She sighed impatiently. “Penny hasn’t spoken to me in several days. We had a disagreement, and her way of punishing me is silence. But she usually answers her text messages, even if only to say yes or no to a direct question.”

“She might be more inclined to answer a call from the police,” Michael Warner suggested to her.

“This is so embarrassing,” Julia Gray muttered, staring at her silent telephone, willing something to appear on the screen.

“If we can just get her number and the address for where she’s staying, we’ll make sure she calls you,” Elwood said. The diplomat. He took his little spiral notebook and pen out of his coat pocket and offered it to her.

Embarrassment flushed her cheeks as she awkwardly wielded the pen with her injured hand.

“I don’t know the exact address,” she confessed. “She’s staying with a friend from school. The last name is Lawyer—no—Lawler. They live nearby. Just a few blocks over. Washburn and Forty-Sixth? Forty-Fifth? I’m just not sure of the exact address. I’ve met the girl’s mother,” she hastened to add. “She’s a very nice woman. I think she’s an accountant. Or her husband is.”

She looked up, unable to resist the urge to see how her lousy, fumbling explanation was being received. Kovac just looked at her, his eyes flat, his face expressionless.

“This isn’t making me look like a very good mother,” she said, forcing a nervous smile. “If you had teenagers, you would understand.”

Her hands were trembling as she gave the notebook back.

“What happened to your wrist?” Elwood asked.

“Oh,” she said, looking at her hand as if it had just sprouted from the end of her sweater sleeve. “Oh, I fell. I sprained it. I slipped on the ice and fell. It’s a hazard of my profession,” she said with a nervous laugh.

“What do you do?” Kovac asked.

“I’m a pharmaceutical rep. I have to negotiate a lot of nasty parking lots this time of year. Snow, ice, high heels, dragging my case behind me.”

“You might want to rethink the high heels,” Kovac said.

Julia Gray nodded, trying to smile.

“I’m sure Penny is fine,” she said again, her thoughts quickly back on the daughter she hadn’t seen in several days. Suddenly, a routine mother-daughter spat was looming large in her mind. An innocent stay-over with a schoolmate was taking on sinister overtones.

“I’m sure she is,” Elwood said kindly. “We’re just checking out all possibilities.”

“This isn’t about that story on the news?” Michael Warner asked, frowning with concern. “The girl on the freeway?”

“Thank you for your time,” Kovac said, deliberately not answering the question, a longtime cop habit. It was ingrained in him to give nothing away. But a part of it this time was both the compassion to keep a parent from thinking the worst, and the perverse twist of that: letting them wonder. In the case of Julia Gray, he felt she deserved a bit of both.

“We’ll let you folks get back to your evening,” he said. “Please let us know if you hear from your daughter.”

They left the house with Julia Gray and Michael Warner looking uncertain in the foyer.

“If you had a sixteen-year-old daughter in this day and age,” Elwood said, “wouldn’t you be a little more insistent about knowing who her friends are and where she might be?”

“If I had a sixteen-year-old daughter,” Kovac said as they walked back to the car, “I’d have her microchipped with GPS.”

18

“Mom, can Alex come over and play with the Wii?”

Liska’s youngest placed the last of the dinner dishes on the counter above the dishwasher and looked up at her with bright, hopeful eyes, the hint of mischief playing at the corners of his mouth.

“Are you done with your homework?”

He nodded enthusiastically, smelling the victory. His gaze darted quickly to the clock on the microwave.

“Did you ask Kyle if he wants to play?” Nikki asked.

R.J. rolled his eyes. “He went upstairs to feel sorry for himself.”

“Maybe he’ll come down later,” she said, knowing R.J. could not have cared less. It was her own futile, wishful thinking. Kyle hadn’t said ten words since they’d gotten home.

Marysue had come to the rescue with spaghetti Bolognese and her usual sunny disposition. She and R.J. had chatted about their days, while Nikki had spent the meal twirling her pasta and watching her eldest stare at his plate.

R.J. shrugged. “Whatever.”

Nikki frowned. “You know, your brother is going through a rough time right now. You could be a little nicer to him.”

“He’s a dork,” R.J. said bluntly. “He’s a dork, and he likes being a dork, and that’s why he doesn’t have any friends who aren’t dorks.”

“He’s your brother,” Nikki said sternly. “And I don’t care if he’s a dork. You stick up for your brother. Family sticks together.”

“He’s the one who shuts his door,” R.J. pointed out, snagging a fresh chocolate chip cookie off the plate on the island. He took a bite. “He doesn’t want to hang out with me.”

“Why would he hang out with someone who calls him a dork?” Nikki countered. “And don’t talk with your mouth full.”

He swallowed and glanced at the clock again. “Can Alex come over?”

Nikki sighed. “Yes, Alex can come over if his mom says it’s okay. And he goes home at ten on the dot. It’s a school night.”

Grinning, R.J. backed toward the hallway. His thank-you came a split second before the doorbell rang, and he bolted.

“And that would be Alex,” Nikki said.

She turned with a sigh toward Marysue. “I hope being with my family won’t make you sterile.”

Marysue smiled kindly, seeming much too wise for twenty-six. “I love your boys. You know that. They’re good boys, Nikki. You’ve got a lot on your plate right now, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve had a lot on my plate for fifteen years. That doesn’t seem to be getting any better. And their lives are only getting more complicated too.”

She went to the coffeemaker, popped a pod in, and hit the button to start the thing hissing and spitting into the lopsided Christmas mug R.J. had made for her—with Marysue’s help—at a local pottery store. She would pour a generous shot of Irish cream liqueur into the coffee and have it with one of the cookies Marysue had made that afternoon.

There was a painful truth: Marysue was a better mother, and she had yet to give birth to anyone.

“I feel like suddenly I don’t know anything about Kyle’s life,” Nikki admitted, and with the admission she recognized a small knot of cold fear in her chest. How had this happened? How could she not know her own child?

“He was my little boy, climbing trees and scraping his knees and building a cardboard dinosaur for the science fair,” she said. “Suddenly, he’s a teenager, and everything about his life is a secret. He had a girlfriend over the summer. I didn’t have any idea! Now he’s getting picked on at school. He’s getting into fights. And I just realized I don’t even know who his friends are anymore, let alone his enemies.”

She poured the Baileys into her coffee and climbed onto a stool at the island. Marysue slid the plate of cookies toward her and took the other seat.

“How did this happen?” Nikki asked. “Have I just not been paying attention? He’s always been such an easy kid, self-sufficient, never in trouble. Did I really just forget about him? I don’t get it.

“I grew up thinking how great it would be when I had my own family,” she said, catching a glimpse of her younger self in her mind’s eye—innocent and full of romantic notions of love and of having a life untainted by her parents’ mistakes and disappointments.

“All the wonderful things we’d do together,” she went on. “All the time I’d spend with my kids—hours and hours of playing games and reading stories and going places and watching the wonder in their little faces as they learned the new things that I’d teach them.”