He pushed it away, dirty from the want of it. Find the name. Get the daughter. That was all.

“My car is here.” Gabrielle took the bagged glass. “Call the lab. Tell them I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“I’ll walk you out,” Bree said.

Marshall didn’t want to be in the room when Bree returned. It would be hard enough for her to call her husband, tell him what she had to tell, without a witness in the room. Besides, there were things he needed to be doing.

He went into Trey’s office. It felt strange to be in this room, alone. Or at all. Trey was his boss. They hadn’t really socialized since he lost Betsy. But he remembered the place, with its spare, modern furniture and high bookshelves lining two of the walls. He sat down at Trey’s desk, but Trey was shorter, so the chair didn’t fit him. His knees jutted up. Still, he wasn’t going to change the settings.

He called the lab and got lucky; the cute tech with the dimples, Jenna something, picked up. She always came through for him. He told her it was for the firm but made it plain it was more urgent than a regular rush job.

“I’ll get it done. But only because you begged,” she teased. “I’m going to be here until midnight, though.” A dramatic, suffering sigh.

“I owe you,” he told her.

“What kind of owe me?” she asked. “Six-pack of PBR or shrimp dinner?”

“Lobster, if you find me some fingerprints.”

She laughed, and they disconnected.

He was swirling Trey’s mouse to make Windows come up before he realized he’d probably just been asked out on a date. Worse, he’d probably accepted.

Betsy had always told him he was stupid about flirting. Once, at the grocery store, he’d left the cart to go grab a local lager from the refrigerated case in the back. A woman came up and asked what kind of beer went well with steak. He’d been telling her about his favorite brewery when Betsy came to find him. The woman left abruptly, and Betsy had almost choked to death laughing. She’d fluttered her eyelashes and fake-swooned into his shoulder. “Excuse me, kind sir, do you have any beer in your pants?”

Was it a date? Jesus. Jenna looked so young to him. Well, it was not a problem for today. He should go out with someone anyway. That swamping wave of sick desire to be the one to hand Bree her baby back told him so. It was different from simply wanting Robert safe and home. Very different. His stupid crush on Bree wasn’t ever going to be a good idea, but it was downright dangerous now. Dangerous for Robert.

He opened up his Gmail and quickly typed in his notes, all he’d gleaned from Bree’s story, the video, and that long, strange phone conversation. He organized them as he went. It wasn’t much.

Witch: Widow. 70+. One child (F). A reader, esp British mystery novels. Likes suspense movies. Owns or owned house with carport. Terminally ill. Accent = Blue collar, rural. Georgia?

Husband: Died young. Construction worker. Controlling/abusive?

Daughter:

He had no facts about the daughter, only the understanding that she was in this up to her neck and that she was the mother’s only weak point.

He would start with their strongest lead. Geoff. It only took four searches to find him in the online edition of an Alabama newspaper. Geoff Wilkerson, age three, had gone missing from a local park almost six weeks ago.

It hadn’t spread beyond the local news. Partially because there’d been a deadly mass shooting at a Texas school earlier that same day, then another at a California nightclub not twelve hours later. These things had dominated the news cycle. But there was also enough in the Alabama stories for him to get the subtext: The cops thought one parent or maybe both were behind their son’s disappearance. The case wasn’t being treated like a kidnapping.

He shook his head. The cops had this one very, very wrong.

Geoff’s father was Adam Wilkerson, a community-college professor. Marshall’s eyebrows knit. He’d been expecting either another lawyer or someone rich enough to be a client. Adam Wilkerson was head of the business and legal-studies department, so maybe he had been a lawyer at one point. A disgraced one, if he’d fallen from Trey and Spence’s level to teaching at a junior college in Gadsden, Alabama.

Adam wasn’t on social media, but he found Geoff’s mother, Kelly, on Facebook and Instagram. She listed her profession as SAHM, still, and that hit him like a fist.

Her profile pictures showed a cute, pug-nosed blonde in her mid-twenties. Her Insta was private, but she’d turned off her Facebook security settings. Her feed was filled with people posting thoughts and prayers. There was a 1-800 number and a plea for information pinned to the top, probably the reason her security was set so low. It had been set up by her sister, who’d posted a furious rant about how the police weren’t looking for Geoff and asking “the Internet” to help bring him home.

Marshall scrolled down past all this. He was looking for the Wilkersons’ regular life. Before. When he found it, it was hard to look at. It was so nice and normal. Pictures of avocado toast and a fat Siamese cat and fresh-cut flowers. Almost every other posting showed a smiling toddler. Geoff had had a short, round face like his mother’s and a cap of blond hair in that bowl cut normally reserved for television children. His happy smile revealed baby teeth with gaps that made them look like little corn kernels.

He was a beautiful child. Again, very hard to look at.

Marshall scrolled further, until he found a good picture of the husband. He was a tweedy sort, older than his wife, with small round glasses and a bald head and some salt in his tidy beard. She was in a cocktail dress, tucked up under his arm. They were clearly heading someplace special.

Marshall pirated the shot and a good face shot of Geoff, too. Then he attached both to an email and sent them to Gabrielle and Bree along with his notes, the couple’s names and address, and Kelly Wilkerson’s social-media links.

He could hear Bree moving around the great room again. Pacing, he thought. Not talking. She must still be trying to get up the courage to call Trey. He felt for her, but his cop brain pointed out that if Trey was still ignorant, he was also likely in a calm state of mind. He could be useful.

Marshall took advantage of her hesitation, texting Trey pictures of all three Wilkersons. He’d forwarded himself the still shot of the old woman from Bree’s phone earlier. Now he cropped it in close, so Trey wouldn’t recognize his own porch, and sent that, too.