'You got some sort of line on her?' the detective asked abruptly.

'No,' Brown replied. 'To be honest, I just saw the flyer and something in it reminded me of a case I once worked. Just thought, you know, I'd check it out.'

'Hell,' the detective answered. 'Too bad. For a minute I got hopeful. You know how it is.'

'So, can you fill me in a bit?'

'Sure. Not that much to tell. Little girl, not an enemy in the whole wide world, goes off to her swim class at the civic center one afternoon. School's out, you know, so they run all sorts of programs down there for the kids. Last seen by a couple of her friends walking toward her home.'

'Anyone see what happened?'

'No. One old lady, lives about midway down the street – you know, it's all old houses with air conditioners blasting away in every window, makes a damn racket. Anyway, this one old gal can't afford to run the electrics, you know, not so much, so she's sitting in her kitchen next to a fan, and she heard a little scream and then a car pulling away real fast, but by the time she can get out there, the car's already two blocks away. White car. American make. That's all. No plate, no description. Book bag with her swimsuit left on the street. Old lady was pretty sharp, give her that. Calls in what she sees. But by the time a patrol car finds her house, listens to her story, and gets out a BOLO, well, things are pretty much history. You know how many white cars there are in Dade County?' A lot.'

That's right. Anyway, we work the case best we can with what we got. Hell, we could only get one of the television stations to run the girl's picture that night. Maybe she wasn't cute enough, I don't know…'… Or the wrong color.'

'Well, you said it. I don't know how those bastards make up their minds what's news anyway. After we got the flyers out, we took a couple of dozen calls saying she'd been spotted here, there, all over. But none were good, you know. We checked out her family real good, wondered if maybe she'd been snatched by someone she knew, but, hell, the Perrys were good folks. He's a clerk for DMV, she works in an elementary school cafeteria. No problems at home.

Three other kids. What the hell could we do? I got a hundred other files on my desk. Assaults. B and E.

Armed robbery. I even got a couple of cases I can make. Got to spend time valuably, you know. Probably the same for you. So, it just turned into one of those cases where you gotta wait for someone to find her body, and then Homicide will take it over. But that maybe never happens. We're so damn close to the edge of the Everglades down here. You can get rid of someone pretty damn fast. Usually it's drug dealers. Like to just drive down some old deserted access road, dump some body out in the 'Glades. Let that old swamp water take care of hiding their work. Easy as one-two-three. But same technique works for just about anybody, if you catch my drift.'

'Anybody.'

'Anybody who likes little girls. And doesn't want them to tell anybody what happened to 'em.' The detective paused. 'Actually, I'm kinda surprised we don't work a hundred cases like this one. If you get that kid in your car without being made, well, hell, ain't nothing you can't get away with.'

'But you didn't…'

'Nah, we didn't have any others like this. I checked with Monroe and Broward, but they didn't have anything, either. I ran a sex offender profile through the computer and got a couple of names. We even went and rousted a couple of the creeps, but both were either out of town or at work when Dawn disappeared. By that time it was already a couple of days old, you know…'

'And?'

'And nothing. Nada. Zilch. No evidence of anything, except a little girl is long gone. So, tell me about your case. Ring any bells?'

Brown thought hard, considering what to respond. 'Not really. Ours was a white girl coming out of school. Old case. Had a suspect, but couldn't make him. Almost.'

'Ahh, too bad. Thought maybe you had something that might help us.'

Brown thanked the detective and hung up the telephone. His thoughts drove him to his feet. He walked to the window and stared out into the darkness. From his room, he could see up onto the major east-west highway that cut into the center of Miami, and then led away, toward the thick interior of the state, past the suburban developments, the airport, the manufacturing plants and malls, past the fringe communities that hung on the backside of the city, toward the state's swampy core. The Everglades gives way to Big Cypress. There's Loxahatchee and

Corkscrew Swamp and the Withlacoochee River and the Ocala, Osceola and Apalachicola state forests. In

Florida, no one is ever far from some nowhere, hidden, dark place. For a few moments he watched the traffic flee through his line of sight, headlights like tracer pounds in the darkness. He placed a hand to his forehead, reaching as if to hide his vision for an instant, then stopped. He told himself, it's just another little girl that disappeared. This one happened in the big city and it got swallowed up amidst all the other routine terrors. One instant she's there, the next she's not, just like she never existed at all, except in the minds of a few grieving folks left with nightmares forever. He shook his head, insisting to himself that he was becoming paranoid. Another little girl. Joanie

Shriver. There have been others since. Dawn Perry.

There was probably one yesterday. Probably one tomorrow. Gone, just like that. An elementary school.

A civic center. The lights beyond his window continued to soar through the night.

There was only one other person in the Miami Journal library when Cowart arrived there. She was a young woman, an assistant with a shy, diffident manner that made it difficult to speak to her directly, since she kept her head down, as if the words she spoke in reply were somehow embarrassing. She quietly helped Cowart get set up in one of the computer terminals and left him alone when he punched in Dawn Perry.

The word Searching appeared in a corner of the screen. followed rapidly by the words Two Entries.

He called them up. The first was only four paragraphs long and had run in a police blotter roundup well inside a zoned insert section that went to homes in the southern part of the county. No story had appeared in the main paper. The headline was: POLICE REPORT GIRL, 12, MISSING. The story merely informed him that Dawn Perry had failed to return home after a swimming class at a local civic center. The second library entry was: POLICE SAY NO LEADS IN MISSING GIRL CASE. It was a little longer than the first, repeating all the details that had previously run. The headline summed up all the new information in the story.

Cowart ordered the computer to print out both entries, which only took a few moments. He didn't know what to think. He had learned little more than what the waitress had told him.

He stood up. Tanny Brown was right, he told himself. You are going crazy.

He stared around the room. A number of reporters were working at various terminals, all concentrating hard on the green glowing computer screens. He had managed to slip back into the library without being seen by anyone on the night city desk, for which he was grateful. He didn't want to have to explain to anyone what he was doing. For a moment, he watched the reporters at work. It was the time of night when people wanted to head home, and the words that would fill the next day's paper got shorter, punchier, driven at least in part by fatigue. He could feel the same exhaustion starting to pour over him. He looked down at the two sheets of paper in his hand, the printout of the two entries documenting the disappearance of one Dawn Perry. Age twelve. Sets off one hot August afternoon for a swim at the local pool. Never comes home. Probably dead for months, he told himself. Old news.