“You’re a fucking moron.”

“Or is your beef something else?” Tinker’s mouth curled in an oily little grin. “Something more personal.”

Slidell gave Tinker a long, hard stare, his face so red it was almost purple.

“You had to know Verlene would eventually trade up.” Tinker jumped his eyebrows, Groucho-style.

“Bloody hell!”

I shot to my feet. “Do I have to turn a hose on you two?”

Slidell looked at me. Shook his head in disgust to say I didn’t get it. “I’m filing a complaint on this asshole.” He pivoted and stomped from the room.

I checked my watch. Ryan had reviewed all the other files. Was now focused on Montreal.

I crossed to the boards. Slowly worked my way down the row. I was looking at Shelly Leal’s school portrait when something said pssst in my head.

What?

I’d seen no pattern in Tinker’s pins. No geo-profile to suggest a terrain-motivated course of action.

Mama thought the LSA dates were significant. Was my unconscious telling me there was something more there?

Leal had gone missing ten days earlier, on Friday, November 21. I got my iPhone and pulled up a calendar for 2009. Felt a jolt of excitement. Nance had also disappeared on a Friday.

I checked 2007. The jolt fizzled. Gower’s LSA date was a Thursday. But so was Koseluk’s. Estrada had vanished on a Sunday.

I jotted the dates, returned to the table, and studied the list.

The pssst called out louder.

On a whim, I did some math.

For a moment I sat very still, staring at the numbers I’d generated. Feeling a lump at the base of my throat.

“Ryan.”

He looked up.

“Gower disappeared on October 18, 2007. Nance on April 17, 2009.”

He nodded, clearly puzzled by the chill in my voice.

“There’s an eighteen-month interval between the two abductions.”

Ryan nodded again.

“A little over two and a half years go by between Nance and Koseluk.”

Ryan ran the numbers in his head. “Twenty-nine months.”

“But if you slot in ME107-10, my Jane Doe skeleton, the intervals are cut to roughly fifteen months.” Ryan started to speak. I cut him off. “Koseluk vanished on September 8, 2011. Estrada on December 2, 2012.”

He saw where I was going. “Fifteen months in between.”

“Merikoski reported Donovan missing on February 1, 2014.”

“According to her statement, she hadn’t seen the kid in weeks.”

“Leal vanishes nine months later.”

“Remember Mama’s theory?”

“Each recent LSA links to the LSA of a vic in Montreal.”

We’d accepted the idea of the linked dates. But Mama had grasped the full significance of the pattern. Because Ryan and I hadn’t done the math that day, we hadn’t seen it. Or perhaps we’d gotten channeled on the difference in ages between the earlier and the more recent victims.

As one, we now had the same terrible thought.

“The intervals are decreasing,” I said. “The next child could be taken this February sixth. That’s roughly two months off.”

PART II

CHAPTER 16

WE LEFT THE law enforcement center twenty minutes late. Fortunately, the girl who was going to catsit for me arrived at the annex precisely at seven. She was a gangly kid wearing the kind of cloche hat once favored by flappers. Birdie took to her right off. Ryan and I left them playing fetch with a red plaid mouse in the study.

I transit a lot of airports. Except for baggage retrieval, which takes longer than the average fall harvest, Charlotte Douglas is perhaps my favorite. Rocking chairs. Grand piano. Sushi bar. That night, forget it. We had barely enough time to grab takeout and dash to the gate.

The wheels left the tarmac right on the dot. Ryan and I had twelve hundred miles of East Coast to eat lukewarm barbecue and fries and plan our attack.

We knew we’d be on our own. The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal detectives who’d worked the case, Luc Claudel and Michel Charbonneau, were both unavailable. Claudel was in France, Charbonneau was on leave following knee surgery. Perhaps just as well. Given the jurisdictional rivalries between the provincial and city cops, we doubted much help would come from the latter on a ten-year-old file.

Angela Robinson was fourteen when she disappeared in Corning, California, in 1985. Hers had been one of the three skeletons unearthed in the pizza parlor basement in 2004. Stalled at every turn, Slidell had agreed to phone the Tehama County Sheriff’s Department to try to churn the waters out there. With little optimism. Almost thirty years had passed since Robinson’s abduction.

The other skeletons belonged to Manon Violette and Marie-Joëlle Bastien. The former was fifteen, the latter sixteen, when they vanished in 1994.

Ryan’s phone queries concerning Bastien had turned up zilch. She was from Bouctouche, New Brunswick, and in the two decades since her disappearance, her nuclear family had dispersed, leaving only a few cousins in the area. No one recalled anything about Marie-Joëlle except that she’d been murdered. And that her remains were buried in the cimetière Saint-Jean-Baptiste.

Ryan had fared better with Violette. Manon’s parents still lived at the same address on boulevard Édouard-Montpetit in Montreal. Though reluctant, they’d agreed to see us the next day.

In the morning, after reexamining our respective files, we would interview Mère and Père Violette. Then we’d work on locating Tawny McGee, the sole survivor of the Pomerleau-Catts reign of terror. We held little optimism that the visits would yield fruit. But what the hell. Nothing else was working.

Another aviation miracle. The flight landed early. The bookend punctuality made me mildly uneasy.

Exiting the airport, I was hit by a wind corkscrewing straight off the tundra. I admit it—I gasped. No matter how often it happens, I’m never prepared for that first frigid slap.

Ryan and I shared a taxi from Dorval. At his insistence, I was dropped first. I suppose it made sense. My condo is in Centreville. His is across the St. Lawrence in a concrete LEGO curiosity called Habitat 67.

Ryan offered to collect me in the morning. Happy to avoid the Métro, and frostbite, I accepted.

Digging for keys, I was aware of the taxi lingering at the curb, exhaust billowing like a small white cumulus in the red glow of the taillights. I was touched. Though I knew we had no future together, it meant something that he still cared about my safety.

My condo was cold and dark. Before removing my inadequate autumn-in-Dixie jacket, I thumbed the lever on the thermostat left. Way left. The hum of the furnace sounded loud in the stillness.

After a slapdash facial and dental effort, I threw on sweats and dropped into bed.

I dreamed about snow.

I awoke to bright sunlight leaking around the edges of the shade. Knew the day would be colder than crap.

The cupboard was bare, not even coffee. Rather than hike to the corner dépanneur, I skipped breakfast.

Ryan phoned at 7:55 as he was making the turn onto my street. I dug out my Kanuk jacket, mittens, and a scarf. Pulled on boots and set forth.

I was right. The air was so crisp, it felt like tiny crystals sliding in and out of my nose. The sun was a tight white ball hanging low in an immaculate blue sky.

I scurried to Ryan’s Jeep and climbed in.

Ryan never tired of teasing about my inadequacy in dealing with polar climes. Today he said nothing. His skin looked gray, and a dark half-moon sculpted each lower lid.