“She told you Dane uses that drug?” Tess asked as she leaned down to fish her phone out of her purse.

“Not exactly. It’s another of my wild-goose chases, I suppose.”

She selected Wikipedia, since it always covered the basics, while they drove through downtown Chillicothe, a city large enough to swallow twenty Cold Creeks. As she read aloud to him, she began to shiver.

“Midazolam is not a pain medication. The main effects are amnesia and patient compliance. Patients lose touch with reality, not knowing where they are or what is really occurring. Patients do not recall pain or a bad experience. Under the drug’s influence they can carry on a conversation but will remember nothing once it wears off. It can open the door to abuse!” she went on, her voice getting louder. “Some patients, during a procedure or later, experience a distorted, nightmarish version of actual events and later feel abandonment and panic. Gabe, that’s it! That’s how I felt! Abandoned. I’ve felt panic, deep inside for years, especially when I hear or see certain things.”

“Calm down. You’re okay now, safe with me,” he said, gripping her knee with his hand. “It’s still a stab in the dark, but maybe one that will find its mark. Dr. Stevens said Dane had easy access to and sold vet drugs, which do not need the property of amnesia, but who knows what else he had access to?”

He put his hand back on the steering wheel, then thumped it with one fist while he spoke. “Tess, as long as I’m here in Chillicothe, I still need to check into something else.”

“And this is about someone other than Dane, right?”

“When Mayor Owens talked to you at the police station, how did he seem to you? Glad to see you? Upset?”

“In a hurry to get me out of town. At first he acted kind of creepy, almost like he wanted to scare me away. Is this something about Reese Owens?”

“He is alleged to have molested a young girl years ago when he was a teenager and the girl was five.”

Tess gasped. “And when he started walking toward me in your conference room, I felt so...so oppressed. In danger. But how could he run for public office, even in such a small town?”

“Well, here’s the strange part. As far as Vic Reingold can tell, the records for the crime have disappeared, except for one he found that someone had missed expunging. But I need to get corroborating evidence of what happened years ago before I question him on this. I’m heading to the neighborhood where he grew up. I’m going to ask around, see what people recall.”

“Well, he did marry the former governor’s granddaughter, so that might be why it was erased, not just so he could run for mayor. Friends in high places—at least as high as that hill near Lake Azure with the mayor’s beautiful house on it,” she said.

“My thoughts exactly.”

He pulled onto a side street in an area that had seen better times, where the houses were night and day from the Owens mansion outside Cold Creek. In the distance the big paper mill loomed with its smokestacks stabbing the sky. The yards were small, the buildings close together. No garages, cars parked on the street. A couple of places had Halloween decorations, ghosts or a black cat cutout. A few garbage cans sat on the curb. Near dinnertime, it was almost deserted except for a couple of boys shooting baskets at a bare metal hoop attached to a pole. The moment the boys spotted the police cruiser, they disappeared.

“You weren’t going to bring me with you here at first, or even tell me you were checking into Mayor Owens, were you?” she asked.

He was leaning forward over the steering wheel, reading house numbers as he slowed even more, then parallel parked under a ghost tied to an old tree. It was made of a dirty sheet with a noose around his neck to make its head.

“I didn’t want to spook you,” Gabe said, “though I hate to put it that way, considering what’s hanging over us. It reminds me of the gift shop where Sandy was taken.”

He leaned toward her and looked at the dark green house out her side window. “Hard to believe Reese Owens grew up here,” he muttered, and turned off the engine. “As much as his wife’s a snob, I’m surprised he didn’t have someone erase records of this old address too. Sit tight. I’m going to see if anyone’s at his boyhood home, ask if there’s someone in the neighborhood who’s lived here a long time. Lock yourself in.”

Tess watched as he went up to the door, rang the bell, then talked to a young woman whose face was obscured behind the torn screen. He came back out to the car, unlocked and opened her door. Arms on the roof of the car, he leaned down toward her.

“Maybe things are finally going our way,” he said. “Mrs. Bowes, who lives right across the street, has been here for thirty years. The problem is, this woman says she’s a bit of a gossip, so isn’t that too bad?”

“I have a feeling I should not go with you,” she said.

“Be right back. And I’m not sure it’s a good thing you’re reading my mind,” he said, and winked at her. He closed the door, then motioned that she should lock herself in again.

It was a good thing, she thought, he wasn’t reading her mind. No man had ever gotten to her the way he did. His glance, his voice, his touch, made her tingle and tremble and in the most delicious way—even when things were supposed to be strictly business, maybe life-and-death business.

* * *

The two-story, gray house had tired-looking lace curtains in the windows, upstairs and down. The narrow sidewalk was sunken and cracked, and the porch boards creaked under Gabe’s feet. The two-seat swing on chains was atilt and moving slightly in the breeze as if ghosts sat there.

When he rang the bell, he saw the curtains twitch as someone looked out. He could hear a TV program blaring from inside. A short, elderly lady with some of her white hair on end and some matted down opened the door. The TV got louder. It sounded like some game show with a lot of applause. She must be hard of hearing. Gabe raised his voice.

“Mrs. Bowes, I’m Sheriff McCord from over in Falls County, just checking up on someone who grew up in this neighborhood. I understand you’ve lived here for years.”

“Thirty-five with my husband, Bob, who worked at the paper mill, but he passed. My daughter says I’m getting forgetful, but not about the past, no, sir. Want to come in? I’m watchin’ a rerun of Family Feud, but I can turn it down.”

He didn’t want to leave Tess alone, even locked in a police car. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just ask you a question or two from here. It concerns the Owens family, and the boy was named Reese.”

“Oh, him. Did real well for hisself, married up, he did. He’s even a mayor now in some little town down yonder.”

Gabe heard applause from the TV in the dim room behind her. It hit him that Reese might resent having to run such a small town, but in a way, he might be hiding out there. If Reese was mayor of a big town, that would bring more media attention, maybe a check of his past, hidden records or not. Maybe that’s why he ate too much, taking out his frustrations that way. And maybe Reese took little girls to prove he was clever, or to feed his sick fantasies that had started here in his teens. There were no doubt plenty of places in that huge house on the hill to hide a child. The Owenses were childless. Maybe they wanted a compliant, sweet little girl—several of them.

“Yes, that’s the man,” Gabe said. “Mrs. Bowes, do you recall anything about Reese Owens getting in trouble with the law?”

“Well,” she said, drawling her words and rolling her eyes. “They tried to cover it up then and after.”

“Who did?”

“His family at first. Then I’ll bet his wife’s people. You know who her granddaddy was, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. What sort of trouble was he in years ago?”

“I’ll tell you, young man, but I don’t want what I say showin’ up in the papers or on TV. My Bob took good money for promisin’ to keep quiet ’bout it once, though I was shopping at Kmart that day and never promised a thing. Just don’t you go getting poor little Reese in trouble for something bad he did long ago. People change, you know.”