“It’s okay,” I say, wrapping my arms around him and holding him with the deepest pressure, the way a potter would center the clay on her wheel.

But it isn’t okay. It won’t be, until Jacob gives Detective Matson this new information.

I am not in a good mood.

It’s Saturday, and although I am supposed to have Sasha for the weekend, I had to cancel as soon as it became apparent that we had an ongoing investigation that demanded my full resources. Basically, I’m going to eat, sleep, and breathe Jess Ogilvy until I find her, dead or alive. Not that that seemed to sway my ex, who made sure to give me a fifteen-minute tongue-lashing about parental responsibility and how on earth was she supposed to carry on with her life when my emergencies kept interrupting? It wasn’t worth pointing out that this was not my emergency, technically, or that the disappearance of a young woman might take precedence over rescheduling a date night with her new spouse, Mr. Coffee. I tell myself that missing one weekend with Sasha is worth it if I can make sure that Claude Ogilvy gets to have another weekend with his daughter.

En route to Jess’s home, where a team of CSIs is entrenched, I get a call from the local FBI field agent, who has been trying to ping the girl’s cell phone. “You’re not getting a signal,” I repeat. “So what does that mean?”

“Several things,” the agent explains. “The GPS locator only works when the phone’s active. So it could be at the bottom of a lake right now. Or she could be alive and well and just have run out of juice.”

“Well, how am I supposed to know which of those it is?”

“Guess once you find a body, it’ll be pretty clear,” he says, and then I drive through one of Vermont’s notorious dead zones and the call is dropped.

When the phone rings again, I am still cursing out the FBI (which is good for one thing and one thing only: screwing up a perfectly sound local investigation), so you can imagine how surprised I am to hear Emma Hunt on the end of the line. I had left her my card yesterday, just in case. “I was hoping you might be able to come back to my house,” she says. “Jacob has something he needs to tell you.”

I have a team of investigators waiting for me on-site. I have a surly boyfriend who might be a murderer and a state senator breathing down my boss’s neck, demanding my job if I don’t find his missing kid. But I put on my flashing blues and do an illegal U-turn. “Give me ten minutes,” I tell her.

I’m in a slightly better mood now.

I have, fortunately, three whole hours before CrimeBusters airs. We are sitting in the living room-Emma and Jacob on one couch, me on a side chair. “Tell the detective everything you told me, Jacob,” Emma says.

His eyes roll upward, as if he is reading something printed on the ceiling. “I went to her house that day, like I was supposed to. Things weren’t right. There were stools knocked over in the kitchen, and papers all over the floor, and all the CDs were thrown on the carpet. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t right.” His voice seems almost computerized, it’s that mechanical. “She was already gone. I went in, and the mess… and I was scared. I didn’t know what happened. I called out her name and she wouldn’t answer and I saw the backpack and the other things and I took them. Houston, we have a problem.” He nods, satisfied. “That’s it.”

“Why did you lie to me about going to Jess’s?” I ask.

“I didn’t lie,” he says. “I told you I didn’t have my session with her.”

“You didn’t tell me about the backpack, either,” I point out. It sits between us, on a coffee table.

Jacob nods. “You didn’t ask.”

Wiseass, I think, just as Emma jumps in. “A kid with Asperger’s, like Jacob, is going to be painfully literal,” she says.

“So if I question him directly, he’ll answer directly?”

“He,” Jacob interjects testily, “is sitting within earshot.”

That makes me grin. “Sorry,” I say, addressing him. “How did you get into Jess’s house?”

“She used to leave her dorm room open for me, and when I got to her house, that door was left open, too. So I went in to wait.”

“What did you see when you went inside?”

“The kitchen was a mess. Stools were knocked over; and the mail was all over the floor.”

“How about Jess? Was she there?”

“No. I called her name, and she didn’t answer.”

“What did you do?”

He shrugs. “I cleaned up.”

I sink back into the cushions of the chair. “You… cleaned up.”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

My mind is racing through all the tampered evidence sacrificed to Jacob Hunt’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies. “You know all about preserving evidence at crime scenes,” I say. “What on earth would make you destroy it?”

Just like that, Emma bristles. “My son’s doing you a favor by speaking with you, Detective. We didn’t have to call and give you this information.”

I tamp down my frustration. “So you cleaned up the mess you saw downstairs?”

“Right,” Jacob says. “I picked up the stools and I set the mail back onto the kitchen counter. And I put all the CDs that had been knocked over in alphabetical order.”

“Alphabetical order,” I repeat, remembering Mark Maguire’s call, and my theory about an anal-retentive kidnapper. “You’re kidding me.”

“That’s what his room’s like,” Emma says. “Jacob’s a big fan of everything being in its right place. For him, it’s the spatial equivalent of knowing what’s coming next.”

“So when did you take the backpack?”

“After I cleaned up.”

The backpack still has its tags on, just like Maguire said. “Would you mind if I hang on to it, for the case?”

Suddenly, Jacob lights up. “You have to take it. You’re going to need to run DNA tests on the straps and you can do an AP on the underwear inside. It might be worth spraying the whole thing with Luminol, to be honest. And you can probably get prints off the card inside with ninhydrin, but you’ll want to compare them against my mother’s since she handled the card when she first found the backpack. Which reminds me, you can look through it now if you want. I have latex gloves upstairs in my room. You don’t have a latex allergy, do you?” He is halfway out of the room when he turns back. “We have a grocery bag somewhere, don’t we? That way Detective Matson can carry this back to the lab.”

He runs upstairs, and I turn to Emma. “Is he always like that?”

“And then some.” She looks up at me. “Is anything Jacob said helpful?”

“It’s all food for thought,” I say.

“Everything changes if there are signs of a struggle,” she points out.

I raise a brow. “You’re a closet CSI, too?”

“No, in spite of Jacob’s best efforts to teach me.” She glances out the window for a moment. “I’ve been thinking about Jess’s mother,” she says. “The last time she talked to her daughter, was it about stupid things, you know? Did they have a fight about how she never called, or how she had forgotten to send a thank-you card to her aunt?” She faces me. “I used to say I love you every time I tucked my boys in at night. But now, they go to bed after I do.”

“My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.” I smile faintly. “He had a stroke a few years ago. Before that, I used to screen his calls because I didn’t have time to talk about whether the Sox would make it into the playoffs. But afterward, I started to call him. Every time, I’d finish by saying I loved him. We both knew why; and it didn’t sit right after all the time I hadn’t said it. It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon. He died eight months ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

I laugh tightly. “And I don’t know why the hell I’m telling you this.”

At that moment, Jacob reappears, clutching a pair of latex gloves. I snap them on and carefully lift the backpack just as my cell rings. “Matson,” I say.