothing instead.

“We just can’t.” He let loose another gargantuan sigh and arched his back against the couch cushion to reach for his wallet. He rummaged around in it and came out with a business card. He handed it to me.

ANDRE STILES

Caseworker

Department of Children & Families

“Sophie’s DCF worker. He worked with her up until recently, I think, when she turned seventeen. I’m not sure if she still sees him, but it’s worth a shot.”

“Where do you think she is?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you absolutely, positively had to guess.”

He gave it some thought as he returned the wallet to his back pocket. “Where she always is. With that friend of hers, the one you’re looking for.”

“Amanda.”

He nodded. “I thought, at first, she was a stabilizing influence on Sophie, but then I discovered more about her background. It was pretty sordid.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it was.”

“I don’t like sordid. There’s no place for it in a respectable life.”

I looked at his white-on-white living room and his white Christmas tree. “You know anyone named Zippo?”

He blinked a few times. “Is Sophie still seeing him?”

“I don’t know. I’m just compiling data until it makes sense.”

“That’s part of your job, eh?”

“That is my job.”

“Zippo’s name is James Lighter.” He turned his palm up toward me. “Hence the nickname. I don’t know anything else about him except that the one time I met him he smelled of pot and looked like a punk. Exactly the type of boy I would have hoped would never enter my daughter’s life-tattoos everywhere, droopy pants with the boxers exposed, rings in his eyebrows, one of those tufts of hair between his bottom lip and his chin.” His face had torqued into a fist. “Not a suitable human being at all.”

“Do you know of any places your daughter and Amanda, and maybe even Zippo, any places they hang out that I might not know about?”

He thought about it long enough for us both to drain our water bottles.

Eventually, he said, “No. Not really.”

I flipped open my notepad, found the page from earlier in the day. “One of Amanda’s and Sophie’s schoolmates told me Sophie and four other people went into a room. Two people in the room died, but-”

“Oh, dear God.”

“-four people walked back out. Does this make any sense to you?”

“What? No. It’s gibberish.” He came off the couch, one hand jiggling the keys in his pocket as he rocked back and forth against his heels. “Is my daughter dead?”

I held his desperate gaze for a moment.

“I have no idea.”

He looked away and then back again. “Well, that’s the problem when it comes to kids, isn’t it? We have no idea. Not one of us.”

Chapter Twelve

While she’d been smoking her cigarette, Angie had called 411 for the phone number of Elaine Murrow of Exeter, New Hampshire. She’d then called Elaine, who agreed to see us.

We spent the early portion of our thirty-minute drive to the Granite State in silence. Angie looked out the window at the bare brown trees along the highway, the cake frosting of last night’s snow hugging the ground in quickly balding patches.

“I just wanted to go over that coffee table,” she said eventually, “and gouge his fucking eyes out of his head.”

“Amazing you never got invited to the debutantes ball,” I said.

“Seriously.” She turned from the window. “He’s sitting there talking about ‘values’ as he sends his daughter to sleep on some bench in some bus station. And calling me ‘Angela’ like he fucking knows me. I hate, hate, fucking hate when people do that. And, Jesus, did you hear him ranting on about the dead mother’s ‘wholly unfit environment’? Because, what, she liked granola and watching The L Word ?”

“You done?”

“Am I what?” she said.

“Done,” I said. “Because I was there to get information on a missing girl who can lead me to another missing girl. I was doing, ya know, my job.”

“Oh, I thought you were shining his shoes with your tongue.”

“My other option was what? To get all self-righteous and blow up at him?”

“I didn’t blow up at him.”

“You were unprofessional. He could feel you judging him.”

“Isn’t that what they say about you at Duhamel?”

Damn. Not bad.

“But I was never a tenth as bad as you were in there.”

“A tenth, huh?”

“A tenth.”

“So, I’m just supposed to sit back and let an emotionally abusive parent swim in his own self-righteousness?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t.”

“I noticed.”

“I mean, is this it?” she said. “Is this the job? Did I forget it’s just talking to people who make you want to scour your skin with a Brillo pad?”

“Sometimes.” I looked over at her. “All right-most times.”

Traffic thinned as we neared the New Hampshire border. I picked up enough speed so that the trees along the highway turned into a brown blur.

“Trying to close out the year with one final speeding ticket?” Angie asked.

As long as my daughter wasn’t in the car, I always drove fast. And Angie had long ago accepted it the way I accepted her smoking. Or so I’d thought.

“What,” I said, “the fuck crawled up your ass this morning, babe?”

The silence that followed got thick enough to make me consider rolling down the windows, but then Angie slammed the back of her head against the headrest and slapped the soles of her shoes against the glove compartment, and let loose a long “Arrgggghhh.” She followed it with, “I’m sorry. Okay? I truly am. You were right. I was unprofessional.”

“Could you repeat that into my tape recorder, please?”

“Seriously.”

“I am serious.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Apology accepted. And greatly appreciated.”

“I really did blow it back there.”

“No, you didn’t. You almost did. But I smoothed it over. It’s all cool.”

“It wasn’t, though.”

“You haven’t done this in a while. There’s bound to be rust.”

“Yeah.” She ran her hands back through her hair. “And I’m covered in it.”

“You still got those, uh, mad computer skills, though.”

She smiled. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Think you could hop on your BlackBerry and Google James Lighter?”

“Who’s…?”

“Zippo. Let’s see if he shows up anywhere.”

“Ah.” She tapped the keys for a bit and then said, “Oh, he shows up all right. Shows up very dead.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. He’s positively ID’d as a corpse found in Allston about three weeks ago.” She read it aloud to me. The body of James Lighter, 18, had been found in a field behind a liquor store in Allston the weekend after Thanksgiving. He’d been shot twice in the chest. Police had no suspects and no witnesses.

Midway through the article, his predictably shitty back story appeared: when he was six years old, his single mother gave him to a friend to babysit and never came home again. To this day, the whereabouts of Heather Lighter were unknown. Her son, James, grew up in a series of foster homes. His last foster parent, Carol “Weezy” Louise, was quoted as saying she’d always known he’d end up this way, ever since he’d stolen her car when he was fourteen.

“Steal Weezy’s car,” I said, “and you apparently deserve two in the chest.”

“What a waste,” Angie said. “A whole life adds up to…” She searched for the word.

“Zip,” I said.

“I’m not going to claim Sophie was some perfect kid until her father came along and destroyed everything.” Elaine Murrow sat on a red metal couch without cushions in the center of the converted barn she used as a studio for her sculpture. We sat on red stools across from her. They were metal, too, and cushionless and about as comfortable as sitting on the mouth of a wine bottle. The barn was warm, but the sculptures kept it from being cozy; they were all metal or chrome and I wasn’t sure I could recognize what they were supposed to represent. If I had to guess, I’d say most were supposed to be oversize fuzzy dice. Without the fuzz. And there was a coffee table (I think it was a coffee table) in the shape of a chain saw. Which is to say, I don’t understand modern art and I’m fairly certain it doesn’t understand me, so we leave it at that and try not to bother each other.

“She was an only child,” Elaine said, “so she was a bit bratty and self-centered. Her mother had a flair for the dramatic, so Sophie did, too. But Brian, believe me, never gave a shit about his daughter until her mother left him. And even then, what he cared about most was getting Cheryl to return to him so he wouldn’t have to live with what her rejection said about him.”

“When did he begin showing serious interest in gaining custody?” I asked.

She chuckled. “When he found out who Cheryl left him for. He was clueless for a good six months. He thought she was living with a girl friend, not a girlfriend . I mean, look at me-do I look like I ever lived a straight day in my life?”

She had heavily gelled spiked hair the white of Liquid Paper. She wore a sleeveless plaid work shirt over dark jeans and brown Doc Martens. When it came to Elaine Murrow, if we were operating under the policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, no one would need to ask.

“Not to me,” I said, “no.”

“Thank you. But dipshit Brian? He didn’t pick up on it at first.”

“And once he finally clued in?” Angie asked.

“He’d show up here in a rage and scream at her, ‘You can’t be a lesbian, Cheryl. I won’t accept it.’ ”

“ He wouldn’t accept it,” Angie said, “so it must not be true.”

“Exactly. Once it finally got through to him that not only was Cheryl not going back to him but that she was, in fact, very much in love with me and this wasn’t some identity-crisis fling? Well…” She blew air out of her mouth, her cheeks puffing and unpuffing. “All Brian’s rage, all his feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing, which had probably been eating at him since, I dunno, birth-guess what form they took? A moral crusade to rescue the daughter he’d never known from the clutches of an immoral lifestyle. From there on, when he’d come to pick up Sophie, he’d wear T-shirts that said charming things like GOD MADE ADAM & EVE, NOT ADAM & STEVE, or the word DE-EVOLUTION over a drawing of a man lying with a woman, followed by a man lying with a man, followed by a man lying with-wanna guess?”

“I’m betting some type of livestock.”

She nodded. “A sheep.” She wiped the corner of one eye. “He wore that around a child, and then he preached to us about sin.”

A large dog-part collie, part who-knew-wandered into the converted barn from a dog door in the back. It ambled between the sculptures and put its chin on Elaine’s thigh. She scratched the side of its face and ear.

“In the end,” she said, “Brian threw everything at us. Every day was a pitched battle. Every morning, we opened our eyes and our hearts filled with dread. Just… dread. Would he show up at one of our jobs with a picket sign filled with biblical verse and calling us child abusers? Would he file some ridiculous order with the court based on alleged conversations he’d had with Sophie about our drinking or pot smoking or having sex openly in front of her? All it takes to turn a custody battle into-I dunno, carnage?-is someone with no love for the actual child involved. Brian would make any claim, no matter how outlandish, invent ridiculous lies and put them in Sophie’s mouth. She was seven when this started. Seven. The court costs drained us financially, his ridiculous lawsuit, which he’d been told from the start didn’t have a chance. I-” She realized she’d been scratching the dog’s ear a little too hard. She took her hand back and it was shaking.

“Take your time,” Angie said. “It’s okay.”

Elaine nodded her thanks and closed her eyes for a moment. “When Cheryl first complained about acid reflux, we thought, ‘It figures,’ given all the stress we’d been under. When she was diagnosed with stomach cancer, I remember standing in that doctor’s office and picturing Brian’s smug, dumb fucking face and thinking, ‘Wow. The bad guys really do win.’ They do.”

“Not always,” I said, though I wondered if I believed it.

“The night Cheryl died, Sophie and I were with her until the last breath left her body. We finally leave the hospital, and it’s three in the morning, it’s damp and raw out, and guess who’s waiting in the parking lot?”

“Brian.”

She nodded. “He had this look on his face-I’ll never forget it-his mouth was turned down, his forehead furrowed so he looked contrite. But his eyes? Man.”

“They were lit up, huh?”

“Like he’d just won the fucking Powerball. Two days after the funeral, he showed up here with two state policemen and he took Sophie away.”

“Did you stay in contact?”

“Not at first. I’d lost my wife and then I lost the child I’d come to think of as my daughter. Brian forbade her to call me. I had no legal rights with regard to her, so after the second time I drove to Boston to visit her at her school during recess, he filed a restraining order.”

“I changed my mind,” Angie said. “I wish I’d been more judgmental on this asshole. I wish I’d kicked in his larynx.”

Elaine’s face cracked around a smile. “You can always make a second trip.”

Angie reached out and patted her hand and Elaine squeezed my wife’s fingers and nodded several times as tears fell to her jeans.

“Sophie began contacting me again when she was fourteen or so. By that point she was so confused and filled with rage and loss, it was like talking to somebody else. She lived with an asshole faux father, a trophy wife faux mother, and a spoiled prick of a half brother who hates her. So, in the logic of human nature, I was one of her favorite targets-Why’d I let her go? Why hadn’t I done enough to save her mother? Why hadn’t we moved to a state where Cheryl and I could have legally married, so I could have adopted her? Why were we fucking dykes in the first place?” She sucked a clogged breath in and let a clogged breath out. “It was brutal. All the scabs got torn off. After a while, I stopped answering her calls because I couldn’t stomach the rage and recrimination for crimes I hadn’t even committed.”

“Don’t blame yourself on that one,” I said.

“Easy to say,” she said. “Hard to live.”

“So you haven’t heard from her in a while?” Angie asked.

Elaine patted Angie’s hand one last time before letting it go. “A couple times in the last year. She was always high.”

“High?”

She looked at me. “High. I’ve been in recovery ten years. I know when I’m talking to somebody who’s fucked up.”

“On what?”

She shrugged. “I’d guess a hard upper. She’d get that edgy motormouth vibe cokeheads get. I’m not saying it was coke, but it was something that jacks you up.”

“She ever mention Zippo?”

“Boyfriend, yeah. Sounded like a beaut. She was very proud of his connections to some Russians.”

“As in the Russian mob?” Angie asked.

“That was my inference.”

“Joy,” I said. “How about Amanda McCready? She ever mention her?”

Elaine whistled. “The goddess? The idol? Everything Sophie wanted to be? Never met her, but she sounds… formidable for a sixteen-year-old.”

“That’s the impression we get. Sophie the type of girl who looks for a leader?”

“Most people do,” Elaine said. “They wait their entire lives for someone to tell them what to do and who to be. It’s all they want. Whether it’s a politician they’re waiting for or a spouse or a religious leader, all they really want in life is an alpha.”

“And Sophie,” Angie said, “found her alpha?”

“Yup.” She stood from her chair. “She sure did. She hasn’t called me in… Since July, maybe? I hope I was some help.”

We assured her she was.

“Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks for talking to us.”

We shook her hand and followed her and the dog out of the barn and down the dirt path to our car. Dusk was settling into the bare treetops and the air smelled of pine and damp, decaying leaves.

“When you find Sophie, what will you do?”

I said, “I was hired to find Amanda.”

“So you won’t feel obligated to bring Sophie home.”

I shook my head. “She’s seventeen now. I couldn’t do anything if I wanted to.”

“But you don’t want to.”

Angie and I spoke at the same time. “No.”

“Would you do me a favor if you do find her?”

“You bet.”

“Tell her she has a place to stay. Any hour of the day. High or not. Angry or not. I don’t care about my feelings anymore. I only want to know she’s safe.”

She and Angie hugged then in that unforced way women can pull off that eludes even those men in the world who are at ease with the bro clench. Sometimes, I give Angie shit about it. I call it the Lifetime Hug or the Oprah, but there was no easy sentiment powering this one, just a recognition, I guess, or an affirmation.

“She deserved you,” Angie said.

Elaine wept silently into her shoulder and Angie held the back of her head and rocked her a bit the way she so often does with our daughter.

“She deserved you.”

Chapter Thirteen

We met Andre Stiles out front of the DCF offices on Farnsworth Street and the three of us walked down along the Seaport in a light flurry to a tavern on Sleeper Street.

Once we were settled in our seats and the waitress had taken our orders, I said, “Thanks again for seeing us on such short notice, Mr. Stiles.”

“Please,” he said, “don’t call me ‘Mister.’ Just call me Dre.”

“Dre it is.”

He was about thirty-seven or thirty-eight, brown hair cut short, the gray just finding its way along the temples and along the edges of his goatee. Well-dressed for a social worker-black cotton crewneck and dark blue jeans far nicer than anything you’d find at The Gap, black cashmere overcoat with red lining.

“So,” he said, “Sophie.”

“Sophie.”

“You met her father.”

“Yup,” Angie said.

“What’d you think?”

The waitress brought our drinks. He plucked the lemon wedge out of his vodka tonic, stirred the drink, and then placed the stirrer beside the lemon wedge. His fingers moved with the confident delicacy of a pianist.

“The father,” I said. “Piece of work, isn’t he?”

“If by piece of work you mean douche bag, yeah, he’s that.”

Angie laughed and drank some wine.

“Don’t sugarcoat it, Dre.”

“Please, don’t,” Angie said.

He took a sip of his drink, chewed a chip of ice. “So many of the kids I deal with, the problem’s not the kid. It’s that the kid drew an asshole in the parental lottery. Or two assholes. I could sit here and be all PC about it, but I do that enough at work all day.”

“Last thing we want is PC,” I said. “Anything you can tell us would be greatly appreciated.”

“How long you two been private investigators?”

“I’ve been on a five-year sabbatical,” Angie said.

“Until when?”

“This morning,” she said.

“You missed it?”

“I thought I did,” she said. “Not so sure anymore, though.”

“You?” he asked me. “How long have you been at it?”

“Too long.” It unsettled me how true those words felt. “Since I was twenty-three.”

“You ever think of doing anything else?”

“More and more every day. You?”

He shook his head. “This is my second career.”

“What was your first?”

He finished his drink and caught the waitress’s eye. I still had half my scotch and Angie still had two-thirds of her wine, so he pointed at his own drink and showed her one finger.

“My first career,” he said. “I was a doctor, believe it or not.”

Suddenly the delicate grace of his fingers made sense.

“You think it’s going to be about saving lives but you find out quick it’s about turnover, just like any other business. How many services can you deliver at a premium price with the lowest expenditure on supplies and labor? Treat ’em, street ’em, and upsell ’em when the opportunity presents itself.”

Angie said, “And you weren’t any more PC then, I take it?”

He chuckled as the waitress brought his drink. “I was fired from four hospitals in a five-square-mile area for insubordination. It’s a record of some kind, I’m pretty sure. I suddenly found myself unhireable in the city. I mean, I could have moved to, I don’t know, New Bedford or something. But I like the city. And I woke up one day and realized I hated my life. I hated what I was doing with it. I’d lost my faith.” He shrugged. “A couple days later I saw an ad for a human services position with the DCF, and here I am.”

“You miss it?”

“Sometimes. More often than not, though? Not so much. It’s like any dysfunctional relationship-sure there were good things about it or else how would you get into it in the first place? But for the most part, it was killing me. Now I have regular hours, I do work I’m proud of, and I sleep like a baby at night.”

“And the work you did with Sophie Corliss?”

“Confidential mostly. She came to me for help, and I tried to help. She’s a pretty lost kid.”

“And the reason she dropped out of school?”

He gave me an apologetic grimace. “Confidential, I’m afraid.”

“I can’t really get a clear picture of her,” I said.

“That’s because there isn’t one. Sophie’s one of those people-she entered adolescence with no real skills, no ambition, and zero sense of self. She’s smart enough to know she has deficiencies but not smart enough to know what they are. And even if she did, what could she do about them? You can’t decide to be passionate about something. You can’t manufacture a vocation. Sophie’s what I call a floater. She bobs along waiting for someone to come along and tell her where to go.”

“You ever meet a friend of hers named Amanda?” Angie asked.

“Ah,” he said, “Amanda.”

“You’ve met her?”

“If you meet Sophie, you meet Amanda.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said.

“You met Amanda?”

“I knew her a long time ago when she was-”

“Ho,” he said, pushing his chair back a bit. “You’re the guy who found her back in the ’90s. Right? Jesus. I knew the name sounded familiar.”

“There you go then.”

“And now you’re looking a second time? A bit ironic.” He shook his head at that irony. “Well, I don’t know what she was like then, but now? Amanda’s a real cool kid. Maybe too cool, you know? I never met anyone of any age so self-possessed. I mean, to be comfortable in your own skin is a rare quality in a sixty-year-old, never mind a sixteen-year-old. Amanda knows exactly who she is.”

“And who is that?”

“I don’t follow.”

“We’ve heard about Amanda’s cool from a lot of people, and you describe her as knowing exactly who she is. My question is-who is she?”

“She’s whoever she needs to be. She’s adaptability personified.”

“And Sophie?”

“Sophie is… pliable. She’ll follow any philosophy if it brings her closer to the group-think of the room. Amanda adapts to whatever the group thinks it wants. And she sheds it as soon as she leaves that room.”

“You admire her.”

“ ‘Admire’ is a little strong, but I’ll admit she’s an impressive kid. Nothing affects her. Nothing can change her will. And she’s sixteen years old.”

“That’s impressive,” I said. “I wish, though, that just one person I talked to mentioned something about her that was goofy or warm or, I don’t know, messy.”

“That’s not Amanda.”

“Apparently not.”

“What about a kid named Zippo? You ever hear of him?”

“Sophie’s boyfriend. I think his real name is, like, David Lighter. Or Daniel. I can’t be positive on that one.”

“When’s the last time you saw Sophie?”

“Two weeks ago, maybe three.”

“Amanda?”

“Around the same time.”

“Zippo?”

He drained his drink. “Christ.”

“What?”

“It’s been three weeks on him, too. They all…” He looked at us.

“Vanished,” Angie said.

Our daughter climbed the jungle gym in the center of the Ryan Playground. It had been snowing since sundown. There was a foot of sand below the jungle gym but I kept my hand nearby anyway.

“So, Detective,” Angie said.

“Yes, Junior Detective.”

“Oh, I’m Junior Detective, huh? Wow, there really is a glass ceiling.”

“You’re Junior Detective for one week. After that I’ll give you a promotion.”

“Based on what?”

“Solid casework and a certain nocturnal inventiveness after lights-out.”

“That’s harassment, you cad.”

“Last week that harassment made you forget your name.”

“Mommy, why would you forget your name? Did you hit your head?”

“Nice,” Angie said to me. “No, Mommy didn’t hit her head. But you’re going to fall if you don’t pay attention. Watch that bar. There’s ice there.”

My daughter rolled her eyes at me.

“Listen to the boss,” I said.

“So what’d we learn today?” Angie asked me as Gabby went back to climbing.

“We learned that Sophie is probably the girl who talked to the police and said she was Amanda. We learned Amanda is very cool and collected. We learned Sophie is not. We learned five people walked into some room, two died, but four walked out. Whatever that means. We learned that there’s a kid in this world named Zippo. We learned it’s possible Amanda was abducted, because no one thinks she’d run away with so much to stay in school for.” I looked over at Angie. “I’m out. You cold?”

Her teeth chattered. “I never wanted to leave the house. How’d we get Edna the Eskimo for a kid?”

“Irish genes.”

“Daddy,” Gabby said, “catch me.”

Two seconds after she said it, she pitched herself off the bar and I caught her in my arms. She wore earmuffs and a hooded pink down coat and about four layers of underclothing, including thermal leggings-so much clothing the little body wrapped inside felt like a snap pea in its pod.

“Your cheeks are cold,” I said.

“No they’re not.”

“Uh, okay.” I hoisted her up onto my shoulders and gripped her ankles. “Mommy’s cold.”

“Mommy’s always cold.”

“That’s because Mommy’s Italian,” Angie said as we walked out of the playground.

“Ciao,” Gabby chirped. “Ciao, ciao, ciao.”

“PR can’t take her tomorrow-dentist-but she can take her the next couple days.”

“Cool.”

“So what’re you going to do tomorrow?” Angie asked me. “Watch that ice.”

I stepped over the ice patch as we reached the crosswalk. “You don’t want to know.”

Chapter Fourteen

Helene McCready’s current abode was, on the surface, a hell of a step up from the Dorchester three-decker apartment where, until recently, she’d seen fit to poorly raise her daughter. She and Kenny Hendricks lived at 133 Sherwood Forest Drive in Nottingham Hill, a gated community two miles off Route 1, in Foxboro. All I knew about Foxboro was that the Patriots played there eight times a year and it wasn’t too far from the outlet mall in Wrentham. After I accessed those two factoids, I was out. End of list.

It turned out Foxboro was also home to half a dozen adorably named gated condo communities. En route to Nottingham Hill, I also passed Bedford Falls, Juniper Springs, Wuthering Heights, and Fragrant Meadows. All, as mentioned, gated. I couldn’t understand what the gates were for, though; Foxboro had an extremely low crime rate. Other than a parking space on game day, I had no idea what they’d want to steal out here, unless there was a sudden shortage of barbecue utensils or power mowers.

The gate at Nottingham Hill wasn’t hard to circumvent, since there was no gatekeeper. A sign on the kiosk read DURING DAYLIGHT HOURS, PRESS *958 FOR SECURITY. A couple of car lengths past the kiosk, the main road, Robin Hood Boulevard, forked. Four arrow signs at the left fork directed me to Loxley Lane, Tuck Terrace, Scarlett Street, and Sherwood Forest Drive. The road was straight, and what lay ahead appeared to be the kind of middle-class cookie-cutter subdivision I’d expected.

To the right, however, the arrows promised to lead me to Archer Avenue, Little John Lane, Yorkshire Road, and Maid Marian’s Meeting House, but the road led only to a collection of sand mounds with a lone yellow backhoe sitting atop one. Somewhere during the Nottingham Hill development boom, the boom had lowered.

I took the left fork and found 133 Sherwood Forest Drive at the end of a cul-de-sac. The backyards around here were the same tan sand as the mounds where Maid Marian’s Meeting House was supposed to stand, and both 131 and 129 were vacant, the building permits still hanging in windows speckled with sawdust. The front lawns were green, however, even in front of the vacant houses, so someone at the holding company still believed in proper upkeep. I circled the cul-de-sac, slowly enough to note that the curtains were drawn across Helene and Kenny’s windows, those facing north, south, and west. The east windows faced the tan mounds of sand in the rear, so I couldn’t see them. But I was willing to bet their curtains were drawn, too. On my way back up the street, I counted two more FOR SALE signs, one with a smaller sign dangling underneath that read SHORT SALE. MAKE AN OFFER. PLEASE.

I cut over to Tuck Terrace and parked by a half-finished ranch at the end of another cul-de-sac. Houses to the right and the left had been completed. They stood empty, though, the lawns and shrubs recently planted and green as shamrocks, even in December, but the driveways awaiting a paving crew. I went through the skeleton of the half-finished ranch at 133 Tuck Terrace and crossed an acre of tan sand with wooden stakes and blue yarn carving out the backyards-to-be. Soon enough I stood behind Helene and Kenny’s house. It was the two-story Italianate model, a McMansion-wannabe so predictable I could smell the granite kitchen countertops and the hot tub in the master bath from the almost-backyard.

There were about forty different ways I hadn’t cased the place properly. I’d driven around the front so slowly a three-legged basset hound with hip dysplasia could have lapped me. I’d parked my car in the vicinity-a block over, but still. I’d approached across open ground. I hadn’t come at night. Short of standing out front with a sandwich board that read BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A FRONT DOOR KEY? I couldn’t have made myself more conspicuous.

So the smart move would have been to walk straight past the house, hope anyone inside took me for a land surveyor or a finish carpenter, and hightail it back home. Instead, I decided the odds had been working in my favor so far-it was two in the afternoon and I hadn’t seen a soul since I’d pulled into the development. It’s stupid to believe in luck, but we do it every time we cross a busy street.

And mine kept holding. The sliding glass doors around back couldn’t keep out Gabby. Or even me with my rusty B &E skills. I picked the lock with a keychain bottle-opener and a credit card. I entered the kitchen and waited by the door in case an alarm sounded. When none did, I jogged up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. I passed through all the bedrooms only long enough to confirm no one was in them and then worked my way back downstairs.

I counted nine computers in the living room. The closest one had a pink stickie attached that read BCBS, HP IL. The next one had a yellow stickie: BOA, C IT. I tapped the keyboard of the first computer and the screen pulsed softly. For a moment, I saw a screen saver of the Pacific, and then the screen turned lime green and a quartet of animated figures with the heads of the cast of Diff’rent Strokes danced across the screen. A speech bubble appeared by Willis’s head and a cursor blinked. Arnold said, “Whachoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” Kimberly was sparking a blunt when she rolled her eyes and said, “Password, dickhead.” A stopwatch appeared in the thought bubble above Mr. Drummond’s head. It ticked down from ten as Kimberly did a striptease and Arnold changed into a security guard’s uniform and Willis hopped into a convertible and immediately crashed it. As it burst into flames, the clock above Mr. Drummond’s head exploded and the screen went black.

I called Angie.

“The entire cast of Diff’rent Strokes ?”

“Now that you mention it, Mrs. Garrett wasn’t there.”

“Must have been the Facts of Life years,” she said. “Whatta you got?”

“Computers with password protections. Nine of them.”

“Nine passwords?”

“Nine computers.”

“That’s a lot of computers for a living room with no furniture. Did you find Amanda’s room yet?”

“No.”

“See if there’s a computer there. Kids are less likely to password-protect.”

“Okay.”

“If you can get on, just get me an IP address, and the incoming and outgoing servers. Most people, no matter how many computers they’ve got, use just one server. If I can’t hack it, I know someone who can.”

“Who do you meet online?”

We hung up and I went upstairs to the bedrooms. Helene and Kenny’s was as expected-Bob’s Furniture dresser and chest covered in wrinkled clothes, box spring on the floor, no nightstands, several empty beer cans on one side of the bed, several empty glasses sporting some sort of sticky residue on the other side. Ashtrays on the floor, wall-to-wall carpeting already soiled.

I passed through the master bathroom, gave the hot tub a smile, and entered the next bedroom. It was tidy and empty. The faux-walnut dresser, chest, matching bed and nightstand all looked cheap but respectable. The drawers were empty, the bed was made. The closet was two dozen empty hangers, evenly spaced.

Amanda’s room. She’d left nothing behind but hangers and the sheets on the bed. On the wall, she’d left a framed Red Sox jersey, signed by Josh Beckett, and a Just Puppies calendar. It was the first hint of sentiment I could attach to her. Otherwise, all I got was the same impression of precision I’d been getting off her trail from the beginning.

The bedroom across the hall was another story. It looked like someone had tossed it in a blender, pressed STIR, and then removed the cap. The bed hid under a patchwork of comforter, blanket, jeans, sweater, sweatshirt, denim jacket, capri cargo pants. The dresser sported open drawers and a vanity mirror. Sophie had tucked photographs into the left and right sides of the mirror, between the glass and the frame. Several were of a boy in his late teens. Zippo, I assumed. He usually wore a Sox cap turned sideways. A stripe of hair extended from ear to ear like a chin strap and a matching tuft of hair sprouted from the space between his lower lip and chin. Tats on the side of his neck and silver rings protruding from his eyebrows. In most of the photos, he had his arm around Sophie. In all of them, he was brandishing a beer bottle or a red plastic cup. Sophie wore big smiles but she seemed to be trying them out, looking for one that fit what she thought people were looking for. Her eyes seemed sensitive to light-in every photo she looked one step from squinting. Her tiny teeth peeked out uncertainly from her smile. It was hard to imagine her happy. Tucked above and below the photos were club postcards for dates long past-last spring and early summer, mostly. All the venues were over-21 clubs.

Sophie definitely cultivated an over-21 look. But you couldn’t overlook the baby fat that hung, pupa-like, from the underside of her chin or covered her cheekbones. Any club let her in knowing she was underage. Most of the photos were of her and Zippo; two were of her and other girlfriends, none of whom I recognized and none of whom was Amanda, though both photos had been cropped on the left-hand side, amputating Sophie’s shoulder at the point where it had presumably touched someone else’s.

I tossed the rest of the room and found some pills I didn’t recognize, with a holistic-medicine vibe to the labels. I snapped photos of them with my Droid and moved on. I found several wristbands, enough to suggest a fetish for wristsbands or a purpose. I took a closer look at them. Most of them were stacked in a pile on the upper shelf of the closet, but a few were strewn in with the general mess.

I pulled all the covers off the bed and pushed the clothes out of the way and found the laptop waiting for me, the power light blinking. I flipped it open and was greeted by a screen saver of Sophie and Zippo, flashing the universal two-fingered “gangsta” sign, which immediately defined them as white non-gang members. I double-clicked on the Apple icon in the top left corner of the screen and worked my way into the main control panel without a single password prompt. There I discovered the IP server info Angie required. I copied it all onto my Droid and texted it to her.

I clicked back to the main screen and then clicked on the mail icon.

Sophie wasn’t a big deleter. Her inbox had 2,871 messages dating back over a year. Her SENT folder contained 1,673 messages, also dating back over a year. I called Angie and told her what I’d found. “With the IP info, you can hack this?”

“Candy from a baby,” she said. “How long have you been in there?”

“I don’t know. Twenty minutes.”

“That’s a lotta time to be in the house of people who don’t have predictable work schedules.”

“Yes, Mom.”

She hung up.

I put everything back the way I’d found it and worked my way downstairs. In the dining room, I found a cardboard box filled with mail on the card table in the center of the room. Nothing out of the ordinary about the mail-utility bills mostly, some credit-card bills and bank statements-until I looked at the names and addresses of the recipients. None of them lived here. There was mail for Daryl Bousquet in Westwood, Georgette Bing in Franklin, Mica Griekspoor in Sharon, Virgil Cridlin in Dedham. I thumbed through the stack and counted nine more names, all living in nearby towns- Walpole, Norwood, Mansfield, and Plainville. I looked through the portico into the living room at the bank of computers. A barely furnished house, what furniture there was from a discount wholesaler, and no sense that anyone intended to make this a ten-year abode. Nine computers. Stolen mail. If I had another hour, somewhere I’d find birth certificates for babies who’d died decades ago. I’d bet every dime I had on it.

I looked at the mail again. Why so stupid, though? Why password-protect the computers but forget to turn on the house alarm? Why pick a perfect spot to do this kinda shit-in a house at the end of a cul-de-sac in a stalled development-and leave stacks of stolen mail in a box?

I looked around the kitchen, found nothing but empty cabinets and a fridge filled with Styrofoam take-out containers, beer, and a twelve-pack of Coke. I closed a cabinet and remembered what Amanda’s classmate had said about the microwave.

I opened it and stared inside. It was a microwave. White walls, yellow light, circular heating tray. I was about to close it when I got a strong whiff of something acrid and I took another look at the walls. They were white, yes, but there was an extra layer of white. When I tilted my head and adjusted my eyes, I saw the same film on the yellow bulb. I found a butter knife and scraped one of the walls very lightly, and what came off was a fine powder, as white and light as talc.

I closed the microwave door, returned the knife to its drawer, and went back into the living room. That’s when I heard the front door knob turn.

I hadn’t been face-to-face with her in eleven years. I’d kind of liked it that way. But here she was, four steps into her living room when her eyes locked on mine. She’d gained weight, mostly in the hips and the face, the sides of her neck. Her skin was splotchier. Her cornflower eyes, always her most attractive feature, remained so. They widened under her feather-cut ginger hair, the roots showing gray by the crown, and her mouth opened into a tight, wrinkled oval, then formed a hesitant P.

It wasn’t like I could claim I was here to fix the garbage disposal. I gave her what I’m sure was a hapless smile, held out my arms, and shrugged.

She said, “Patrick?”

“How you doing, Helene?”

Chapter Fifteen

Kenny came in behind her. He looked confused for about half a second before he reached behind his back. I reached behind mine.

He said, “Ho.”

I said, “Hey.”

A young girl came in behind him. She opened her mouth wide but no sound came out. She wrung her hands by her side as if she’d stepped on the third rail. I got a good look as she stepped hard to her left to get out of our line of fire. Sophie Corliss. She’d lost the weight her father had demanded of her. And then some. She was gaunt and sweaty and stopped acting electrified long enough to sink her hands into the back of her head and pull at her own hair.

I held out one hand. “This does not have to go this way.”

“What way?” Kenny said.

“The way where we both pull our guns.”

“You tell me, sport, which other way this can go.”

“Well,” I said, “I could remove my hand from my gun.”

“But I might just shoot you for your trouble.”

“There’s that,” I agreed.

“And if I remove my hand?” He frowned. “It’s the same result, different victim.”

“If we did it at the same time?” I offered.

“You’d cheat,” he said.

As I nodded, he cleared his gun and pointed it at me.

“Sneaky,” I said.

“Let me see the hand.”

I removed my hand from behind my back and held up my cell phone.

“It’s nice,” Kenny said, “but I think mine has more bullets.”

“True, but did your gun call anyone?”

He took a step forward and then another. My screen read HOME. CONNECTED: 39 SECONDS.

“Oh,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Helene said, “Fuck,” very softly.

“You put the gun down or my wife calls the police and gives up our location.”

“Let’s-”

“Tick, tock,” I said. “It’s fairly obvious you’re ripping identities and committing a few thousand levels of consumer fraud here. Plus you’re making crank somewhere nearby and then you’re baking the used coffee filters in the microwave just to squeeze out that little extra. You want the police en route within, oh, thirty more seconds, keep holding the gun on me, Kenny.”

Angie’s voice came through the cell phone. “Hi, Kenny. Hi, Helene.”

Helene said, “Is that Angie?”

“It is,” Angie said. “How you doing?”

“Oh,” Helene said, “you know.”

Kenny frowned and looked terribly tired all of a sudden. He thumbed the safety forward and handed me the gun. “You’re one frustrating motherfucker.”

I put the gun, an S &W Sigma 9mm, in the pocket of my jacket. “Thank you.” I turned my lips toward the phone. “Catch you later, honey.”

“Grab some bottled water on the way home, would you? Oh, and some half-and-half for the morning.”

“Sure. Anything else?”

Kenny rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, but I can’t remember what it is.”

“Well, call me when you think of it.”

“Cool. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I hung up.

“Sophie?” I said.

She looked over at me, surprised I knew her name.

“You carrying?”

“Huh?”

“A gun, Sophie. Are you carrying a gun?”

“No. I hate guns.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“But you’ve got one in your pocket.”

“That’s called irony. How strung out are you right now?”

“Oh, I’m not bad,” Sophie said.

“You look bad.”

“Who are you?”

“That’s Patrick Kenzie.” Helene lit a cigarette. “He found Amanda that time?”

Sophie hugged herself and fresh beads of sweat popped on her forehead.

“Helene?” I said.

“What?”

“I’d feel a lot better if you put that bag you’re carrying on that couch and step away from it.”

She placed the bag on the couch and came back over to Kenny’s side.

“Let’s all go in the dining room.”

We sat at the card table and Kenny fired up a cigarette while I got a closer look at Sophie. She kept running her tongue behind her upper lip, back and forth, back and forth. Her eyes rolled right to left, left to right, right to left like they were on ball bearings. It was forty-two degrees outside and she was sweating.

“I thought you were going to let this go,” Kenny said.

“You thought incorrectly.”

“She won’t pay you.”

“Who?”

“Bea.”

“Or Amanda,” Helene said. “She doesn’t come into her money for, like, another year.”

“Well, then, it’s settled,” I said. “I quit. But since we’re on the subject, where’s Amanda?”

“She went to visit her father in California,” Helene said.

“She has a father in California?” I said.

“She didn’t come out of a cereal box,” Helene said. “She had a mother and a father.”

“What’s her father’s name?”

“Like you don’t remember.”

“From a case I worked twelve years ago, Helene? No, I don’t remember.”

“Bruce Combs.”

“But his friends call him B Diddy?”

“What?”

“Never mind. Where’s Bruce live?”

“ Salinas.”

“And that’s where Amanda flew into?”

“Yeah.”

“Which airport?”

“ Salinas Airport.”

“ Salinas doesn’t have a commercial airport. You mean she flew into either Santa Cruz or Monterey.”

“Yeah.”

“Which one?”

“ Santa Cruz.”

“Yeah, they don’t have a commercial airport, either. So there goes your dumbass Salinas story, Helene.”

Kenny exhaled a chuck of cigarette smoke and looked at his watch.

“You got someplace to be?”

He shook his head.

Behind him, Sophie fidgeted and kept looking at a spot over my head. I turned, saw the clock on the wall. I caught Helene looking at it too.

“You don’t have someplace to be,” I said to Kenny.

“No.”

“You’re supposed to be here,” I said.

“Now you’re getting it.”

“Someone’s coming a-calling.”

A tight nod followed by a rapping on the sliding glass door behind us.

I turned in my chair as Kenny said, “Punctual fuckers, I’ll give ’em that.”

The two guys on the other side of the glass weren’t particularly tall but they were poster boys for stocky . They both wore black leather car coats. The one on the left had belted his at the waist, the other left his open. They both wore turtlenecks-the one on the left wore a white one. His partner’s was baby blue. The one on the left had a black beard, the one on the right had a blond one. They both had full heads of hair and bushy eyebrows and mustaches thick enough to misplace a purse in. The one on the left knocked again and gave a little wave and smiled a big, toothy smile. Then he tried the door. He cocked his head when he couldn’t open it and looked back through the glass at us, his smile beginning to fade.

Helene shot from her chair and unlocked the door. The dark-haired guy pulled it back. He entered in a rush and took her face in his hands and said, “Miss Helene, how are you today?” and gave her a kiss on the forehead. He released her face as if he were shot-putting it, and Helene stumbled backward a step. He clapped together a pair of massive hands as he entered the dining room and gave us all another big smile. His companion shut the door behind him and strolled into the room lighting a cigarette. Both of them had long hair, parted down the middle, à la Stallone circa 1981, and even before the dark-haired one had spoken, I’d pegged them for Eastern Europeans-whether they were Czechs, Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians, or, hell, Slovenians was beyond my ear at the moment, but their accents were as thick as their beards.

“How are you, my friend?” the dark-haired one asked me.

“Not bad.”

“Not bad!” He seemed to love that. “Then that is good, yes?”

“You?” I said.

He gave my question a happy jerk of his eyebrows. “I am great, my main man. I am super-duper.”

He sat in the chair Helene had vacated and slapped my shoulder. “You do business with this man?” He jerked his thumb at Kenny.

“Occasionally,” I said.

“You should stay away from him. He big trouble, this one. He bad guy.”

Kenny said, “No.”

The dark-haired guy nodded earnestly at me. “You can trust me. You see what he do to this poor girl?” He pointed at Sophie, who stood against the fridge, shaking and sweating all the more. “Little girl, and he give her a big drug habit. He a real piece of shit.”

“I believe you,” I said.

He widened his eyes at that. “You should believe me, guy. He’s crazy cowboy, this one. He doesn’t listen. He breaks deals.”

Kenny said, “If you just tell Kirill we’re looking. We’re looking . It’s all we do.”

The guy hit my chest lightly with the back of his hand, wildly amused. “ ‘Tell Kirill.’ You ever hear a thing so dumb? Hey? Tell Kirill. Like a man tell Kirill anything. A man ask Kirill. A man beg Kirill. A man go to his knees before Kirill. But tell Kirill?” He turned away from me and bore in on Kenny. “Tell him what, piece of shit? Tell Kirill you looking ? You searching? You out there, guy, beating the hedges to find his property?” He reached out and took a cigarette from the pack Kenny had left on the table. He lit it with Kenny’s lighter and then threw the lighter in his lap. “Kirill says to me this morning, he says, ‘Yefim, wrap this up. No more waiting. No more junkie bullshit.’ ”

Kenny said, “We are this close. We know almost where she is.”

Yefim knocked over the table. I barely saw his arm move but the table was suddenly not in front of us anymore or, more important, not between Yefim and Kenny. “I fucking tell you, guy, not to fuck this up. You make us money, yeah yeah yeah. You always deliver, yeah yeah yeah. Well, you didn’t fucking deliver this for Kirill, my man. And more, you didn’t deliver this for Kirill’s wife and she have her heart set on this. She’s…” He snapped his fingers a couple times and then looked back over his shoulder at me. “What you say, my friend, when someone finds no happiness in life anymore and no one can change that?”

“I’d say they’re inconsolable.”

The smile that blew across his face was the kind movie stars give on red carpets-that much wattage, that much charm.

“Inconsolable!” He gave me a thumbs-up. “You right on that, my good friend, thank you.” He turned back to Kenny, then changed his mind and looked back at me. He spoke very softly. “No, really. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You a good fucker, man.” He patted my knee and then turned away. “Violeta, Kenny? She’s inconsolable, guy. That’s what she is. She’s inconsolable, and Kirill, he love her so crazy, man, now he’s inconsolable. And you, you’re supposed to fix that. But you don’t.”

“I’m trying.”

Yefim leaned forward, his voice soft, almost gentle. “But you don’t.”

“Look, ask anyone.”

“Who I ask?”

“Anyone. I’m out there looking. It’s all I do.”

“But you don’t,” he said again, even softer this time.

Kenny said, “Just give me a couple more days.”

Yefim shook his bison head. “A couple more days. Pavel, you hear him?”

The blond guy who stood behind Kenny said, “I hear him.”

Yefim pulled his chair closer to Kenny. “You teach Amanda what she know. So, how she get the drop on you?”

“I taught her what she knows,” Kenny agreed. “But I didn’t teach her all she knows.”

“She smarter than you, I think.”

“Oh, she’s smart,” Helene said from the doorway. “She’s all A’s in school. Last year, she even got-”

“Shut up, Helene,” Kenny said.

“Why you talk to her like that?” Yefim said. “She’s your lady. You should show more respect.” He turned to Helene. “You tell me-what did Amanda get? She get some award?”

“Yeah,” Helene said, drawing the word out into three syllables. “She got gold ribbons in trig, English, and computer science.”

Yefim slapped Kenny’s knee with the back of his hand. “She got gold ribbons, man. What you get?”

Yefim stood and dropped his cigarette on the rug and ground it out with the toe of his work boot. He lifted the table off the floor and righted it. He and Pavel looked at each other for a solid minute, neither of them blinking, just breathing through their noses.

“You have two days,” Yefim said to Kenny. “After that, you were your mother’s dream, guy. You understand?”

Kenny said, “Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.”

Yefim nodded. He turned and held out his hand to me and I shook it. He looked in my eyes. His were a liquid sapphire and reminded me of a candle flame slipping under the surface of melting wax. “What’s your name, my friend?”

“Patrick.”

“Patrick”-he placed a hand to his chest-“I am Yefim Molkevski. This is Pavel Reshnev. Do you know who Kirill is?”

I wished I didn’t.

“I assume you mean Kirill Borzakov.”

He nodded. “Very good, my friend. And who is Kirill Borzakov?”

“He’s a businessman from Chechnya.”

Another nod. “A businessman, yes. Very good. Though he’s not from Chechnya. You’re a Slavic businessman in this country, everybody thinks you Chechen or”-he spit on the carpet-“Georgian. But Kirill, like me and Pavel, is Mordovian. We take the girl.”

“What?” I said.

Pavel crossed the dining room and grabbed Sophie off the wall. She didn’t scream, but she wept a fair amount, shaking hands held up by her ears like she was trying to ward off wasps. Pavel’s free hand remained in the pocket of his car coat.

Yefim snapped his fingers and extended his palm in my direction. “Give to me.”

“ ’Scuse me?”

All the light drained from his eyes. “Patrick. Dude. You so smart up to now. Stay smart, guy.” He wiggled his fingers. “Come. Give me the gun in your left pocket.”

Sophie said, “Let me go,” but there was no heat in it, only resignation and more tears.

Pavel was turned all the way toward me, hand in his pocket, awaiting instruction. If Yefim sneezed, Pavel would put a bullet in my brain before anyone could say, “Gesundheit.”

Yefim wiggled his fingers again.

Holding the grip by two fingers, I removed the handgun from my jacket pocket and handed it to Yefim. He placed it in his coat pocket and gave me a small bow. “Thank you, dude.” He turned to Kenny. “We take her. Maybe we have her make us another one. Maybe we test Pavel’s new gun on her, yes? Shoot her many times.”

Sophie shrieked through her tears and it came out strangled and wet. Pavel hugged her tighter to him but seemed otherwise unconcerned.

“Either way,” Yefim said to Kenny and Helene, “she is ours now. She is not yours ever again. You find the other girl. You find Kirill’s property. You return it to us by Friday. Do not screw the poop on this one, piece of shit.”

He snapped his fingers and Pavel dragged Sophie past me and past Helene and over to the sliding glass doors.

Yefim gave my shoulder a fist chuck. “Be well, my good friend.” On his way out of the dining room, he grasped Helene’s face in his hands and gave her another hard kiss on the forehead and another push backward. This time she fell on her ass.

His back to us, he held up a finger. “Don’t make a asshole of me, Kenny. Or I make a big asshole of you.”

And then they were gone. Within a few seconds, a truck engine came to life and I got to the kitchen window in time to see a Dodge Ram bump out into the untilled mounds behind the house.

“Do you have another gun?” I said.

“What?”

I looked at Kenny. “Another gun.”

“No, man. Why?”

He was lying, of course, but I didn’t have time to argue. “You’re some kind of douche, Kenny.”

He shrugged and lit a cigarette and then yelled, “Hey,” when I swiped his car keys off the granite countertop in the kitchen and ran out the front door.

A yellow Hummer sat in the circular drive. The poster child for How Detroit Got It Wrong. An utterly useless behemoth that got such piss-poor mileage the Sultan of Brunei might be embarrassed to drive it. And we were shocked when GM came asking for a bailout.

I had the Dodge Ram in sight for half a minute as I climbed into the Hummer. It bounced across the field, up one furrow, down another, Pavel’s blond hair distinct behind the wheel. When they bounced out of the field, they went east toward the entrance gate, and I lost sight of them, but I figured I had at least a fifty percent shot of them heading for Route 1. When I barreled out of Sherwood Forest Drive and back up Robin Hood Boulevard, I saw their tire tracks had turned right out of the entrance toward Route 1. I goosed the gas as much as I could, but I didn’t want to overdo it and ride up their ass.

I almost did anyway. I came over a rise on the country road I’d been zipping along, and there they were at the bottom, sitting at a red light in front of a combination grocery store/post office. I tried to bring my speed down as casually as possible, while keeping my head down like I was consulting a map on my seat, but trying to look inconspicuous in a yellow Hummer is like trying to look inconspicuous walking naked into a church. When I looked up again, the light had turned green and they punched the gas and took off at a good speed, though not tires a-screaming.

In another mile, they reached Route 1 and headed north. I gave it thirty seconds and pulled on. Traffic wasn’t thick, but it wasn’t thin, either, and I easily dropped back several car lengths and over two lanes. When you’re trying to stay undercover in a yellow Hummer, every little bit helps.

Only a suicide takes on Russian guns. And I liked life. A lot. So I had no intention of doing anything but keeping a soft tail on them until I saw where they took Sophie. Soon as I had an address, I’d make a 911 call and be done with this.

And that’s what I told my wife.

“Get off their tail,” she said. “Now.”

“I’m not on their tail. I’m five cars back, two lanes over. And you know how good I am on a tail.”

“I do. But they could be better. And you’re fucking driving a yellow fucking Hummer . Just get their license plate, call it in, and drive away.”

“You think they’re driving a car registered with the RMV? Come on.”

“You come on,” she said. “These guys are a whole different level of dangerous. Bubba thinks the Russian mob is too crazy to deal with.”

“As do I,” I said. “I’m just going to observe and report. They kidnapped a teenage girl, Ange.”

At that moment, my daughter called, “Hi, Daddy,” from somewhere in the background.

“You want to talk to her?” Angie asked.

“That’s low,” I said.

“I never said I fight fair.”

I passed Gillette Stadium on my right. Without a game being played inside, it looked large and alone. There was a mall beside it, a few cars in the parking lot. Up ahead, Pavel turned on his right blinker and drifted over into the far right lane.

“I’ll be home soon. Love you,” I said and hung up.

I moved over one lane, then another. There was only a red PT Cruiser between the Hummer and their Ram, so I kept the distance to a hundred yards.

At the next intersection, the truck turned right on North Street and then took an immediate right into a lot filled with tractor trailers backed up to a long, white distribution terminal. From the road, I could see the Ram drive down a dirt path alongside a row of tractor trailers and then take a left toward the back of the terminal.

I pulled into the lot and followed. To my right stood a retaining wall by the Route 1 overpass. Beneath the overpass, freight train lines and commuter rails fed north into the city or south toward Providence. To my left were the tractor trailers backed into their receiving bays. In one receiving bay, a few beefy guys pushed through thick strips of plastic to load boxes onto a trailer with Connecticut plates.

At the end of the path, the rail lines stretched off to my right while the brown dirt road curved to the left. I curved left around the terminal. The pickup truck sat in the middle of the path about fifteen yards away. Its parking lights were on. The engine idled. The passenger door was wide-open.

Yefim hopped off the passenger seat, screwing a suppressor onto the end of a semiautomatic handgun. In the time it took me to compute this, he walked five paces and extended his arm. The first shot punched a puckered hole in my windshield. The next four shots took out my front tires. The tires were just starting to hiss when the sixth shot added another puckered hole to the windshield. The hole sprouted veins. The veins widened, and the windshield crackled like popcorn in a microwave. Then it collapsed. Two more shots ripped up the hood, though I couldn’t be positive of either the number or their locations, because I was curled on the front seat, covered in windshield.

“Hey, guy,” Yefim said. “Hey, guy.”

I shook some glass out of my hair and off my cheeks.

Yefim leaned into the Hummer, his elbows on the window frame, the pistol and silencer dangling from his right hand. “License and registration.”

“Good one.” I eyed that pistol.

“No good one,” he said. “Serious request. License and registration.” He tapped the silencer against the side of the window frame. “Right fucking now, guy.”

I sat up and searched for the registration. Eventually, I found it tucked into the visor. I handed it to him, along with my driver’s license. He took a long look at them and handed the registration back.

“It’s registered to piece-of-shit Kenny. Piece-of-shit Kenny drives piece-of-shit fag-yellow Hum-vee. I knew it wasn’t yours. You too classy, man.”

I brushed some windshield pebbles off my coat. “Thank you.”

He fanned the air with my driver’s license and then put it in his pocket. “I keep this. I keep it, Patrick Kenzie of Taft Street, so you remember. So you know that I know who you are and where you live with your family. You have family, yes?”

I nodded.

“Go to your family, then,” he said. “Give them big hugs.”

He rapped the door with the gun one last time and walked back to the pickup truck. He climbed in, shut the door, and they drove away.

Chapter Sixteen

One positive thing I learned about a Hummer-bitch didn’t drive too bad with its front tires blown out. As a few brave truckers and freight loaders worked their way out of the nearest loading bays, I backed the Hummer up twenty yards, pinned the wheel, and then popped it into drive and headed for the train tracks. Those front tires were slap-slap-slapping away as the men shouted at me but nobody gave chase; an SUV sporting eight fresh bullet holes tends to diminish the desire to confront its owner.

Or, in this case, its driver. Kenny was its owner, and Kenny was fucked when the police found the car and saw who it was registered to. Not my problem, though. I drove it down the freight train tracks a couple hundred yards to a depot that led to the parking lot of Gillette Stadium. The only cars nearby were parked by the executive offices of One Patriot Place. The fan parking areas were barren for a couple hundred yards until you reached the shopping center next door. That’s where I drove the yellow Hummer. As I drove, I wiped. I used a handkerchief on the seat, the steering wheel, and the dashboard. I’m quite sure I didn’t get every fingerprint I’d left, but I didn’t have to. No one was going to get all CSI on the interior when it was registered to an ex-con who lived within two miles of the stadium.

I parked on the outer fringe of the mall lot and took the escalator into the movie theater. It was Cinema De Lux, so I could have enjoyed table service from the balcony and paid $20 to watch a movie that would be on DVD for a buck in three months, but my mind was elsewhere. I found a bathroom with a handicapped stall and its own sink. I closed the door and removed my jacket and shook all the glass from it. I did the same with my shirt and then I used a wad of paper towels to push all the glass into one corner of the stall. I put my shirt back on, doing my best to ignore the tremors in my hands, but it was hard to do so when my fingers shook so much I couldn’t get the buttons into their holes. I gripped the sink and bent at the waist and took a dozen long, slow breaths. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Yefim walking toward me, casually extending his arm, casually firing into the windshield, casually ending my life if the situation had called for it. I opened my eyes. I stared at my reflection in the mirror and splashed some water on my face and stared at myself a little longer until my reflection looked a bit more in command of itself. I splashed some water on the back of my neck and tried to button my shirt again. My hands still shook but not as violently, and eventually I made do. Five minutes later, I left the bathroom looking a little bit better than when I’d entered.

I went back down the escalator. A dark green cab sat out front of the theater. I hopped in and gave the driver the address of the house two doors over from where I’d left my car. A security guard was parked behind the Hummer, roof lights flashing. As we exited the parking lot, a Foxboro Police cruiser passed us. Kenny was almost out of time.

The cab dropped me in front of the house on Tuck Terrace. I left the driver a solid tip but not so solid he’d be able to pick me out of a lineup. I walked to the house as he backed onto the road. I pretended to put a key in the front door as he pulled forward and then rode up the street. I walked over to the house where I’d left my Jeep. Back through the half-finished ranch, back across the field of sand, and I was once more at Kenny and Helene’s sliding glass door. It was unlocked, and I let myself in and stood watching as Kenny added the laptops to a duffel bag on the floor and Helene packed up the cable modems.

Kenny noticed me. “You got my keys?”

I patted my pockets and was surprised to find them. “Here you go.” I tossed him the keys.

He zipped the duffel bag and lifted it off the floor. “Where’s it parked?”

“Yeah,” I said slowly, “about that.”

“I can’t believe you killed my ride,” Kenny said as we drove past the empty Nottingham Hill security kiosk in my Jeep.

“I didn’t kill it. Yefim did.”

“I can’t believe you just fucking left it.”

“Kenny, your Hummer looks like the bus at the end of The Gauntlet . The only way it was reaching your house was by U.N. airlift.”

We came to the same stoplight where I’d almost run into Yefim and Pavel’s truck. A small armada of Foxboro Police cruisers came tear-assing down the road from the other direction. Kenny and Helene dropped in their seats as the cruisers blew through the red light, sirens a-rage. In another fifteen seconds, all four cruisers had disappeared over the rise behind us as if they’d never existed at all. I looked at Kenny, crammed under my glove compartment.

“Subtle,” I said.

“We don’t like calling attention to ourselves,” Helene said from the backseat.

“Which is why you drive a yellow Hummer,” I said as the light turned green.

On Route 1, we passed the stadium again. The Hummer was surrounded by local and state police, a black-panel crime scene truck, and two news vans. Kenny looked at the state of it-the blown tires, the shattered windshield, the shot-up hood. Another news van pulled into the lot. A helicopter flew overhead.

“Shit, Kenny,” I said, “you’re big-time.”

“Please,” he said, “can’t you let a man grieve in peace?”

We stopped in Dedham, back behind the Holiday Inn at the intersection of Route 1 and Route 1A.

“Okay,” I said. “In case you haven’t figured it out, you two are screwed. I saw you grab the computers, but I’m sure you left something behind in the house that’ll tie you to all the wonderful fraud and identity theft you’ve been up to. Not to mention the meth dust in the microwave. I’m only half as smart as most cops at this, so let’s assume they’ll have you two charged by midday and will be out on the prowl with no-knock warrants by dinnertime.”

“You’re such a bad bluffer.” Helene lit a cigarette.

“You think?” I reached over the backrest, took the cigarette out of her mouth and flicked it out the window past Kenny’s face. “I got a four-year-old, you moron. She rides in this car.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t want her going to the playground smelling like a Newport.”

“Touchy, touchy.”

I held out my hand to her.

“What?”

“Gimme the pack.”

“Nigger, please.”

“Gimme the pack,” I repeated.

Kenny sounded weary. “Give it to him, Helene.”

She handed over the pack. I slid it into my pocket.

“So,” Kenny said, “you got a solution for us?”

“I dunno. Tell me what Kirill Borzakov wants with Amanda.”

“Who said he wants Amanda?”

“Yefim did.”

“Oh, right.”

“So what’s Amanda got that they could want?”

“She ripped a load, took it on the run with her.”

I made the sound of an NBA buzzer when the shot clock runs out. “Bullshit.”

“No, he’s serious.” Helene, all wide-eyed.

“Get out of my car.”

“No, listen.”

I reached across Kenny and pushed his door open. “See ya.”

“No, really.”

“Really. We’ve got less than two days to trade whatever Amanda’s got for Sophie. Now I know you don’t give a shit about the life of a teenage girl, but I’m kind of a dinosaur that way, and I do.”

“So go to the police.”

I nodded as if that made perfect sense. “Testify in open court against the Russian mob.” I scratched my chin. “By the time it’s safe for my daughter to leave Witness Protection, she’ll be fifty-fucking-five.” I looked at Kenny. “No one’s going to the cops.”

“Can I have my cigarettes back?” Helene said. “Please.”

“You going to smoke in my ride?”

“I’ll open the door.”

I tossed them back over the seat to her.

“So where’s this leave us?” Kenny said.

“What I said-we need to make a trade. The more you two dick me around on what exactly it is they want from Amanda, the less chance Sophie will be in anything less than three or four pieces by the time Friday rolls around.”

“And we told you,” Kenny said, “Amanda ripped off their-”

“It’s a piece of fucking jewelry,” Helene said. She opened the back door wide and placed one foot on the ground as she lit her cigarette. She blew the smoke out past the door and gave me a look like Satisfied?

“Jewelry.”

She nodded as Kenny closed his eyes and rested his head against the seat. “Yeah. Don’t ask me what it looks like or how she got it, but she stole this, what, crucifix?”

“Well, it’s not a crucifix,” Kenny said. “ ’Least I don’t think so. They keep calling it a ‘cross.’ ” He shrugged. “That’s all we know.”

“And you don’t know how this cross got into her possession?”

Another head shake. “Nope.”

“So you have no idea how Amanda might have had the opportunity to put her hands on this cross, or why she was hanging out with the Russian mob. Is that what you’re selling?”

“We don’t smother her,” Helene said.

“What?”

“Amanda,” Helene said. “We let her make her own decisions. We’re not up her ass all the time. We show her respect as a person.”

I looked out the car window for a bit.

After the silence went on a bit too long, Helene said, “What’re you thinking?”

I looked over the seat at her. “I’m thinking how I’ve never had the impulse to hit a woman in my life, but you get me in an Ike Turner frame of mind.”

She flicked her cigarette into the parking lot. “Like I haven’t heard that before.”

“Where. Is. She.”

“We. Don’t. Know.” Helene bulged her eyes at me like a pissy twelve-year-old, which, in terms of emotional development, wasn’t far off the mark.

“Bullshit.”

Kenny said, “Man, I taught that girl how to create new identities so tight she could join the CIA. Obviously, she created a few I didn’t know about and now she’s running around with one of those identities. And she’s got a flawless fucking social security card and birth certificate, I assure you. And once you got those, you can create a ten-year credit history in about four hours. And once you’ve done that ? Shit. The country’s one big ATM.”

“You told Yefim you were close.”

“I woulda told that ice-blood motherfucker anything he needed to hear, long as it got him to leave my kitchen.”

“So you’re not close.”

He shook his head.

I looked at Helene in the rearview. She shook her head.

We sat in silence again for a bit.

“Then what good are you?” I said eventually and started the Jeep. “Get out of my car.”

I was scheduled to have a beer with Mike Colette, my friend who owned the distribution warehouses. He’d hired me to discover which of his employees was embezzling, and I’d found an answer he wasn’t going to like. I thought of canceling the meeting, because I was still a hair shaky from the eight bullets that had been fired in my direction, but we’d agreed to meet in West Roxbury and I was already over on that side of town, so I called his cell and told him I was on my way.

He sat at one of the bar tops by the window at West on Centre and gave me a wave as I came through the door, even though he was the only guy at the tables. He’d been like that since we’d met at UMass, an earnest, solid guy of entrenched decency. I never met a soul who didn’t like him. The logic among our friends was if you didn’t like Mike, it said nothing about him but everything about you.

He was a small guy with close-shorn curly black hair and the kind of handshake that you could feel in every bone of your body. He gave it to me when I reached the table and I was so distracted I hadn’t prepared for it. I damn near ended up on my knees and I was pretty sure carpal tunnel set in immediately.

He pointed at the beer in front of my chair. “Just ordered it for you.”

“Thanks, man.”

“Get you anything? Appetizer or something?”

“Oh, no, I’m fine.”

“Sure? You look a little off, man.”

I took a sip of beer. “I had a run-in with some Russians.”

He drank from his own frosted mug, his eyes wide. “They’re a fucking menace in the trucking business, man. I mean, not all Russians, but Kirill Borzakov’s crew? Whew. Stay away from those guys.”

“Too late.”

“No shit?” He put his beer on the coaster. “You had a run-in with Borzakov’s guys?”

“Yup.”

“Kirill’s not just a thug, man, he’s an out-of-his-fucking-mind thug. You heard he got another DUI?”

“Yeah, last week.”

“Last night .” Mike pushed a folded Herald across the table at me. “And this one beats all.”

I found it on page 6: “ ‘Butcher’ Borzakov’s Bezerko Blowup.” He’d taken his Targa into a Danvers car wash. Halfway through the service, he’d apparently become impatient. This was bad news for the car that sat ahead of his in the wash. Kirill rammed it. The car was propelled out of the wash, but the engine of Borzakov’s Targa seized up. Police found him in the parking lot, covered in suds as he tried to attack one of the Panamanians who worked the gas pumps with a wiper blade he’d snapped off his own car. He was Tasered and taken to the ground by four staties. He posted first-quarter NBA numbers on the Breathalyzer and the staties also found a half-gram of cocaine in his seat console. It took him all the way to dinnertime to make his bail. In the sidebar, they ran the names of the four men whose deaths he was suspected of ordering this past year.

I folded the paper. “So it’s not the fact that he’s a killer that should bother me, it’s that he’s a killer having some kind of psychological meltdown?”

“For starters.” He placed an index finger to his nose. “I hear he’s dipping into his own supply.”

I shrugged. Man, was I sick of this shit.

“Patrick, no offense, but you ever think of doing something else?”

“You’re the second person to ask me that today.”

“Well, I could be in the market for a new manager after this lunch, and you did work in trucking all through college, if I remember.”

I shook it off. “I’m good. Thanks, Mike.”

“Never say never,” he said. “All I’m saying.”

“I appreciate that. Let’s talk about your case.”

He folded his hands together and leaned into the table.

“Who do you think is embezzling from you?”

“My night manager, Skip Feeney.”

“It’s not him.”

His eyebrows went up.

“I thought it was him, too. And I’m not saying he’s a hundred percent trustworthy. My guess is he takes a box off a truck every now and then. If you went to his house you’d probably find stereo equipment that matched missing shipments, that kind of thing. But he’s only able to fuck with the shipping manifests. He’s not able to get to invoices. And, Mike, the invoices are the key. In some cases, you’re being double- and triple-billed for shipments that don’t originate with you and don’t arrive at their destinations because they don’t exist.”

“Okay,” he said slowly.

“Someone ordering five pallets of Flowmaster mufflers. That sound right to you?”

“Yeah, that’s about right. We’ll sell them all by July, but if we waited until April to order them, the price would be another six, seven percent higher. It’s a smart risk, even if it eats a little space.”

“But you’ve only got four pallets in the warehouse. And the invoice reads ‘four.’ But the payment was for five. And I checked-they shipped five.” I pulled a notepad from my laptop bag and flipped it open. “What can you tell me about Michelle McCabe?”

He sat back in his chair, his face drawn.

“She’s my accounts-receivable manager. She’s the wife of a buddy of mine. A good buddy.”

“I’m sorry, man. I am.”

“You’re sure?”

I reached back into the laptop bag, came out with my case file. I slid it across the table to him. “Go through the top twenty invoices. Those are the dirty ones. I attached the invoices the companies received so you can compare.”

“Twenty?”

“Could be more,” I said, “but those are the ones would hold up in any court if she ever sued you. Or if she files a grievance with the Labor Board, throws any sort of wrongful termination shit at you. If you want to have her arrested-”

“Oh, no.”

Of course that would be his reaction.

“I know, I know. But if you did, all the proof you need is right there. At the very least, Mike, you should consider making her pay restitution.”

“How much?”

“This past fiscal year alone? She took you for twenty thousand minimum.”

“Jesus.”

“And that’s just the stuff I found. A true auditor, knowing where to look, who knows what he’d find?”

“This economy, and you’re telling me I got to shitcan my accounts-receivable manager and my floor manager?”

“For different reasons, but yeah.”

“Christ.”

We ordered two more beers. The place began to fill up; the traffic outside thickened on Centre Street. Across the street, people pulled up in front of the Continental Shoppe to pick up their dogs from a day’s grooming. While we sat there, I counted two poodles, one beagle, one collie, and three mutts. I thought of Amanda and her thing for dogs, the only trait I’d heard ascribed to her that sounded soft, humanizing.

“Twenty thousand.” Mike looked like someone had swung a bat into his stomach, then slapped him in the face while he was doubled over. “I ate dinner at their house last week. We went to the Sox a couple times last summer. Christ, two years ago, she’d just started for me? I gave her an extra thousand as a Christmas bonus because I knew they were about to get their car repo’d. I just…” He raised his hands above his head and brought them back down helplessly behind his skull. “I’m forty-four years old and I don’t understand anything about people. I just don’t get them.” He brought his hands back to the table. “I don’t understand,” he whispered.

I hated my job.

Chapter Seventeen

It had been a few hours since my encounter with Yefim and I still couldn’t shake it. Back in the day, I would have manned up with a drink or six, maybe called Oscar and Devin so we could meet at some dive to out-understate one another when it came to violent encounters.

Oscar and Devin had retired from the BPD several years ago, though, and bought a failing bar together in Greenwood, Mississippi, where Oscar’s people hailed from. The bar was just up the street from Robert Johnson’s purported grave site, so they’d turned it into a blues club. Last I heard, it was still failing, but Oscar and Devin were too drunk to care, and the Friday-afternoon barbecues they threw in their parking lot were already the stuff of local legend. They were never coming back.

So there went that outlet for me. Not that it was much of an outlet. What I really wanted was just to get back home. Hold my daughter, hold my wife. Shower off the smell of my fear. I was planning to do just that, taking the Arborway over toward Franklin Park so I could cut through to my side of town, when my cell rang and I saw Jeremy Dent’s name on the caller ID.

“Fuck me,” I said aloud. I had Sticky Fingers in my CD player, turned up loud, the way Sticky Fingers should always be played, and I was right at the point in “Dead Flowers” where I always sang along to Jagger getting goofy with the words “Kentucky Derby Day.”

I turned down the music and answered my phone.

“Merry Almost Christmas,” Jeremy Dent said.

“Merry Almost Festivus,” I said back.

“You got a minute to drop by the office?”

“Now?”

“Now. I got a yuletide present for you.”

“Really.”

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s called a permanent job. Like to discuss?”

Health insurance, I thought. Day care, I thought. Kindergarten. College fund. A new muffler.

“On my way.”

“See you soon.” He hung up.

I was halfway through Franklin Park. If I hit the lights on Columbia Road just right, I would reach home in about ten minutes. Instead, I banged a left onto Blue Hill Avenue and headed back downtown.

“Rita Bernardo took a job in Jakarta, of all places.” Jeremy Dent leaned back in his chair. “Booming security business there these days, all those wonderful jihadists-bad for the world but great for our bottom line.” He shrugged. “So, anyway, she’s off to keep Indonesian discos from blowing up and that opens up a slot we’d like to offer you.”

“What’s the catch?”

He poured himself a second scotch and tilted the bottle toward my glass. I waved it off. “No catch. Upon further evaluation, we came to the conclusion that your investigatory skills, not to mention your experience in the field, are assets too valuable to pass up. You can start right now.”

He pushed a folder across his desk and it cleared the edge and landed on my lap. I opened it. Clipped to the inside cover was a photo of a young guy, maybe thirty years old. He looked vaguely familiar. A slim guy with dark, tightly coiled hair, a nose that fell just a half-inch short of beakish, and a café-au-lait complexion. He wore a white shirt and a thin red tie and held a microphone.

“Ashraf Bitar,” Jeremy said. “Some call him Baby Barack.”

“Community organizer in Mattapan,” I said, recognizing him now. “Fought that stadium plan.”

“He’s fought a lot of things.”

“Loves the camera,” I said.

“He’s a politician,” Jeremy said. “By definition that makes him an Olympic-level narcissist. And don’t let the Mattapan roots and the Mattapan address fool you. He shops at Louis.”

“On what? Sixty K a year?”

Jeremy shrugged.

“So what do you need?”

“A microscope on his whole fucking life.”

“Who’s the client?”

He sipped his scotch. “Immaterial to your efforts.”

“Okay. When do you need me to start?”

“Now. Yesterday. But I told the client tomorrow.”

I took a sip from my own glass of scotch. “Can’t do it.”

“I just offered you a permanent position with this firm, and you’re already being difficult?”

“I had no idea this was in the wind. I had to take a case to put food on the table. I can’t walk away in the middle of it.”

He gave a slow, that-doesn’t-concern-me blink. “How long before you can divest yourself?”

“Couple more days.”

“That puts us at Christmas.”

“Yeah, it does.”

“So let’s say you free up by Christmas, can I tell our client you’ll close his case”-he pointed at the folder-“by New Year’s?”

“ If I’m done with my current case by Christmas, sure.”

He sighed. “How much they paying you, your current client?”

I lied. “A fair wage.”

I came home with flowers I couldn’t afford and Chinese takeout I couldn’t afford, either. I took the shower I’d been fantasizing about all afternoon and changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from Pela’s one and only concert tour, then joined my family for dinner.

After we ate, we played with Gabby. Then I read to her and put her to bed. I came back into the living room and told my wife about my day.

Once I’d finished, Angie went straight to the porch for an American Spirit Light. “So the Russian mob has your driver’s license.”

“Yes.”

“Which means they know our home address.”

“Said information usually appears on a driver’s license, yes.”

“And if we tell the police they kidnapped a young girl…”

“They would be perturbed with me,” I agreed. “Did I mention the part where Duhamel offered me a permanent position?”

“A thousand times,” she said. “So you’re going to walk away. As in, right now.”

“No.”

“Uh, yes.”

“No. They kidnapped a seventeen-”

“-year-old girl. Yes. I heard you. I also heard the part where they shot the shit out of a car you were driving and took your license so they could come here if they felt like it and kidnap our child. So, I’m sorry about the seventeen-year-old girl, but I’ve got a four-year-old girl right here who I’m going to protect.”

“Even at the cost of another life.”

“You’re damn right.”

“This is bullshit.”

“This is not.”

“Yes, it is. You asked me to take this case.”

“Lower your voice. Okay, yes, I asked you to-”

“Knowing what it did to me the last time I searched for Amanda. What it did to us. But you were all about the greater good. And now that the greater good is biting us in the ass and another kid is in danger, you want me to pack it in.”

“We’re talking about our daughter’s safety.”

“But that’s not all we’re talking about. We’re in this now. You want to take Gabby and go see your mom, I think that’s a great idea. They’re dying to see each other. But I’m going to find Amanda and I’m going to get Sophie back, too.”

“You’d choose this case over-”

“No. Don’t try that shit on me. Do not.”

“Volume control, please.”

“You know who I am. You knew the minute you convinced me to do what Beatrice asked that I would never stop until I found Amanda again. And now you want to tell me it’s over? Well, it’s not. Not until I find her.”

“Find who? Amanda? Or Sophie? You can’t even differentiate anymore.”

Both of us had reached one step below atomic and we knew it. And we knew how bad it would get if we took the next step. Marry an Irish temper to an Italian temper and you often get broken dishes. We’d done a little counseling just before our daughter was born, to help us keep our hands off the nuke button when the air in the silo got too tight, and most times, it helped.

I took a breath. My wife took a breath and then a drag off her cigarette. The air on the porch was cold, bracing even, but we were dressed for it and it felt good in my lungs. I let out a long breath. A twenty-year breath.

Angie stepped in close to my chest. I wrapped my arms around her and she placed her head under my chin and kissed the hollow below my throat.

“I hate fighting with you,” she said.

“I hate fighting with you.”

“Yet we manage to disagree fairly often.”

“That’s because we like making up so much.”

“I love making up,” she said.

“You and me both, sister.”

“You think we woke her?”

I went to the door that separated our bedrooms and opened it, watched my daughter sleep. She didn’t sleep on her stomach so much as on her upper chest, head turned to the right, butt sticking up in the air. If I looked in two hours from now, she’d be on her side, but pre-midnight, she slept like a penitent.

I shut the door and came back to bed. “She’s out.”

“I’m going to send her.”

“What? Where?”

“To see my mom. If Bubba will take her.”

“Call him. You know exactly what he’ll say.”

She nodded. It was barely a question, really. Angie could tell Bubba she needed him yesterday in Katmandu and he’d remind her that he was already there. “How’s he going to get weapons on a plane?”

“It’s Savannah. I’m quite sure he has connections there.”

“Gabby’ll love to see her nonnie, that’s for sure. She’s been talking about it nonstop since the summer. Well, that and trees.” She looked over at me. “You good with that?”

I looked at her. “These are bad fucking people I’m going to take on. And, like you said, they know where we live. I’d put her on a plane tonight, if I could. But what about you? You’re going to put the spurs on again, join me on the wagon trail?”

“Yeah. Might speed the process up.”

“Sure. But what’s the longest you’ve been away from Gabby since we had her?”

“Three days.”

“Right. When we went to Maine and you whined about missing her the whole friggin’ time.”

“I didn’t whine . I stated the obvious a few times.”

“And then restated it. That’s called whining.”

She slapped my head with a pillow. “Whatever. Anyway, that was last year. I’ve matured. And she’s going to love this-going on an adventure to see her nonnie with Uncle Bubba? If we told her tonight, she’d never have fallen asleep.” She rolled on top of me. “So what’s your immediate plan?”

“Find Amanda.”

“Again.”

“Again. Trade the cross she stole for Sophie. Everyone goes home.”

“Who says Amanda’s going to give it up?”

“Sophie’s her friend.”

“The way I’ve heard it, Sophie’s her Robert Ford.”

“I don’t know if it’s that bad.” I scratched my head. “I don’t know a lot, though. Which is why I’ve gotta find her.”

“How, though?”

“Question of the month.”

She reached across my body and grabbed my laptop bag off the floor. She opened it, pulled out the file marked A. M C C READY and opened it on the pillow to the right of my head. “These are the shots you took of her room?”

“Yeah. No, not those-those are of Sophie’s room. Keep going. Those there.”

“Looks like a hotel room.”

“Pretty impersonal, yeah.”

“Except for the Sox jersey.”

I nodded. “Know what’s weird? She isn’t a fan. She never talked about the team or went to Fenway or wondered aloud what Theo was thinking when he made the Julio Lugo deal or traded Kason Gabbard for Going Going Gagne.”

“Maybe it’s just Beckett.”

“Huh?”

“Maybe she’s just got a crush on Josh Beckett.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, that’s his jersey, right? Number 19. Why are you whiter than usual suddenly?”

“Ange.”

“What?”

“It’s not the Red Sox she’s obsessed with.”

“No?”

“And she doesn’t have a crush on Josh Beckett.”

“Yeah, he’s not my type either. So why the jersey?”

“Twelve years ago, where’d we find her?”

“At Jack Doyle’s house.”

“And where was that?”

“Some little Podunk town in the Berkshires. What was it, like, fifteen miles from the New York border? Twenty? They didn’t even have a coffee shop.”

“What was the name?”

“Of the town?”

I nodded.

She shrugged. “You tell me.”

“Becket.”

“Give Daddy a hug.”

“No.”

“Sweetie, please.”

“No, I said.”

We were in tantrum mode. Standing in the C Terminal of Logan, Bubba and Gabby with their tickets in hand, a surprisingly light security check-in line awaiting them, and Gabby pissed off at me like only a four-year-old can get pissed off. The arm-folding, the foot-stomping, the whole deal.

I knelt by her and she turned her head. “Sweetie, we talked about this. Throwing a tantrum in the house is what?”

“Our problem,” she said eventually.

“And what’s throwing a tantrum outside our house?”

She shook her head.

“Gabriella,” I said.

“Our embarrassment,” she said.

“Exactly. So give your old man a hug. You can be mad at me, but you still have to give me a hug. That’s our rule. Right?”

She dropped Mr. Lubble and jumped on me. She held on so tight her thumb knuckles dug into my spine and her chin dug into the side of my neck.

“We’ll see you real soon,” I said.

“Tonight?”

I looked at Angie. Christ.

“Not tonight. But real soon.”

“You’re always going away.”

“No suh.”

“Yes suh. You go away at night and you’re gone when I get up in the morning times, too. And you’re taking Mommy away, too.”

“Daddy works.”

“Too much .” She had a catch in her voice that suggested another meltdown was imminent.

I propped her in front of me. She looked in my eyes, a tiny-doll version of her mother. “This is the last time, honey. Okay? Last time I go away. Last time I send you away.”

She stared at me, eyes and lips bubbling. “Swear.”

I held up my right hand. “I swear.”

Angie knelt beside us and kissed our daughter. I stepped back and let them have their own moment, which was even more emotionally fraught than mine.

Bubba stepped in close. “She going to cry on the plane, make a scene, shit like that?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “But if she does and anyone gives you a dirty look, you have my permission to bite them. Or at least growl at them. And if you see any Russians giving her funny looks-”

“Man,” he said, “anyone gives that kid a funny look? Their eyes will end up on the ground looking back up at their head as I cut it off their fucking neck.”

On the other side of security, they looked back at us, Bubba holding Gabby up by his shoulder as he lifted their bags off the conveyor belt. They waved.

We waved back, and then they were gone.