“The kid was kind of dozy,” Campion said. “Like, tired, not stupid.”

“This Harwood guy, he says the three of them are going to Five Mountains for the day, but he only gets two tickets. He says his wife has been talking suicide, tells us his wife went to the doctor about it, but turns out she never went.”

“She didn’t?”

“No. I talked to Dr. Samuels today. And her boss, who runs the heating and cooling company? He says he didn’t see any signs that she was depressed the last couple of weeks. If anything, she was excited about something. Kind of, I don’t know, anticipating something.”

“Weird.”

“So far, the only person who’s saying the wife’s suicidal is the husband. Doctor never saw her, her boss says she was fine.”

“So the husband, he’s laying the groundwork.”

“This Bertram guy, the wife’s boss, said Harwood took his wife for a drive someplace on Friday. When Bertram asked her where they were going, she said it was a secret or something, a surprise.”

“So where you going with this, Detective?”

“You still on shift?”

Campion sighed. “I’m kind of doing a double. Wanna make it a triple? Having a life is hugely overrated.”

“You’ve put out news releases before, right?”

“I’ve worked that end, yeah.”

“I told Harwood we’d put out a release tomorrow, but I think we need to put one out tonight. Shake the bushes, you know? We’ve still got time to make the eleven o’clock news. Something simple. A picture of Jan Harwood, believed last seen in the vicinity of Five Mountains. Police seeking any information about the woman’s whereabouts, contact us, blah blah blah, the usual drill.”

“I’m on it,” Campion said.

Duckworth thanked her and closed the phone. He was starting to wonder whether Jan Harwood ever even made it to Five Mountains. He was starting to wonder just what her husband might have done with her.

How the hell that fit in with Leanne Kowalski, he had no idea. But two women who worked together, going missing at the same time-that was one hell of a coincidence. He decided to put his focus, for now, on Jan Harwood. Maybe he’d turn up Leanne Kowalski along the way.

SIXTEEN

I was about a half an hour out of Rochester when my cell rang.

“It was on the news,” Mom said. “They had it on the TV.”

“What?” I said. “What did they have?”

“They had a picture of Jan, and that the police were looking for help to find her. That’s good, right, that they did that?”

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “But the detective, he said they were going to make a decision about that tomorrow. I wonder what made him change his mind. How much did they say?”

“Not much,” my mother said. “They gave her name and age and height and what she was last seen wearing.”

From some distance away, my father shouted, “Eye color!”

“That’s right. They said what color eyes she has and hair and that kind of thing.”

“And where it happened?”

“Just a mention,” Mom said. “It said she was last seen near Five Mountains. But they didn’t have anything about that man trying to take Ethan. Shouldn’t they have had something on that?”

I said, “I wonder why Detective Duckworth didn’t call me. You’d think, if he was deciding to change the timing of the release, he would have let me know.”

I wondered how long it would be before someone from my own paper called, asking what the hell was going on, how the Standard could get scooped on the disappearance of the spouse of one of its own staff members. Even if we didn’t have an edition until the next day, it could have gone up on the website.

I didn’t have time to worry about that now.

“Are you almost there?” Mom asked. Dad yelled, “Tell him to keep drinking coffee!”

“Pretty close,” I said. “I was going to get a hotel, go see Jan’s parents in the morning, but now I’m thinking maybe I should just knock on the door tonight. I can’t lay in my hotel all night thinking about her. I have to do something right away.”

I didn’t hear anything on the other end.

“Mom?”

“I’m sorry. I was just nodding. I guess I was thinking you could see me.” She laughed tiredly.

“How’s Ethan?”

“I just left him on the couch. I’m afraid if I move him he’ll wake up and never settle down again. Your father and I are going to turn in now. But if something happens, if you have any news, you call us, okay?”

“I will. You too.”

Before putting the phone back into my jacket, I considered calling Detective Duckworth and asking him why he’d decided to go ahead with releasing Jan’s picture now. But I was almost to Rochester, and I needed to focus on my upcoming meeting with Jan’s parents.

I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, not after all the things Jan had said about them. But I wasn’t there to criticize them for how they’d raised Jan. I wasn’t there to lay blame, decide who was right and who was wrong.

I wanted to know if they’d seen Jan. Plain and simple. Had she been there? Had she called them? Did they have any idea where she might be?

Just after midnight I got off 90 and headed north on 490. Not long after that, I got off at the Palymra Road exit and quickly found my way to Lincoln Avenue.

The streetlamps were the only thing casting any light at 12:10 a.m. You might have thought, on a Saturday night, that there might have been a house or two with the lights on, a party going on. But maybe this was a street made up mostly of older residents. No lights on after ten on a Saturday night.

I rolled down the street and came to a stop out front of the house I had seen only once before. The Oldsmobile was in the driveway. The house was dark save for one light over the front door.

I killed the engine and sat in the car a moment, listening to the engine tick as it cooled.

I wondered if Jan could be in that house.

If Jan had returned here, it was hard to imagine the kind of confrontation she was likely to have had that could have ended with an invitation to spend the night.

“Let’s do this,” I said under my breath.

I got out of the car and closed the door as quietly as I could. No sense waking any more people on Lincoln than I had to. I walked across the empty street, up the driveway, and onto the front porch of the home of Horace and Gretchen Richler.

I stood in the glow of the single bulb, looking for a doorbell button. I found it mounted in the right side of the doorframe and pushed on it, hard, with my thumb.

No bell went off inside the house, at least none that I could hear. I glanced over at the metal mailbox hanging from the wall, noticed the “No Flyers or Junk Mail!” sticker. Maybe the Richlers didn’t like to be troubled with nuisance callers or mail. One way to deal with that was to disconnect the doorbell.

Or it could just be broken. To be certain, I leaned on the button a second time, but still heard nothing from inside the house.

I opened the metal storm door and saw a tarnished brass knocker on the main door. I rapped it five times. I didn’t know whether it would wake the Richlers, but it sounded like five gunshots out here on the porch.

When I didn’t see any lights going on after fifteen seconds, I did it again. I was about to do it a third time when I could see, through the window, light cascading down the stairs.

Someone was up.

I rapped two more times, lightly, so they wouldn’t think whoever was at the front door had taken off before they’d made the decision to come downstairs. In another moment Horace Richler appeared, in a bathrobe and pajamas, what hair he had pointing in several directions.

Before he got to the door, he shouted, “Who is it?”

“Mr. Richler?” I called out. Not shouting, but loud enough that I hoped he could hear me through the door. “I need to speak to you.”

“Who the hell is it? You know what time it is? I gotta gun, you know!”