Cold Case

Four Hours Missing

Mary Ryan looked like the Madonna. Jack Malone had thought that the first time he saw her, when she opened the door to them, and he thought it again now as he gazed at her photograph. Not the tranquil version in blue with a baby in her arms, but the one that looked as if she had been signed up to a deal that involved suffering for the sake of other men's sins. Mary could have been a younger sister Jack never knew he had; one who had endured as he rebelled. The fall of brown hair, the haunted dark eyes; every time he had looked at a photograph of Mary's missing daughter he had been disconcerted by how similar Margaret was to his own children. He remembered Mary holding a white cotton handkerchief in her fingers that she had washed and ironed so there wasn't a single crease, and which she slowly mangled into a damp twist of despair as first the hours and then the days crawled by and there was no word of her daughter.

That had been four years previously; before Martin had joined them, before so many things had happened, regrettable and memorable and painful and so beautiful he hoped that he would always carry them to the grave. Impossible to think of memories now without thinking of his father, his mind at the last a Pandora's box from which more than ills were escaping; recollections taking wing and flittering away to be scattered, perhaps forever, or perhaps to be there again on the next visit. For himself, when that time came, Jack was sure that the lost children he had never found would be the last memories to leave him. All those days of never knowing; he had seen them erode marriages and sanity, like rainfall on rock. He and his team lived in the fissures left by other people's disappearances. Margaret was one of the ones who would always haunt him, and now here was her mother's photograph staring up at him reproachfully, come to join the missing, gone to join the lost. He groaned aloud.

And he had been thinking that with the last case wrapped up in a way that was nothing other than depressing he would at least be able to let everyone knock off early to try to get over it….

"Something wrong?"

He looked up to find Vivian Johnson gazing at him in concern. He beckoned her into the office and pushed the file across to her. "Remember Margaret Ryan?"

Viv grimaced. "Vividly." Jack knew how she hated unsolved cases. She was as tenacious as she was compassionate, that was what made her such a good agent, but the flip side to that was the way the unsolved ones ate at her. Especially when children were involved. "Seven years old, went missing on her way home from school, appeared – from the one grainy security video that ever showed up – to have been abducted by the stranger who asked her for directions, was never seen again. Have we got a new lead?"

"Possibly – if we can find a link between Margaret's disappearance and her mother's."

Viv's warm brown eyes widened. "Mary Ryan has gone missing as well?"

"Four hours ago."

She looked at the pictures and Jack followed her gaze, black and white photographs of that dark-eyed girl, already appearing so wistful – even in a school photograph – as if she had always known she was intended for tragedy.

"Who reported her missing?"

"You remember Mary's husband, Frank Ryan?"

Viv's eyes betrayed a flicker of amusement for all her concern. "I remember how well the two of you hit it off."

Jack had to acknowledge that with the glimmer of a smile. "Yeah, we really got along great. Especially when I pretty much accused of him being involved in his daughter's disappearance only to have that security camera footage from that gas station turn up showing her with a guy seventy pounds lighter and six inches shorter than him."

"At a time when Ryan had the alibi of being in the local store – as seen by six other customers and a time-dated security camera."

Malone narrowed his eyes. "Now you're just rubbing it in."

"Just showing that I have perfect recall of the case, Jack."

Jack picked up the file and led the way out to where Danny Taylor, Samantha Spade, and Martin Fitzgerald were sitting in the bullpen, sharing that wilted body language that always followed a tragic conclusion to a case. They all looked exhausted and rumpled. Danny and Martin had both loosened their ties and were half-heartedly trying to write reports. Sam was still staring at the photograph of the dead woman that she had evidently just taken down from the whiteboard.

As Jack walked in, Danny looked up, brown eyes reading Jack effortlessly and already having decided that this was something out of the ordinary. He and Martin had not exactly had a fun time today, most of which they had spent interrogating a particularly difficult suspect, who, despite having elevated stupidity to a whole new level, had still taken three very long hours giving them all manner of crap before finally admitting to murdering their missing waitress; killing the hope they had been nurturing that he could have just injured her. It was always difficult when they had spent forty-eight hours getting to know every aspect of the life of a missing person, becoming intimately connected with his or her hopes and fears, only to have their search end with a cold corpse in a dumpster.

Sam looked pinched from the snow outside, as if she were waiting for spring so that her blood could thaw. For a woman born in a state with an average snowfall of forty-five inches, she really did detest the cold. Martin was gazing up at Jack as if he were waiting for the day's lesson to begin. It was difficult not to look at Martin these days and see a walking reminder of the toll this job took on all of them. Martin had found his equilibrium once more but he was never again going to be that shiny-faced self-confident new agent who offered his opinion so eagerly; a lot of his certainties were gone, probably forever, and although Jack had waited a little impatiently for Martin to get some life experience and toughen up, he now wished that life could have gone a little easier on him and broken him in more gently.

When Jack paused to pin up the picture of Mary Ryan, her eyes seeming to gaze at him with renewed sadness; as if his inevitable disappointment of her had never been in doubt yet was still to be regretted. He tossed the file onto the desk and it spilled its contents, fanning photographs of the next life that would be touching theirs.

"Mary Ryan, aged thirty-six, mother of one daughter, Margaret, herself an unsolved missing person's case from four years ago, went missing four hours ago from the Wayne Memorial Hospital in Honesdale. Mary is eight and a half months pregnant. She called her neighbors and asked them to take her in to the hospital in Honesdale because she started having what seemed to be labor pains. The neighbor dropped her off at the hospital, but by the time the doctor saw her, the contractions had stopped and they couldn't find anything wrong. Mary Ryan used the hospital payphone to call her husband to come and pick her up, and said she'd wait for him in the hospital lobby. By the time he got there – and it's a three-hour drive for him because they live up the ass end of nowhere – she wasn't there. No one's seen her since. According to her husband, she didn't pick up her purse, which means she doesn't have any cash with her or even a front door key."

Viv tapped the photographs of the house in which the Ryans lived, which Jack remembered vividly, that stone and wooden homestead buried so deeply in the woods. A house that dwelled in shadows, as he recalled it, a place the sunlight could barely find and which the snow iced annually like birthday frosting. "Mary was definitely seen at the hospital?"

"Yes, seen by several witnesses as well as the doctor who examined her, and Ryan was seen – also by several witnesses – at the market a three hour drive from where she was at the time she went missing. The local PD talked to him. He said his wife was a little tired when he left in the morning for the market but insisted she was okay. She called the neighbor about three quarters of an hour after he left."

Sam said, "Why didn't she call her husband? Most expectant fathers need to be surgically detached from their cell phones."

"She said she felt she was going into labor and she couldn't afford the time for him to drive back."

"Who are the neighbors?" Danny put in.

"Doug and Karin Box. They only moved in a few weeks ago. They live about twenty miles from the Ryans' place. They don't really know the Ryans that well but they knew Mary was pregnant and had seen her in the local store in Unity, so when they got the call, they got out their car and drove her to the hospital. They're waiting to be interviewed now."

"She could still be getting a lift back with someone else," Viv suggested. "What about car accidents?"

"That's our first line of enquiry but I don't want to waste any time on this one, so, let's assume it's an abduction but hope for the best."

"Who's with the husband?" Danny asked.

"Locals at the moment. We're having his calls routed through here to save setting up a team on the spot. He's…well, he's not the easiest guy in the world to get along with and he really doesn't like having strangers in his house. The last time he got pretty fed up with having an agent camped out in his living room so this time we're trying another way." Jack looked around the expectant agents. "I want all the hospitals in the area called, the morgues, everywhere. Sam, can you handle that?"

Samantha reached for the phone. "I'm on it."

"Danny, Martin, you two talk to the neighbors who drove her in; find out everything you can about Mary's state of mind. Did she seem depressed or excited about the baby? Did she seem frightened of anything or anyone? You know the drill. Vivian, you and I get to drive out to Honesdale to interview the hospital staff, see if somebody saw something."

Martin looked up from the file. "What about the husband? Is he coming in?"

"He wants to stay in the house in case she calls or turns up, so, I've told him that you'll come to him. Given that we completely failed to find his daughter for him when she went missing four years ago, I think that's the least we can do."

Danny was examining the picture of Margaret. "Are we assuming the cases are connected?"

"We're not assuming anything right now. We're keeping a completely open mind." Jack glanced across at Viv. "I heard that."

She held up her hands. "I didn't say a word."

"I heard you thinking it."

Sam's voice could be heard clearly as she spoke into the phone: "A Jane Doe, no identification, no purse, thirty-six years old, dark hair and eyes. No one matching that description? Okay, thank you…"

Danny narrowed his eyes. "Am I missing something here? Would you like to fill us in on whatever it is you're not telling us?"

Jack had a vivid memory of that angry confrontation in the dark kitchen; Mary watching from the doorway while tempers sparked like cinders from a campfire. "The last time around, the FBI agent leading the case screwed up, he thought Ryan had something to do with Margaret's disappearance. He was wrong, and he wasted a lot of time pursuing that line of enquiry that would have been better spent in other ways, meaning that Ryan probably doesn't have too good an impression of the FBI right now, so it would be good if you two could treat him with kid gloves."

"Who was the screw up?" Martin enquired as he tightened the knot on his tie and smoothed down his jacket, trying to look as if the day had not already felt over to him, as if he had not mentally already been on his way home.

"You're looking at him."

Danny glanced up with a frown. "Something about the guy set off your radar?"

"We just didn't hit it off."

Viv shrugged. "I don't know – I thought you were getting along fine until you accused him of having played a part in his daughter's abduction."

"I never actually said that."

"Maybe not, but I think he got where you were heading with those enquiries."

"Did you get him to take a polygraph?" Danny asked.

"Took it, passed it."

"Are you sure you did screw up?" Martin pressed. "Because I'd take your gut instinct over…"

Every time Martin did that – started trying to set Jack Malone up as the guy he wanted to be when he grew up, Jack was torn between enjoying it and wondering if he ought to nip it in the bud. He honestly thought he could have done a kinder job of raising Martin than Victor Fitzgerald; and had thought that from the first time he'd watched Martin squirming uncomfortably around his father, torn between irritation and embarrassment, while Victor barked orders and Martin tried to work up to that teenage rebellion he should have had a decade earlier. But nor did he particularly want to replace Victor as Martin's first stop for Daddy Issues, especially as, if Martin's affair with Samantha was anything to go by, then at least some of Martin's Issues could be Oedipal. But he understood, as a son who had never had enough of his father's attention in his time, that it wasn't enough to be told what was expected of you and that you had to unquestioningly accept parental authority, just because. He got that sometimes a man's father had to earn his respect through his actions, not just expect to have it handed to him on a plate because he'd been there at the conception. And, as a man with no sons of his own, he was perhaps not entirely uncomfortable with the role of playing surrogate father to Martin and Danny.

"Well, don't. Not over six eye witnesses and a time-stamped security video. Sometimes even I get it wrong."

"Can we have that in writing?" Vivian asked mildly.

"No," Jack assured her. He turned back to the two younger agents. "Ryan's not the kind of guy that takes questioning well. He's six feet five, two hundred and fifty pounds, and looks as if he bench presses grizzly bears. He inherited this big farm in Wisconsin from his father, which he worked before and after his father's death until he sold up and moved to the Catskills, so he's always been his own boss. I think he's a little out of practice at people not treating him with a certain amount of…deference, and he was in a high stress situation. He's just got a whole alpha male thing going on, but don't let it get to you because I don't think it's relevant to the case. So, after you two have talked to the neighbors, I want you to drive out and join Viv and me in Unity, and then I want you to drive up to Ryan's place and talk to him, but you need to tread carefully. Be polite."

"As opposed to how we usually are?" Martin sounded hurt and Jack wished he would lay off with the reproachful eyes. It wasn't exactly a secret around here that Martin had become short-tempered with pain after that last fall of his and that it had made him more of a liability than an asset when interviewing witnesses for a while, but that had been out of character for him and wasn't an issue now. Jack felt he should probably make that clear before Martin started beating himself up about what he imagined to be a criticism.

"I'm saying be extra polite. Otherwise you're just going to waste time butting heads. Call him ‘sir' a lot like you mean it – he likes that. But try to find out what you can about how he and his wife were getting along and what her state of mind was in the days leading up to her disappearance."

Sam put down the phone from another fruitless call and looked across at Jack. "You don't think she's suicidal, do you?"

"I don't know. That's something I hope we can establish by talking to the people who met with her but we know she took her daughter's disappearance hard, she's got another baby due any minute and still no word on Margaret. She's probably tired and hormonal; she may have felt momentarily overwhelmed."

"Or that the only way to protect her unborn child from the world that took away her daughter, was to kill it and herself." Sam was careful not to meet anyone's eye.

"That's a different take on the word ‘protect' from any I would use." Martin took a sip from a cup of coffee that had been cold an hour before and Jack wondered when, if ever, he was going to trade in that damned FBI mug and get something less geeky.

Sam's eyes momentarily flashed a look of hurt. "It's not something a man would understand. She may have thought it was the only way to keep it safe from all the harm out there."

"Rabbits do it," Danny put in. As everyone looked at him in surprise, he expanded: "Eat their young to protect them from predators."

"It's still murder," Martin insisted.

Sam gave him a look of exasperation. "Why don't you wait until you've already lost one child to God knows what and lain awake every night for four years wondering if she was raped or tortured before she was killed, and then try being eight and a half months pregnant in a world where every headline tells you there is no safe place to raise a child and see how rational you feel?"

They all watched her move away to another desk and Martin looked not unlike a schoolboy who had just received a scolding he wasn't entirely sure that he deserved. "Did I say something wrong? Because I didn't mean…"

"It's okay." Danny patted his arm. "Just tell Sam you're sorry later."

"But I don't know what I did."

"That's not the point. The point is, she's upset, so you say you're sorry. That's what you do with women when you upset them. You not knowing that – that's the reason you're single, right there, buddy."

Viv glanced across at Jack. "I'll talk to her."

"You sure?" Jack looked over in some concern to where the blonde agent was doggedly dialing more numbers. Sam was looking as if the cold had got into her bloodstream today, a bone-deep chill, and he suspected this case was going to get straight under her skin. It was already under his, like an itch. He had failed Mary Ryan once; he was damned sure he wasn't going to do it twice. "She okay?"

"Jack, you don't need me to tell you that this job sucks some days. This is one of those days."

Sighing, he rose to his feet. "Okay, well, it's you and me for Honesdale. Again. And I was so hoping I'd seen the last of that place." He glanced at Danny and Martin. "You two know what you're doing?"

"Don't we always?" Danny countered.

"I don't know. The last time I took my eye off you for five minutes, Martin managed to get himself shot and you got yourself concussed. So, can you make it to the interview room and back without need of the paramedics?"

Danny glanced at Martin. "I don't think we need to dignify that with a reply."

"Me neither."

Jack watched them head out of the door towards the interview rooms, turning to find Viv watching him with that expression on her face that told him he was not yet on her shit list but did need to take a behavioral exit turn before he got there. "What?" he said defensively. He thought he had shown some admirable restraint in not also mentioning Martin getting knocked down a staircase or nearly getting shot and having to be saved by a well-placed bullet from Danny, or all the various terrifying things that Danny had done while suffering from PTSD.

"It's been months, Jack, – it's probably time to dial down the over-protective thing."

The moment hung there as Jack thought about how to play this; he had been waiting for someone to call him on his attitude for a while and had been ready to go in hard and defensive, but with Viv holding his gaze with all that understanding in her eyes, he felt he could afford an acknowledgement; an admission that, yes, he knew it was a problem, and, yes, he was dealing with it.

"Hey, you did your part in making me what I am today when you decided to have open heart surgery on my watch."

"You know, I didn't actually do that on purpose, and I don't think Martin got himself shot just to fray your nerves either."

"I'm not so sure." He pulled on his coat, his gaze letting her know he got it and he really was working on it for all the flippancy of his reply: "It's classic adolescent acting out at a father-figure behavior. It's right up there with painting your bedroom black, playing your music too loud, and smoking pot. He does it again, he's grounded."

***

Martin had spent a long time learning the common signs of deception; the gestures people made when they were being evasive or untruthful; all that tugging at their clothing, adjusting their hair, hands uncomfortable in any position, refusing to meet the eye of the person questioning them; white collar crime was good for studying all the many ways in which apparently respectable people would, given the right – or wrong – circumstances, lie through their teeth. Then he had also had the opportunity to study the common signs of evasion from the inside, as he pretended to be something he wasn't while concealing what he had become. So, he considered himself something of an expert on lying these days, but so far, the Boxes hadn't said or done anything to trigger his radar. He believed that they were telling at least what they perceived to be the truth.

Karin Box was thirty-two and her husband was thirty-six. She had a likeable face rather than a pretty one, her wiry fair hair barely tamed while his was starting to thin back from his temples. Their clothing looked workmanlike rather than smart, their thick sweaters and heavy boots reminding him just how cold and rough the terrain was out of the city; also the kind of clothing one might expect people to throw on quickly when they needed to go out in a hurry in answer to a phone call. So far he was making them as nothing but concerned and honest.

Martin noticed that Danny, like him, was being extra polite in readiness for talking to Ryan. He was still getting flashes of guilt and self-hatred over various interviews he'd conducted when sweating his way through withdrawal; skin prickling with need and every witness feeling as if they were thwarting him out of spite by not furnishing the information that was necessary to get the job done. Ever since he'd stopped being a slave to the painkillers he had been watching himself carefully to ensure that he asked the right questions, used the right words, checking with Danny probably too many times in each interview, a shared glance to reassure himself that he was doing this right. Danny had never lost patience with him, gaze steady and kind. But today he felt normal again, or as close to normal as he could get, and the rhythm had come back to him, all that hard won knowledge still there when he needed it. Despite what Jack had told them about being wrong, Martin couldn't help thinking there had to be something that would have set off Jack's radar, but nevertheless he picked his words with extra care.

"So, have you known the Ryans long?" Danny pressed, politely.

"Not really. We only bought our place a few months ago, but we'd seen them around, you know…? In the local stores, buying groceries. Frank Ryan always made a point of saying ‘Hi' and even Mary would smile if she saw you wave. We knew Mary was pregnant and we'd heard in the store about what happened to their little girl. I think everyone was really rooting for the baby to be okay and for her to feel better."

"She wasn't well?"

Karin Box leaned forward. "She always looked so sad. Sometimes, when they'd come into town, she'd stay in the jeep while her husband did the shopping, and I'd see her watching the kids in the school and I just knew she was thinking about her little girl."

And Martin could see her then, Mary slightly misted behind windshield glass, watching the children spill through the school gates, so vivid and animated while she was a grief-paled ghost, the thread that connected her to life growing thinner and thinner with each year that passed and there was no word of her missing daughter.

"What about when she called you?" Martin asked.

Doug Box shrugged. "Karin took the call. I was just heading out, but she came out after me and asked me to wait, said Mary Ryan was on the phone and thought she was having contractions. I asked if I should go and look for Frank, but Karin said Mary wanted to be taken straight to the hospital. So, we drove up there, and picked her up, and then drove for Honesdale. We're still getting used to the winters around here, and I don't mind telling you, driving down those rough roads, with the puddles all frozen and snow everywhere, and a pregnant woman in the back – well, I was glad when that journey was over."

Karin smiled and patted her husband's hand. "Doug says if we have any kids, we have to move into Honesdale for the last three months of every pregnancy, just for the sake of his nerves."

"How did Mary seem during the journey?" Danny gave Karin his best encouraging smile and Martin ducked his head to hide a smile as he saw the woman visibly responding to the warm light in Danny's soulful brown eyes.

Karin and Doug exchanged a glance. "She was quiet," Karin offered. "I asked her if she was in a lot of pain and she said it wasn't that painful but she was just really worried about the baby and she was probably fussing about nothing and I said it was better to be safe than sorry."

"She didn't really say much," Doug put in. "We asked her how Frank was and she said he was fine and we asked if it was always like this in the winter and she said it was, pretty much, but that it was so beautiful in the woods sometimes, that it made up for it."

"I asked her what it was like where they'd lived before," Karin added. "She said it was a thousand acres of nowhere in the middle of nothing."

"I tried to ask her about family," Doug added. "But she said she didn't have any family except her husband, not any more."

"Did you get the impression that she was depressed?" Martin looked down at his notepad and saw that he had written ‘a thousand acres of nowhere'. He really wanted to know how she had referred to the baby, if she had seemed connected to it. That was the difference sometimes, the pregnant women who were unwilling vessels for a life they'd never wanted, and the ones who were bonding with their unborn through every kick. Had this baby been Mary's way back to life after the cryogenic suspension of grief from the loss of her first child or just something with which she was unable to connect?

Once again Doug and Karin exchanged a glance, confirming their impressions with one another. "No, a little excited, maybe. Her eyes were kind of bright. I thought she might be getting the beginning of a fever."

"What about frightened?"

"No. Definitely not."

"Did she talk about the baby?" Danny put in.

Karin visibly tried to remember. "I asked if she knew if it was a girl or a boy and she shook her head and there was kind of an awkward silence. You know how it is when someone's lost a child? You want them to know that you know and you're not going to say anything crass but at the same time you don't want to bring it up. Anyway, Doug said Frank seemed the kind of guy who would probably like to have a son. She looked kind of… I don't know… She seemed cold and I told Doug to turn up the heater. And I asked her about names and she said sometimes you couldn't know what a baby was meant to be called until it was born and you held it and then sometimes you knew."

Martin and Danny exchanged a look of relief. A woman talking about holding a living baby and choosing a name didn't sound as if she were contemplating suicide.

Danny tossed the question in as if they just had to ask it and it wasn't even that important: "Did you get the impression that everything was okay between her and her husband?"

Doug shrugged. "I guess." He looked at his wife. "Karin…?"

She grimaced. "She's just so quiet when he's around, you know? He's a nice guy. He helped out the Wentworths when that tree went down on their barn. Came straight over with his chainsaw and cut it up for them for kindling. But he's so sure about everything and I always think when I see them together that if I was living with someone who took up all that space and never had any doubts, I'd find it hard to know who I was, too."

Her husband looked amused. "You're just used to having a man like me who's house-trained and does as he's told."

She grinned back at him. "Well, yeah, honey, that's the way I think men are meant to be. Can't go around letting them have their own way all the time. It's not good for them."

"That's how Mary Ryan strikes you?" Martin leaned forward, trying to catch hold of that tantalizing thread of information before it was snatched away again. "Someone who doesn't know who she is?"

"I don't know. She's just so…quiet. There could be a lot going on inside, but I don't think she'd talk about it. I like her fine, she's just not someone you can call up for a girl chat when you're having one of those days, you know?"

"You didn't notice anything strange? When you picked Mary up, during the journey, or when you dropped her off at the hospital?"

Another shared look between the husband and wife and then a helpless shrug from both. "No, I'm sorry," Karin said.

"No one out of the ordinary?" Danny suggested. "No one hanging around suspiciously?"

"Didn't see anyone like that – but then we weren't really looking."

"What was the last thing she said to you?"

"I wanted to go in to the hospital with her but she said not to wait, that she'd call Frank and ask him to collect her. She apologized for coming out without her purse and said she would give us gas money next time she saw us. That was pretty much it until we got the call from Frank – he checked the last number she'd called – and he asked us to come straight here."

Martin gave them a warm smile. "You did absolutely the right thing. Thank you for your help. An agent will be along to take you home."

Danny followed Martin into the corridor. "Not very observant but I think they're honest."

"They may not have seen anyone waiting because the kidnapper either wasn't there or he was out of sight. But, I agree. I think they've told us everything they know. It's just a pity they know so little. Ryan sounds kind of…controlling."

"Well, that would explain Jack not liking him. Jack likes strong women who know their own minds and don't take any crap from anyone. When women aren't like that he tends to get suspicious."

"Of course, Ryan may just be over-protective. Mary's pregnant and she's already lost one child. He may not realize he's stifling her." Martin darted Danny a slightly defensive glance. "Some woman think you're smothering them if you ask for a second date. Ryan may just be old-fashioned." He added curiously: "How come you and Sam didn't work this case anyway? Weren't you both on the team back then?"

"We'd been working another case when this one came in. Sam and I were in Miami. We were pretty sure the guy we were looking for was dead as we had an eye witness account of him being shoved into the trunk of a car and most people don't sleep with their eyes open. But we needed to find the body to be sure. While we were still in Miami finishing up the dumpster search, the Ryan case came in and, as there was no time to waste, Jack and Viv started right on it. They had other people checking records and running forensics but it was basically all those two lived for and dreamed of for a while. By the time Sam and I got back it was pretty much a cold trail and Jack was not in the best of moods, as you can imagine."

"I'm kind of glad I wasn't around back then."

"I think that was the case that made Jack realize he needed someone else on the team."

"Jack told me he needed an extra agent because he'd fed the last one to alligators for breaking procedure."

"Well, he was a little pissed with you at the time, Concussion Boy." Danny gave Martin a sideways look. "So, would you call me up for a guy chat when you're having one of those days?"

Martin tried to suppress a smile without much success. "No."

"Okay, now I'm hurt."

"No, you're not. You wouldn't call me either."

"I'd call you in a heartbeat," Danny protested.

"You'd call Viv," Martin pointed out. "Everyone calls Viv. Even Jack calls Viv."

Danny considered for a moment and then conceded with a shrug. "Okay, but if Viv was out I'd so call you."

Every now and then they got close to talking about it: the shooting, the terror, the pain, the survivor guilt, the addiction, but they always ended up veering away from it. Martin was still of the opinion that veering away was the right thing to do. Danny had helped him when he needed his help and he had thanked him for it, but there were some things he didn't think either of them were ready to discuss, and every time he tried out a conversation for size in his head it came full of words that sounded like excuses, and he knew Danny would never want to hear those. And it was true, of course. It didn't matter how he'd got from not being an addict to being one, just that he acknowledged he was one now and worked hard not to take another pill.

Besides, he didn't know if words had yet been invented to describe how it had felt to live with that pain every day, the exhaustion of it wearing on his nerves, until he didn't even feel like himself any more, just a shredded shadow of the man he had once been. Every day he had forced himself to sound like the man he'd been before, still half-convinced that faking it well enough for long enough could make it be true. He still missed the painkillers, not just because of the hit they had given him, but the security they had provided that the pain couldn't get to him, couldn't flare up and overwhelm him, making that gray sweat trickle down his spine as his body became nothing except a transmitter for white waves of misery. Even after the physical symptoms of dependency had receded, he still missed the security they had provided. If he'd flushed them after he stopped needing them for the pain, he wouldn't have had them to hand after that fall down the stairs that had made the pain flare up so agonizingly again, and that thought had terrified him, that he could have left himself bereft, that the pain could get to him and he would have nothing to hand to combat it.

He risked a glance at Danny and caught the tail end of one of those concerned looks. In the beginning they had all overwhelmed him with those, making him feel weak and redundant, so ineffective he needed to be replaced, because even a ninety pound woman was stronger than he was right now… And then it had just been Danny who looked at him that way; he'd faked out everyone else. In the past he'd turned away those looks with flippancy because he didn't want Danny to know how right he was to be worried for him; now he wanted him not to have the burden of concern because despite his lingering fear of ever experiencing that kind of relentless grinding pain again, Martin actually was doing okay.

Martin shrugged. "Are you going to do that gazing intently into his eyes and nodding sympathetically thing with Ryan, by the way? Because he may get the wrong idea."

"It's called normal human empathy, Martin, you should try it some time."

"Doesn't sound like something any man in my family would enjoy."

Danny squeezed his shoulder briefly, and the touch was still a fraction too gentle, as if Martin was too fragile for any greater pressure. "Okay, time to pack for the great outdoors and make tracks for Unity. I'll pick the car. Jack said we're going to need something pretty darned Marlboro Man to tackle the terrain where Ryan lives."

"Get something with snow tires," Martin warned. "And a really good heater."

"Just make sure you pack clean underwear and an extra sweater. If your mother calls I want to be able to tell her that her little boy isn't going to be catching a chill on my watch."

Martin groaned. "I knew it was a mistake to ever let you and my mother meet."

"She's a wonderful woman," Danny was saying warmly. "And we had some really good times talking about all those cute little things you did when you were a kid. All of which I've committed to memory, by the way."

"You have enough blackmail material for a lifetime, don't you?"

Danny patted him on the shoulder cheerfully as he headed off. "Several lifetimes, Martin. Several."

Danny and his mother had not met inside the hospital. They had met in the car park where Danny had pulled by to pick up Jack – who, unlike Danny had visited Martin in the hospital even when Martin started undergoing painful physiotherapy – and for some reason, Martin's mother, who had never wanted Martin to join the FBI and still harbored hopes he might come to his senses and get into politics, had liked Danny. Martin still found it blackly comic that, after all those years of trying to get her attention while she wafted out of the door on his father's arm on a wave of expensive perfume on her way to some important social gathering, all it had taken, in the end, to get her to spend a little time with him was to get himself shot, twice, and bleed a lot. He had felt almost ashamed of his reaction when he had opened his eyes to find his mother with tears in hers, his father so upright and tense with anxiety for him; the shock of revelation that they loved him with the same painful intensity that he loved them, and then the guilt following hot on its heels that it came as such a surprise.

Perhaps her defenses had been left particularly low by Martin's shooting or perhaps Danny had just charmed her, the way he charmed everyone. Either way, Danny was now one of the few people that Martin liked whom his mother also liked, and he suspected her of calling Danny up to find out how Martin was really doing. He could almost hear her saying the words: ‘All his father ever tells me is that he's looking well….'

Not that anyone could say that about him any more, not for a while now. His clothes still hung off him awkwardly and the shadows under his eyes were slow to fade. He knew that sometimes just looking at him was enough to give Samantha a bad case of the guilts. She had it fixed in her head that, if she hadn't allowed her own irrational guilt over their abortive romance to come between them, that she would have noticed what was wrong with Martin earlier and been able to help him before things got so bad. Martin wasn't so sure. He suspected that he had used all the skills he had developed as an agent in trying to conceal what he had become very well and he had needed to hit bottom before he would admit that he needed help anyway. Up until the point when he had been too out of things to show up at work, and unable to do his job properly when he was there; up until the point when the first thing he had done in the morning was throw a pill down his throat just on reflex, without even thinking about it, he had never used the word ‘addict' about himself.

With Danny, it was a different kind of fear of what any conversation would bring forth. He never wanted to see that look in Danny's eyes again, all that anger and disappointment at the way Martin had let him down. Every now and then he would let Danny know that he was still going to meetings, and Danny was receptive to that, and kind, but he knew that the glimmer of anything that sounded like an excuse or a rationalization and there would be that look in Danny's eyes again, and he didn't think he could bear it. With Danny's help he had gotten himself straightened out, and he was still riddled with regret and shame and remorse and self-loathing if he let it overwhelm him, but he was functioning again, without pain and without painkillers. He wasn't sure how Danny was doing; sometimes when they exchanged a glance Martin thought he saw himself reflected in those too-expressive eyes, not as he was now, but as he had been after he was shot, when he had slipped into darkness even as Danny begged him to stay with him.

Martin had no recall of any events after that point, of course; Danny calling for an ambulance, Danny putting pressure on his wounds with blood-soaked hands, Danny accompanying him to the hospital and waiting while he was wheeled into surgery; he just remembered the visits that had been regular while he was on morphine, and then stopped as soon as there was the possibility of seeing him in pain; waiting and wondering and then realizing why Danny wasn't coming, and wouldn't be coming if it meant he was going to have to see Martin hurting; how Martin had to go and find him first.

It had taken so long for the pain to stop, so many months when it had ground him down to a jagged edge, and it had felt so good when those torn muscles had started to heal and it had finally begun to fade, when he had felt the reins of his life back in his hands again. And yes, bright lights and loud noises still made him flinch, so did sitting behind any van, the thrum of the engine of his own vehicle starting to get into his nervous system very quickly as he waited for the doors to fly open, the bullets to spray…. But all of that was to be expected and wasn't something he allowed to interfere with his efficiency. Physically he had grown stronger and the pain had lessened. He had been almost giddy with the relief of being able to perform ordinary tasks without constant discomfort…then had come that fall and the unbearable spiking of fresh agony and the knowledge that he simply could not go through this again, day by day and hour by hour, not and do his job. He kept seeing the look in Danny's eyes as he gazed at him, seeing his own pain searing Danny all over again, feeling weak because he couldn't hide it, when he should have hidden it better, feeling worse because Danny deserved to be protected from it.

He had imagined Danny telling Jack, telling Viv, people taking him to one side and asking him if he was really up to this, if he could really still cut it in the field. The thought of being shoved behind a desk or having people hovering over him protectively once more, being thought of as weak, a liability, someone to be watched out for when danger threatened, instead of someone who was an asset, that had been unbearable to contemplate. Anything was better than that, and the only problem was the pain. Mentally he considered himself perfectly fit, physically, also, except for the pain which might impede his ability to do his job. The pain had been crippling – like an unwanted acquaintance who had once overstayed their welcome, come for what had promised to be a weekend only to end up staying for a month, turning up on the doorstep again with a suitcase in each hand when he had thought them gone for good.

But the pain could be controlled by painkillers. The pain could be fenced in and ordered and denied the right to screw up his life all over again, as long as he could take the pills to do so, but gaining access to the painkillers was difficult unless he was prepared to explain that he had been injured again, which would mean assessments and more examinations and more time spent as a patient in need of help when he didn't need any help, he just needed the pain to stop…. The painkillers were like the fairytale trolls who offered help just when he needed it most then demanded their own price. Taking them let him do his job but then it had swiftly become impossible to do his job without them. It became harder and harder to obtain them and more and more difficult to function without taking them…. Which was when everything had begun to spiral away from him, his life becoming as unmanageable as fall leaves spun upon the wind, and the one person he wanted to call for comfort was already dead – after suffering this kind of pain, and feeling herself a failure for allowing it to overwhelm her. A dozen times a day as he felt the weakness and shuddering and sweats and shivering and self-loathing coursing through him, Martin had wanted to call Aunt Bonnie and tell her that he couldn't do this any more, he couldn't be this person any more, and yet he couldn't now remember how to be anyone else.

Failure had never been an option for a Fitzgerald. Other children possibly had the option of getting something less than a 4.0 grade average but he never had. He had to graduate top in his class, and, of course, he had to graduate magna cum laude; anything else would have been unthinkable. All those lectures when he was growing up, the praise and blame had both been couched in the same terms: ‘Your mother and I are very proud of you, son', ‘Your mother and I are very disappointed in you, Martin'. Any small rebellion had been treated as if it were such a shock to their systems, as if it had left them prostrate on the floor in need of years of therapy because he'd smoked a joint; because he'd sneaked out one night and gone to a rock concert after it had been forbidden; because he'd lied about Daniel Fisher's parents knowing about the party at his house; because he'd drunk a beer. His rebellions really had been embarrassingly trivial, the boy he had always been kept on such a tight rein that ignorance of other possibilities made him complicit in the whole business of his life being so over-ordered, so utterly controlled, realizing that he had let those values seep into him, like pesticide into soil. His stress levels would spike unbearably at the prospect of any failure, even if it had originally been his father who cared so passionately that he should succeed at everything; he had been contaminated by those wishes to the point where they had become his own. He was still proud of himself for kicking over the traces of that paternal control so completely and running off to join the FBI – even if his sprint for freedom had been weighed down by all the baggage he carried with him and probably always would. Running off to join the FBI not being an act, as he'd pointed out to his father at the time, on a par with running off to join the circus or deciding to give up a promising career in White Collar Crime to run a vice ring from his basement.

"I just want to do something that matters."

"You don't think politics matters?"

"No, Dad. I don't. I think you end up trying to get yourself re-elected by keeping in with the people who put you there, and any idealism you may once have had gets squeezed out by the system. Not to mention the fact I think for someone to want to go into politics it might be an idea for him to have some political convictions that are a little more fully-formed than mine. This is what I want to do. I think I could be good at this…."

And for a while, he thought he actually had been. He'd made mistakes, certainly, sometimes he'd made very bad mistakes, like the error of judgment that had led to the death of Anwar Samir. But people had been found who would otherwise have remained lost in part because he was one of the agents looking for them. Everything he did mattered in this job, and for a while that had been the most incredible feeling to wake up to every morning; to know that he could walk into the office and make a difference, a palpable positive difference, to the lives of other human beings at their most vulnerable and most in need of help.

Then he had become one of them. He had lost himself so entirely that he didn't recognize his own reflection, and it was impossible to ask for help in finding himself again – somewhere within the shaking, vomiting remnants that were left to him – when he wasn't allowed to have got to this point; because the son of Victor Fitzgerald was absolutely not permitted to fail so completely.

But the nephew of Aunt Bonnie would have been. She had always allowed him to explore the possibilities that there might be other ways to be and think and grow; let him in on the big truth that parents were just people with opinions, and their advice and guidance could never be more than that; that even the wisest of them weren't handing down absolutes on tablets of stone.

"Your father's a wonderful man, Marty, and he loves you so very much but sometimes…"

"He's an arrogant blowhard who thinks that saying something is true makes it that way even when it isn't?"

That smile of hers that told him he was naughty and loved at the same time. "He's not infallible. None of us are. You can't expect him to be. And you can't expect yourself to be either. We all make mistakes. You're going to make them, too."

"No, I think I checked my father's life plan for me pretty thoroughly before I came out, and that's definitely not on his agenda."

Her hand on his forehead stroking back his hair so tenderly, sometimes he thought his aunt's house was the only place where anyone ever touched him. "That's how we learn. It's painful and sometimes it's humiliating, but it's necessary sometimes to just utterly screw up…."

He could have picked up the phone and called her and known it would be okay, even if he were a sweating, shivering mess, sobbing incoherently down the line to her, telling her that he had screwed up so badly he didn't think there was a way back for him because he was now an addict and a thief and a liability to the people who trusted him to keep them safe. She was the only person in his family he could think of who may have had some advice to offer him that would have helped, but by then she had gone beyond all suffering and all possible assistance. He helped people every day, or had before he had turned into a junkie, but when she had needed him the most he hadn't had any help to give her.

He had never felt so utterly lost or so alone, and even now he was afraid of the pain and what it had done to him; how easily it had defeated him; afraid that it might inhibit him, the fear of taking another bullet making him less of an agent that he had been before. Like giving up the painkillers, he knew he needed to give up the fear as well. He could eat and sleep and walk and even run these days; he had a lot to be thankful for and people relying on him to do his job the same way he'd done before, not to become meek or inhibited by the fear of being hurt.

He just wished he could look back on the last few months and see himself as something more than someone who had failed everyone who had ever believed him the first time that he was truly tested.

***

Samantha Spade had never thought she would get used to the constant overhead of artificial light. An open plan office should never have come to feel so much like home, but it did now; bad sign, she suspected, proof she was becoming a workaholic incapable of making a commitment to anyone or anything except the missing who became consuming passions until they or their corpses were found. Damn, five more years of this and she'd be well on her way to becoming Jack Malone.

She made another note and thought again how much work one could do in the office. She sometimes forgot that; like Martin she tended to prefer to be out in the field, but so much of their job was this – making calls, following up old paper trails, watching security tapes, tracing DMV records, cross-referencing names. This was more likely to be where the vital lead came that may save a life. This case was already getting to her and she hadn't been involved in the search for Margaret; it was just too unlikely, like a puzzle with so many pieces missing one couldn't see the pattern at all.

So far the white board was showing a lot of time line but very little useful information. Mary had called Karin Box at 8:35am and the Boxes had gotten to her around 9:11am – Jack had explained that where the Ryans lived was so isolated that even the closest neighbor was a half hour drive away. They had arrived at the hospital at around 12:28. A Doctor Hughes had seen her at 12:46. She had called her husband at 13:37, then gone outside around 13:48 – which was the last time she had been seen, by a passing orderly. Then everything for Mary just stopped. Her husband had arrived at the hospital at 16:34pm, having driven straight there to collect her as soon as she called. The timing of the phone call was the only possible oddity about Mary Ryan's behavior – that twenty minute delay between being shown out of his examining room by Doctor Hughes and her calling her husband, but it could be something as simple as waiting for a pharmacy prescription to be filled or waiting in a line for the payphone. Sam had called all the hospitals and morgues with no success, and was now waiting on the hospital security tape footage, and for the hospital pay phone records to be faxed to her.

She had retrieved the file on the Margaret Ryan disappearance and was starting to familiarize herself with the details. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that a mother and a daughter had both apparently been abducted four years apart but she wasn't sure she believed in those. She was going to be cross-referencing every step of the way and while she tried not to pre-judge a case, if there didn't end up being a connection she was going to be very surprised.

"Here you go."

Looking up in surprise, she found that Martin had deposited a cup of coffee in front of her and was eating a Danish while sitting on her desk. He looked more at home there than he had in a while. For too long now he had seemed to be concealed by a thin veil of pain; a distance between them which had little to do with their months of intimacy and was more a conscious act on his part of cutting himself off from the rest of them. She felt as if she had him in focus for the first time in months. He was looking less bony than he had and the shadows under his eyes had faded a little, although the lines were there; she suspected it was going to be a long time before they went away. Even his suit seemed to fit him a little better than usual and his tie was not actually burning her retinas. It was red silk, and matched the blue-black suit and thinly striped white shirt he was wearing a lot better than the oversized tweed suit-check shirt-and-orange tie ensemble atrocity he had been wearing on the last occasion she had really looked at him.

"How long have you been here? Nice tie."

"Just arrived. Thank you." He looked down at his tie in confusion, as if surprised to find it there, and yet he presumably did choose those clothes each morning, made a conscious decision to wear suits of coarse tweed or unsightly checks that would only have fitted him if he had first put on two sweaters. Presumably he did go into stores and select those ties with the patterns that always made her think of a particularly drab acid trip. She wondered if someone had once told him that as long as a suit jacket cost more than a thousand dollars, and had shoulder pads, a gentleman would always look stylish in it; or did he just buy suits like his father's because he had no real attachment to his work clothes anyway, only to his work? Or was it a sensory thing? His clothes had always felt better than they looked, even the worst of his suits a pleasure against the fingertips. At home he wore jeans and college sweatshirts, and looked younger and sexier and painfully unguarded. She wondered if people in the office had expected her to take him shopping while they were dating or if she was the only one who thought that Martin's clothes were terrible? One day, she really would have to ask Danny.

She picked up the coffee and sipped it, realizing how much she needed it as the first gulp went down. "Thanks. You're not having any?"

Martin gestured vaguely in the direction of the doorway. "Danny's getting mine."

She bent her head to hide a smile. Danny had originally been so proud of the way he was getting the new guy broken in, but it was still Danny who did most of the running around after Martin. "You have him well trained. Get anything from the Boxes?"

"Nothing much. Did you find out anything?" He craned his neck to read her notes over her shoulder, his hand automatically going to his stomach as he did it. She couldn't tell if he was still in pain these days or if the pain had just been a part of his life for so long that he expected it to be there even when it wasn't. There had been so many times every day for the past few months when she had wanted to ask him if he was okay, but he had been so keen to tell everyone how well he was, and how ready to come back to work, that she, who had behaved in exactly the same way after her own shooting, didn't have to heart to push it. She did feel as if she'd failed him though, but that had become a reflex for her now; a constant niggling of guilt that sometimes, ironically, made her snap at him when she had intended to be nothing other than patient.

"Sam?" He looked at her in surprise when she didn't answer. "Are you going to fill me in on all the background so I don't have to read my way through all these old files?"

"You know, I've been meaning to ask – did you pay poor people to do your homework for you at school?"

"Of course."

When he smiled at her it was almost like old times, a relief to see his ridiculously blue eyes crinkling with humor instead of pain. It was difficult not to touch his arm, just to let him know that he was cared about; however busy they all got, however difficult this job became, he did have friends here to whom he truly mattered – even the friends who had slept with him. But it was always difficult – touching people with whom one had once had sex; the touching always lasted too long or not long enough. She envied the way Danny and Viv and even Jack could just pat Martin on the shoulder or the back, or invade his personal space the way Danny was always doing, without having to be self-conscious about it. But then she had known all about the difficulties of office romances before she had ever invited Martin to share that taxi and done it anyway.

"I'm a sucker for a pretty face," she said aloud and when Martin looked at her in confusion, she opened the file. "I'll give you the Cliff Notes because you brought me coffee."

"What do I get?" Danny came in bearing coffee and donuts, slopping the coffee down and distributing pastries; energy so high it felt as if the national grid could just plug into him and power an entire city.

Sam realized that as well as being thirsty and caffeine-deprived she was also starving. "You, I may have to marry."

"We should totally do that," he told her cheerfully. "We'd clean up on that book they're running on us in Admin."

Danny was wearing a more obviously blue suit, but, unusually, a white shirt, and a tie that was exactly the same shade as Martin's. She fingered it curiously. "Are you two coordinating your clothing now?"

"Yes, Martin and I call each other every morning to make sure that our ties match," Danny deadpanned. "Because we really like it when we're trying to interview suspects and they waste our time making cheap cracks instead of answering our questions. And – by the way – next time you get the hung over three hundred pound ex-con to interrogate and we'll take the friendly neighborhood call-girl."

Sam smirked at him. "But I heard ‘Buster' took such a shine to you two. The word is he offered Jack a whole fifty dollar bill for five minutes alone with you."

"That was for five minutes with Martin. He offered seventy-five for me."

"Well, if you ever get tired of all this, there's a whole new career for you, right there."

"Don't forget the only slightly hot electrical goods." Martin snagged a donut for himself. His Danish had evidently gone down without touching the sides and Samantha moved her own donut away from him before he started eyeing it up. She was all for Martin gaining the weight he'd lost but not with her food. "He was willing to throw those in, too. And we have an open invitation to share his cell in Pelican Bay."

"The guy sounds like a real prince. I don't know how you two could say ‘no'."

"What book they're running in Admin?" Martin added through a mouthful of donut.

Danny gestured with sugary pastry. "The Inter-Team Office Romance book. Right now, I could get us pretty good odds on Sam and I getting married in Vegas or Martin and I getting married in Canada."

"What kind of odds?" Sam felt stung. She suspected she was probably the reason the bets were being placed; one could not sleep with two co-workers and expect no one to make comments; but she was perfectly willing to tough it out and follow Danny's lead on this. He had a way of meeting things head on which she had always admired. "Cause I always have the rent to make."

Danny's eyes were warm and kind and she liked the light of mischief in them. "Twenty to one on you and me, fifteen to one on me and Martin."

Martin licked some sugar from his fingers. "You and Sam marrying is considered a longer shot than you and me marrying?"

"Fifteen to one is still pretty good – although I bet those odds would be longer if you stopped wearing matching ties." Sam took another sip of coffee. "If we all put a thousand bucks on it and then booked you two your tickets to Canada, we could clean up."

"We'd get more if it were you and me though," Danny pointed out. "To maximize our profits, you and I should get hitched. Right away the odds on Martin and I marrying are going to lengthen. Then you and I get a quickie divorce and I marry Martin before the smart money catches on. As an extra bonus, Martin would also get to really annoy his father."

Martin held up his sugar-dusted hand. "Count me in for a thousand."

Sam was pretty sure that somewhere inside Danny Taylor, the playboy, was a nice Catholic boy just looking to settle down, who would no more use the marriage vows to line his pockets than he would sky dive naked off the Empire State Building, but she liked his way of dealing with what could have been considered a public humiliation. She pointedly shook some of the sugar from Martin's donut from a file into the wastepaper basket. "What about me and Elena?"

Danny shook his head. "Only four to one – but thank you for the visual."

"You're welcome."

"How's she doing?" Martin's gaze was fixed on her donut and she quickly took a bite.

"Last time I called her, she sincerely asked me to kill her. I'm making sure my flu shots are up to date from now on. Now do you want me to fill you in on the background to this case or would you rather read the copies I just made for you?"

Martin gulped down some coffee. "You tell us."

She told them all she had so far. There were more files coming, so far she only had the bare bones of births and deaths; social security numbers and DMV photographs. Impossible to do this job and not be aware of how thin one's own life would look if subjected to an investigation. Date of birth, date of first runaway attempt, date of marriage, date of divorce; and agents sitting there making assumptions, making judgments, making guesses. They worked together every day and yet they probably knew more about some of the missing people they had looked for than they did about each other.

"Mary Ryan was born in a small town in Wisconsin called Indemnity, population about six thousand. It's very rural. Frank Ryan's family owned a big farm on the outskirts of the town. The Ryan family gave employment to a lot of people during harvest time and throughout the year and a lot of the town's economy was dependent on them. His mother died when he nineteen so he came back from college to help his father out on the farm. No one in the family has ever had so much as a parking ticket. In fact if they were any squeaky cleaner their name would have to be ‘Fitzgerald'."

Martin made a face at her. "I hate them already."

Danny nodded at the file, also trying to read it over her shoulder. She often wondered how he and Martin managed to avoid clashing heads the way they did that. "What about Mary's family?"

"Very much from the other side of the tracks. Mary grew up in a trailer park outside town." She tried to say it without a tremor, as if she was not already feeling a pull of connection to this woman from Wisconsin who had grown up in a place that was too cold and too poor while surely dreaming of better things. "Mary's father was arrested several times for drunkenness, assault, DUI, and there are a lot of notes on his file about officers being called to the house because of domestic disturbances. Mary's mother was admitted to the hospital on several occasions with unexplained injuries, and Social Services had both kids down as being ‘at risk'. The mother died when Mary was eleven. Her father finally was DUI one too many times, ran the curb into a bunch of kids waiting at a bus stop, and served a six-year sentence for vehicular manslaughter.

"Mary and her brother were in and out of foster homes and her brother was arrested several times while still a juvenile for various offences. And before you ask, yes his juvie records were sealed but the sheriff knew everything he'd been charged with and told Jack and Viv all about it when they were investigating Margaret's disappearance. According to the sheriff, Nathan was arrested for taking a vehicle without permission, public drunkenness, breaking and entering, assault, resisting arrest, you name it, he probably did it. He finally got sent to Juvenile Hall when he was sixteen for being high behind the wheel of a stolen car – which didn't help him as much as you'd hope because it was only six years later that he died behind the wheel of a different car that he drove into a tree. He was burned beyond recognition. His father had been killed driving over a cliff while drunk only a few months before Nathan died in almost the same way."

Martin grimaced. "Nice family."

Samantha saw Danny glance at him briefly but he didn't say anything and it was left to her to say – a little more tartly than she had intended: "Even poor white trash have a right not to be kidnapped, Martin."

He gave her a hurt look. "I was just thinking that Mary Ryan can't seem to catch a break, can she? She finally gets away from what sounds like the start in life from hell and marries a decent guy and then she loses her child. And now this."

Danny touched him gently on the arm. "Which is why we're going to find her. Cause that's what we do."

"And we don't even need a secret identity or special costume," Sam murmured as she reached for the next pile of files.

Martin swallowed the last of his coffee and got up from her desk. His gaze was searching. "Are you going to be okay?"

She knew what he was asking; almost wishing she had never told him even as much as she had about what it had been like to come from a tiny town in Wisconsin. She gave him a smile brittle as shattered glass and wondered if he could see all her yesterdays reflected in it. "Fine. And you should get moving. Jack's not going to be happy if you two are late arriving in Unity. According to Viv, he hates that town and the feeling is entirely mutual so he's not going to be in the best of tempers."

Danny smirked at her triumphantly. "We get to drive a Humvee."

"It's still a three and a half hour drive from here, especially as you boys don't know how to drive in the snow."

"I'm from Washington," Martin pointed out. "We have snow there."

Breaking it to him gently, she said: "Not really relevant, as no way is Danny letting anyone but him drive the big shiny Humvee." For Danny's sake she phrased it that way instead of saying ‘No way is Danny going to let you risk your neck behind the wheel in this kind of weather', and if Danny drove at faster than forty miles an hour the whole way there she would be amazed. She hoped Jack had factored in Danny's heightened anxiety where Martin was concerned when calculating their journey time or he was going to be extremely ill tempered with worry by the time they arrived.

She watched Martin catch up with Danny and point out in vain that he knew everything there was to know about driving in the snow only to have Danny give him a pitying smile. She remembered all too clearly how annoying it had been to have people hovering over her, giving her covert glances, letting her know they didn't feel she was ready to be back in the field yet, so she waited until Martin and Danny were out of sight and earshot before she said quietly: "Drive safely."

***

Standing in an exam room in the Wayne Memorial Hospital in Honesdale, Jack Malone assessed Doctor Hughes with the skill of long practice; forty-seven, he would say at a guess, hair starting to recede like a shore before the tide, deep-set eyes, hard-working, possibly over-worked but conscientious and thorough. They had been talking for a few minutes now and he had seen no sign of the man having anything to hide.

"So, the contractions had stopped by the time you saw Mary?" Viv pressed.

"Completely. She didn't seem to be in any discomfort."

Viv looked a little incredulous. "At eight and a half months pregnant? Because I remember feeling as if I had accidentally swallowed a fire hydrant for about the last six weeks."

Doctor Hughes had the grace to smile. "No more than the usual discomfort that anyone feels in the last few weeks of pregnancy when there is eight pounds of infant pressing on one's bladder."

"You didn't keep her in?" Jack asked.

"I wanted to but she seemed embarrassed by the whole incident. She apologized for taking up my time. I suggested that she let me run some tests but her blood pressure was normal, there was no sign of any contractions, she didn't have a noticeable backache. She felt she'd already caused enough fuss and said she just wanted to get home. She said she'd been so flustered when she left the house that she wasn't sure if she'd left a note for her husband and she wanted to call him right away."

That sounded like the Mary Ryan he remembered; that woman had put more effort into going unnoticed than anyone he had ever met, it was as if she craved invisibility the way a neglected child craved affection, as if the world could never quite be quiet enough for her; as if she could never be too still.

"Do you remember what time you finished your examination?"

"I saw my next patient at seventeen after one."

"Did you give Mary a prescription?"

"No. I asked her if she needed anything and she said she was fine. She seemed to be in perfect health and she was adamant she didn't want to stay in so I let her go with a warning about coming straight back if she had any other symptoms."

"So, you weren't worried about her?" Viv enquired.

Hughes shook his head. "No. I wasn't sure there had even been contractions as such, maybe a touch of indigestion or the baby being a little restless. She really did appear to be in perfect health."

"And you got the impression that she was going to call her husband next?"

"Yes. She asked me where the payphones were and I asked the nurse on duty to direct her to the one just down the hall."

Jack managed a smile. "Thank you, you've been very helpful. Would it be possible to talk to the nurse?"

"I'll have her paged for you."

As they walked towards the payphone, Jack said: "One doctor down, only seventeen nurses, five receptionists, and two dozen other possible witnesses to interview. Why didn't I send Danny and Martin to do this job?"

Viv gave him a glance of mild amusement. "Because you wanted to be on the spot. As for the ‘abduction' – it could have been a set up if Mary wanted to get away from her husband – wait until he's out of the house then call neighbors who she knew would bring her to the hospital, go through the motions of a medical examination, while always intending to make a run for it."

"That would be my assumption, too, except for the disappearance of her daughter. I'm worried someone may have targeted her. In the same way it could have been the only chance for a wife who lives an isolated life to get free of a controlling husband, it was also the only chance for someone to snatch her."

"I could never figure her out, you know, Mary Ryan," Viv admitted. "All those times we talked with her and sat with her and told her we were hoping for news, I never knew what she was thinking. In this job we get so good at reading people, and she was still a blank page to me."

Jack remembered those Madonna eyes, the sadness, the resignation; Mary Ryan pouring them both another cup of tea in that neat kitchen that hadn't been updated in a decade; gaze going to her daughter's photograph as if she already knew she was gone forever and her loss was no more than she deserved. "I remember thinking she was too good to be true – the perfect wife, the perfect mother who lived only for her daughter; it was as if she had no ambitions for herself, nothing she wanted, nothing she hoped for. I felt there had to be a secret life somewhere even if it was only in her head."

"That whole family…" Viv shook her head. "There was something going on there we never got close to."

That was exactly how Jack thought of it, too. He had spent so many hours in that dark house in the dark woods, asking questions and listening to the answers and feeling all the time that something significant was being kept from him. He thought of the place as cobwebbed with secrets, strands veiling every corner; a double failure, not just their inability to find Margaret but also their failure to read all that secret history that every family harbored. He had felt as if the Ryans were a puzzle box and he and Viv had never found the catch; perhaps if they had done they would have found Margaret.

"I'm telling myself it's an advantage that we have all the background we gathered last time," he offered.

Viv sighed. "Yeah, I'm telling myself that, too, Jack."

"Maybe we didn't dig deep enough. Maybe we were one piece of information away from working out what it was we were missing. I just got so hung up on thinking Ryan was an abusive husband…"

He was still angry with himself for that mistake. They had wasted so much time when the local PD had already taken a day too long calling them in. Something about Ryan had rung all his alarm bells and he'd convinced himself the man was molesting his daughter or beating his wife. It had turned out he was doing neither or had found a way to beat the polygraph because those questions had been asked and answered in brief, dismissive negatives. They had wasted time pursuing the alibi of an innocent man and Margaret had been lost, presumably forever. Later, when he'd analyzed his own reactions to Ryan he had realized, too late, that it had been an alpha male clash. He was used to being treated with a certain amount of deference himself; most people tended to respect men in authority who worked for the government and carried loaded guns; Ryan had seen Jack Malone as someone paid for by his taxes who wasn't doing his job. The same attitude that irked him every time he had dealings with Victor Fitzgerald had irked him with Ryan, too, this feeling that the world should revolve the way they wanted it to because they had more money and a longer family tree than most of the people they encountered.

A background check had revealed that the Ryans had owned that farm in Wisconsin for six generations. In Indemnity they were people of importance; everyone knew them, their custom was always good, their wishes were respected. Even in these new surroundings, Jack had noticed that people talked about Ryan with respect, regarded him as a man of importance.

"You were sure Ryan was an abusive husband, I was sure it was his money that made him a target." Viv shrugged. "If you were on a wild goose chase for non-existent bruises, I waited and waited for that ransom note that never came."

"I know." Jack grimaced. "I was hoping for it, too. That meant it wasn't a pedophile, that it was someone with an interest in keeping her alive. You know those woods are so wild and so empty, she could have been buried ten miles from the house, or her body dropped into one of those abandoned mine shafts, and we'd never know."

"The dogs didn't find anything," Viv reminded him. "Maybe she ran away, after all."

"If she'd been the age she would be now, then I might buy it – possibly. But how many seven year olds can successfully disappear without anyone finding them? Everyone who knew her described her as naïve and innocent. A quiet, obedient girl with a strict but loving father, who, like her mother, tended to do as she was told."

Viv glanced at him. "That always bothered you, didn't it?"

Jack stood in front of the payphone and gazed at it until Mary came into focus for him. He pictured her in that worn blue coat of hers, hair the exact same shade as her daughter's dark plaits, placing the handset back in the receiver, stepping back and then fading away before his eyes.

"I have daughters. ‘Quiet and obedient' is not how I'd describe them. I'm not sure that's how kids are meant to be. Or wives. Not that I'm claiming to be an expert. Ryan may not have hit them or raised his voice to them but I think he demanded so much from them they never had time to think whether or not he had the right to keep asking it; I think he stifled them with the weight of all his expectations."

Viv said: "You know – given the way Martin turned out there are people who might argue that Victor Fitzgerald did a pretty good job as a father."

"I'm not even going to pretend to follow you."

"You follow me perfectly. There isn't a right way to raise a child and you can't judge anyone's performance until you look at the adult and see how he or she turned out. Margaret was a nice girl, everyone agreed on that. And Mary didn't exactly have the best start in life. She said it herself – Ryan rescued her from a drunken father who used to hit her and her brother whenever he had too much booze or not enough. To her, she said, Ryan was her knight in shining armor."

Jack sighed, remembering. "It was the way she said it, Viv. Like it was a mistake. Like it was a delusion. Like the fairytales always lie."

He turned to find the nurse had arrived to answer their questions, pointing out the phone Mary had used – Viv arranged for the numbers called from it during the time Mary had been in the hospital to be faxed straight to Samantha – telling them how she had seemed when on the phone – her fingers had shaken a little, she had seemed excited – how she had watched her walk out to wait for her husband; how she hadn't thought of her again until Ryan arrived and started looking for his wife.

Viv was checking the timeline again. "It feels like a set up to me. I don't think it was chance that Mary came here today."

Jack had a lot of respect for Viv's instincts. He trusted his own for the same reason he trusted hers; they were born of experience. No one could really succeed in this job unless they learned how to read people and read the patterns in their behavior. And their instincts were always going to be clouded by their own experiences, he recognized that; men like Ryan were going to set off his alarm bells even when they were innocent, and Sam was always going to think any teenage girl was innocent and any forty-year old man was probably guilty of something; just as Danny thought every child was salvageable, however damaged, and Martin had to be watched closely when the cases took a turn too dark because he bottled up everything inside while being as sensitive as an over-strung piano wire. Out of them all, Viv was the one who carried the least baggage and was the least inclined to view the world through the flawed lens of her own imperfections. That was why he trusted her judgment most of all – sometimes even more than his own.

"She didn't seem the type to run off to me." He looked at her sideways. "She was so spiritless, that was why I was convinced he'd broken her somehow."

"Perhaps life broke her before she even met him." Viv gazed up at the security cameras. "It's too much of a coincidence, Jack. She called him and then she walked out here and gave herself a three hour start."

"To go where? To do what?" He liked the idea of her making a dash for freedom, away from that dark house in the looming forest, away from a man who was always going to set his teeth on edge. But he suspected that the only sanctuary that Mary Ryan would ever seek from her sorrows would be to the quiet of chill black water or the fiery eye of an oncoming train.

Viv blew on her hands as the snow gusted down on them gently as a benediction. "What wouldn't you do to get your kids back, Jack? If anyone ever took Reggie, everything I know, everything I've ever learned in this job, would go straight out of the window."

Jack was already ordering the tapes from the security cameras to be sent to the office. There was enough there to keep the tech guys busy for a while, looking through grainy footage of pregnant women while hoping for a match, and all the while he was seeing Mary Ryan sitting in her kitchen in that stone and wood house with no glimmer of hope in her eyes.

His breath caught and he stopped in mid-stride. "That was it."

"What?" Viv put her hand over the phone and he realized belatedly she was talking to Sam.

"Most people wait moment by moment for good news, but she never expected to see her daughter again. She was already like one of the bereaved. That's why I thought it was Ryan and that she knew it was him. She acted like someone who didn't have any hope."

With her gaze fixed on him, Viv said: "Sam, I need to call you back. Jack…?"

"That was why I thought Ryan beat her, not because of the bruises she didn't have, and which the school physician and the gym teacher told us Margaret didn't have either, but because Mary didn't have any hope."

He could see Viv remembering, turning over old impressions in the light of new perceptions. "Jack, you're right – Mary thought her daughter was dead, but you know what – I was waiting for a ransom note because I'm almost certain Ryan believed she was alive. Whatever Mary believed, Ryan thought his daughter was taken for his money. When that ransom note didn't arrive, he was as baffled as I was."

And he realized abruptly that Viv was right, too. Ryan had never shown a moment's evasion, never even seemed aware of his wife's quiet despair, because he had been angry with hope and frustration, snatching up the phone when it rang, hurrying to look in the mailbox each morning. He hadn't done it, after all. For all the warning bells he'd rung in the mind of Jack Malone, for all that he might be a man capable of murder; he had believed his daughter was alive as fervently as his wife had believed that she was never going to see her again.

***

Samantha Spade picked up the fax that had just come through and scanned it for the Ryans' number. There it was, at 13:37, just as it said on the Ryans' phone records, a three minute call placed from the hospital pay phone to the Ryans' phone. The call before it had been placed to a cell phone and it had lasted seventeen minutes. That could explain the delay in Mary using the phone. She could have been waiting while someone else used it. She called Viv and asked her if she could ask the nurse if there had been anyone using the phone when she had shown Mary to it.

"Already asked her," Viv explained. "She said no one was using it."

"So, the call made at 13:20 could have been made by Mary before she called her husband?"

"What's the number that she called…?" Viv had to raise her voice as she and Jack clearly went out through a door.

Sam could hear the unmistakable sounds of the town replacing those of the hospital, no quiet paging of doctors and nurses, the sound of trolleys being wheeled, someone in the background asking just how long his wife was going to have to wait before anyone could see her, to the sound of traffic noise. She gave her the number, Viv repeating the digits after her, and listened to the sound of Jack dialing. She almost jumped out of her skin when his dialing was greeted by the unmistakable sound of a cell phone ringing. "Viv, is that…?"

"It's coming from the dumpster," Viv told her, sounding as shocked as Sam felt.

Sam listened to rustling and some cursing from Jack as he made contact with something he clearly didn't much care for and then the ringing was much louder. "I've got it," she heard Jack say breathlessly. "Whoever Mary Ryan called before she phoned her husband, I'm holding their cell phone right now."

***

The nearest town to where the Ryans lived was Unity, a place so small that Jack wasn't sure it even featured on the maps. It certainly lived up to its name; which meant that he was about as welcome here as a plague toxin. As far as this town was concerned he was always going to be the big bad G-Man who had wasted time questioning Ryan instead of finding his lost child. But although people didn't much like co-operating with him, they really did want Mary found and for that reason were overcoming their dislike of him to help as much as they could. Despite the slanting snow gusting down around him and close-to-freezing temperature, every telegraph pole had a poster with Mary's picture on it. That was one of the benefits of small town crimes – everyone took it to heart, everyone cared. A pregnant woman who had already lost her child to an unexplained abduction was not exactly a hard sell in the sympathy stakes, and Ryan had made a lot of donations to local charities and churches in the twelve years they'd been living in this area.

This evening the whole town was tinkling with ice and snow, not enough of it salted to prevent the roads ridging with gray-brown slush. Darkness was coming in and carrying more cold with it; up in the mountains where Frank Ryan was waiting for his wife to come home, the local PD quite probably his only company, it would be even colder than here, the air bracing itself for another freeze. It was supposed to be a little warmer tomorrow, not necessarily a good thing as there was more snow forecast to dump itself all over the ice that was going to form tonight. He hoped Danny had taken in what he'd told him about renting a vehicle that could tackle that kind of terrain. Martin at least had his hiking experience and time logged in those all outdoor activities summer camps rich kids got sent to if their grades were high enough for even the most demanding parents to let them off studying calculus during their vacation. Thinking about Victor Fitzgerald, Jack wondered if Martin's grades had ever been considered truly ‘high enough'. Depressing to think that Martin had probably known the best parenting out of any of the five of them – Jack didn't know enough about Elena yet to consider her background something he could judge – and yet every day Jack saw him chilled a little by the long shadow his father cast.

He was still slightly uneasy about sending Martin and Danny up to deal with Ryan, and yet couldn't have said exactly why. Martin had a reasonable knack with difficult people, he could suck it up and keep it polite, and, even if Danny was a hothead sometimes, he was also instinctively empathetic in a way that only Viv could match. He would pick up on things that Martin might miss, but he could also get ignited by them. Jack would remind him before they set off to keep himself in check – however much Ryan treated them like a couple of green kids better suited to simonizing his car than finding his missing wife.

The cell phone in the dumpster had been stolen out of a car in Albany two days before. Nothing else had been taken and they were waiting on the security footage from the apartment block now. Jack had ordered the local PD to dust the car for prints, just in case, even though it was almost certainly too late now and any prints would have been obliterated. The cell phone itself had been wiped clean. By not taking the car or anything else that was in it, the crime had remained so small as to go unnoticed right up until the moment when it had been used in the commission of a possible kidnapping, by which time it was probably a stone cold lead on a road to nowhere. As if they didn't already have enough of those.

Looking at his watch for the fifth time, Jack Malone thought that it would probably be a lot better for his blood pressure if he were allowed to act out unreasonably about Danny and Martin being nearly an hour later than he estimated it should have taken them to join him and Viv in Unity – especially when there was all that ice and snow on the roads. Viv was refusing to get with that particular program, much to his annoyance, and being maddeningly calm.

"They were picking up another car for the trip up to the Ryans' place, Jack, it may have taken longer than they thought. Or they could have got lost…"

"No, Danny called me as they were leaving." Jack looked at his watch for what was now the sixth time. "That was more than four hours ago. And I told them to merge onto 1-84 West and then take Exit 30 to Porter's Lake. It's not exactly brain surgery."

"Well, it's snowing. The traffic is going to be slow."

"I'm just saying it's three and a half hour drive, that's all, and they should be here by now. And they can't drive up to Ryan's tonight, not now, not on that track, they'll have to go tomorrow, when it's light and they can see what they're doing."

"You know the local sheriff's office would take them and then they wouldn't have to drive on that road and your blood pressure could return to normal."

"It could undermine their authority with Ryan and I want them to interview him alone, not with the friendly neighborhood sheriff – who, as you may remember, likes Ryan and doesn't like us – drinking coffee in the kitchen. And there's nothing wrong with my blood pressure."

"Well, there's going to be if you don't learn to relax a little. They're only forty minutes later than they should be. Maybe they stopped off for something to eat. You do want them to eat, don't you?"

"In a gesture of astonishing generosity I was planning to buy us all take out."

"And did you tell them that?"

He glared at her. "That patient, reasonable thing you've got going isn't fooling anyone, you know. I know you only do it annoy me." After a pause he added conversationally: "I couldn't help noticing that your name doesn't appear anywhere in that book Admin is running any more."

"Well, fancy that." Vivian's face was an unperturbed blank.

"You didn't threaten those good people, did you?"

"Why would you think that?"

"Because I know for a fact that there were pretty good odds to be had on you and I having an affair before Thanksgiving."

Still looking seraphic as an angel, Viv shrugged. "I may possibly have mentioned that it would be better for their long term health prospects if they made some minor alterations to some of their bets."

"You didn't think the rest of us might like not to be the subject of tawdry gossip and speculation, too?"

Viv glanced up at him with her best ‘don't try it on with me' expression. "Jack, I know for a fact that you have twenty bucks on ‘Danny and Martin having sex while undercover'."

"Oh, come on. It was ten to one odds, and Martin's an easy drunk."

"Did Sam tell you that?"

"It's in his personnel file, right next to ‘relentless over-achiever' and ‘questionable dress sense'."

Viv nodded up the street from their motel. "I think that's them now."

The two younger men were obliviously chatting as they pulled in neatly next to Jack's car. They were driving a rented Dodge Humvee that looked more appropriate to tackling the prairie or possibly an African safari and Jack wondered if he'd overdone it a little in stressing the roughness of the road that led up to the Ryans' place. Still, with so much more snow forecast, it was better to be safe than sorry. He noticed that Danny was driving and wondered if that was just the way it had fallen out or if Danny was still a little PTSDy about Martin driving a car they were in just in case someone ambushed it and riddled it with machine gun fire. Jack at least liked to think they were deep in discussion about the case, but as Danny switched off the engine and opened the door he could hear Martin saying: "…I just don't think I'd want to live for three hundred years if I had to live on the first floor of a five story walk up."

"Well, I don't think you're accurately factoring in the plus value of the drinking the blood of virgins…"

"Glad you boys could join us," Jack told them. "Where the hell have you been?"

Martin looked as if he were probably guilty of something even if he wasn't sure exactly what. "We missed our turn off."

"Where?"

"We forgot to merge, ended up driving too far on the Jersey City Turnpike."

"We may have been a little distracted," Danny admitted.

Martin turned to Viv – whom he evidently considered the more likely to be sympathetic – and said: "A bunch of co-eds flashed us from a convertible."

She looked only mildly surprised. "In this weather? Brave girls."

Jack felt his amusement in danger of overturning his irritation. "Did they perchance also make lewd remarks?"

"They did." Danny jumped down from the jeep with a flourish, pressing the button for the central locking in a way that suggested he was going to have to be surgically separated from those keys. "I told them I hoped they didn't kiss their mothers with those mouths, so they slowed down, cut us on the inside, and flashed Martin, too. You don't even want to know what they said to him – but there are pimps out there right now still blushing."

Jack glanced at Martin in what was definitely amusement now. "Are you recovered from that encounter or are you going to need counseling before you can eat dinner?"

"They didn't just flash us with their…" Martin explained. "They weren't wearing any kind of underwear…anywhere."

Danny nodded solemnly. "We're talking a full on Sharon Stone moment here, Jack."

Viv glanced across at Jack. "I have to admire their pioneer spirit. Even at that age I'd have been wanting something thermal for this weather."

Jack shook his head. "You boys had better have at least some positive information for me if you want dessert."

"Just let Martin geek up in the motel room and we can pool what we have," Danny said.

Jack watched Martin roll his eyes as he unpacked his laptop and he and Danny headed off to their twin room, bantering at one another good-naturedly in a way he had thought gone for good along with Martin ever getting to take another pain-free breath.

"They look well, don't they?" Viv offered at his side.

"They look an hour late to me," Jack retorted. "And in Martin's case in need of a shave."

"You know you love them really."

Jack could hardly hide his smile of relief as he realized that Viv was right and they really did look fine; they were acting like Danny and Martin again. "I know no such thing."

As he watched Danny waving Martin in ahead of him after he'd unlocked the door with exaggerated courtesy and Martin rolling his eyes, he tried to see them through Ryan's eyes. Viewed that way they suddenly seemed a lot more physically insubstantial than he usually thought of them.

"Do those two look kind of young to you? You know – if you were seeing them for the first time?"

Viv gazed after them in some confusion. "They look like Danny and Martin to me, Jack. And, no, they don't look particularly young. Why?"

"Do you remember Ryan saying something about young men these days needing more discipline and how he was all for them introducing the draft again as he thought five years in the army was what every boy needed?"

"I don't think he meant it for people like Martin and Danny, Jack. I think he probably meant unemployed young black men that he didn't like wandering around unchecked because they didn't have them where he came from..."

That caught him off his guard, her words and the bitterness, and he turned to her in surprise. "That's what you thought?"

He felt wrong-footed by his own lack of observation. He thought he was pretty good at picking up things like that but, of course, he was never going to be as aware of the small signs of prejudice that Viv was. After the hundred and fiftieth time of seeing them, Viv would be pretty much an expert.

"It wasn't what you thought?"

"I thought he just had a bug up his ass about every guy under the age of forty not treating him as if he were Ryan of Ryan's Farm, proud descendent of six generations of manly men from Montana."

"Wisconsin," Viv corrected absently. "And, trust me, you can't do that accent."

"Maybe you and I should go. We have the history with him."

"It's because we have the history with him that we're not the right people to go, Jack, and you know that. Last time around we missed whatever clues we should have picked up on to find Margaret. It's time for some fresh eyes."

"Okay, but remind me to give Danny the lecture about being very polite."

"You've already given him the lecture, and Martin, too."

"Well, in Danny's case I'm going to give it to him twice."

As he followed them into the motel room, he could feel the air bracing itself around him, that indrawn breath of a world about to get colder, and tried to tell himself that was what had just made him shiver.

***

Viv watched in a way she hoped – without much optimism – was more disapproving than indulgent as Danny pointedly pushed the greasy carton from Martin's cheeseburger further from his side of the coffee table on which all their papers were spread out. "I think I liked you better when you had an eating disorder."

"You try a few months where the only thing you can digest that doesn't hurt is apple sauce and see how much junk food you have a craving for."

"Boys…" Jack warned them. "Not that I don't appreciate the cabaret after dinner but I need to know where we are."

Danny reached over the pizza carton Jack and Viv were sharing. "One of the questions we've all been asking is – did Mary Ryan leave her cell phone behind because she was in a genuine hurry and forgot it or because it was part of a pre-arranged flight and she didn't want to be carrying anything traceable?"

"And the answer is…" Martin swallowed another mouthful of cheeseburger and pressed the Enter button on his laptop. The printer began to disgorge paper. "She doesn't own one. She never has. She doesn't have a driver's license, or a bank account in her own name, or an ATM card, or a credit card, and she isn't a co-signatory on her husband's account either. She is entirely dependent upon him financially for everything and has been the whole time she's been married to him."

"Still?" Jack demanded. "She told me that they just hadn't got around to adding her to the account. I thought it was odd then. The cell phone is news to me, though. I got the impression she'd lost her old one and was in between them last time. But you can see why I was suspicious of the guy – there were so many red flags about that relationship."

"He certainly seems to like his wife cut off from everyone but him." Martin handed over the pages of print out.

Jack glanced over it and gritted his teeth, all the old suspicions coming back again. "So, she has no way of driving anywhere, no money to pay for a bus ticket, no way of obtaining funds from a bank account, and they used to live on a very isolated farm."

"‘A thousand acres of nothing in the middle of nowhere'."

"And now they live in a very isolated house at the end of a very bad road." Viv pulled the photograph out of the file.

"Exactly." Jack nodded. "There are a lot of remote properties and no near neighbors. It's not unusual for people to own eighty or a hundred acres of rock outcroppings and mature woods and make a partial living renting out a cabin for hunters or hikers in the season. It's very, very private. A man could pretty much do what he wanted."

"Isn't this what happened last time?" Danny put in. "Didn't you spend so much time chasing after Ryan that you didn't find who really took the girl?"

Jack grimaced and Viv thought Danny could have phrased that a little more tactfully. Nevertheless: "He's right, Jack."

"But it's creepy all the same." Martin was still typing as he talked. "In this day and age, most women aren't dependent on cash handouts from their husbands to buy groceries."

"You've checked his account?"

"His income comes from interest on investments he made when he sold the farm. There was no mortgage on the property, it was prime farmland and he got top market price for it. With the money from the sale he could have afforded a place that was in Lew Beach but he bought a hundred and sixty acre parcel, mostly made up of what the realtors call ‘billy goat land' – very rocky, hilly and wooded, only accessible by one bad road, in Sullivan County. It's generally used for hunting, not living in all the year round, and most of it only cost him around two thousand dollars an acre, which, for the Catskills, is a steal. Most of the investments he made have doubled in value. Anyone who read about him selling the farm, or even who read the press clippings when Margaret went missing would know he was a very wealthy man. Here." He hit ‘Print' again and the printer spewed out Ryan's financial records in black and white columns of figures. "But there's no evidence of any unusual payments going out or coming in either in the past few months or back when Margaret was taken."

Jack sighed. "So, we have evidence of a controlling husband from whom a wife could possibly want to escape, and equal evidence that kidnapping aforementioned wife could be a very lucrative venture but no evidence of a ransom being paid? Great."

Vivian set the pictures of Mary and Margaret side by side, thinking how alike they were. Margaret would have been taller than her mother, that was the only contribution Ryan's genes seemed to have added to the mix; in every other way Margaret looked like her mother, and seemed to have inherited all her temperament from her as well. The teachers had described her as shy and studious, a girl who never missed a lesson and always handed in her homework on time.

"At the hospital, a nurse saw Mary hang up the phone after talking to her husband and go and sit down in the waiting room, but she didn't pick up a magazine, she just sat there. And an orderly thought he saw Mary look at her watch and then go outside about fifteen minutes later."

Jack checked his notebook even though Viv was sure he had it all memorized. His father might have succumbed to Alzheimer's, but there was certainly nothing wrong with Jack's mind. It could make steel traps look rusty. "Which was two hours and forty-five minutes before her husband could arrive to pick her up, but it was assumed she was going shopping and would come back later."

Danny looked up. "Mary mentioned her husband was coming for her? Because, I'm thinking right now we only have Ryan's word for what passed between them."

Viv shook her head. "The same nurse – Ellen O'Hara – overheard a little of the conversation and it confirmed Ryan's version, and when Mary put the phone down she told Ellen that she hated to be a nuisance and it was a long way for her husband to have to drive just because she'd overreacted. Ellen asked her if her husband minded and Mary said that he'd told her he'd rather she was safe than sorry and Ellen said he was quite right, and then she went off to see a patient and the last she saw of Mary she was sitting down in the waiting room."

"I think we have what happened after she went outside." Martin clicked on the screen and turned it so Viv and Jack can see. "Sam sent through the footage from the security camera outside the hospital. We think this is Mary."

"‘Think'…?" Viv was hoping for something a little more concrete than that but as the grainy image started to play she saw Martin's problem. The woman had kept her back to the security camera and her head lowered as she walked outside. But she had dark hair and was certainly pregnant and Viv thought she recognized her, not just build and coloring, but something in the defeated set of her shoulders. As they watched, a man so bundled up in a hat, scarf, and greatcoat that he was visible only as two eyes and a nose, came up to Mary and touched her arm. She jumped nervously and turned, there was a pause as the two stared at one another, almost as if the tape had frozen, and then the two of them moved off together.

Even playing it four times over, Viv couldn't see if there was a gun or decide whether or not Mary had gone willingly. "But whoever he is I think she knew him."

Jack was still watching the replay fixedly. "That's the best shot we have of this guy? Because he could be anyone. We need more footage. We have to see what happened next. Did she get into a car with him? Someone must have seen something. I want the locals interviewing everyone within a mile of that hospital."

Danny nodded. "They're already on it, Jack. They've been on it since she went missing."

Viv watched the abduction or meeting again. Build for build – as much as one could tell when comparing two tiny snatches of grainy footage and on both occasions the suspect was wearing several layers of bulky clothing – Mary's abductor could have been the same man who had last been seen with Margaret. "I still like the third option."

Jack was watching it too, looking for details he had missed. "The ‘lured away with the promise of information about Margaret' option?"

"We know how vulnerable the parents of missing children are. Chet Collins could have gotten himself into a whole heap of trouble plenty of times if you hadn't been there to look out for him. What if someone told Mary they had information about Margaret but that she wasn't to tell her husband? Ryan's not the kind of guy to sit at home and do what a kidnapper or a possible kidnapper tells him; he'd want to be out there breaking the guy's neck. Mary may have agreed to this meeting by herself."

"What would persuade her to do something so dangerous?" Even as Jack asked the question she knew he knew the answer. "Okay, dumb question."

"Maybe she had some hope after all, Jack," Viv offered.

Jack's dark eyes were angry and intent. "And maybe it's going to get her killed." He turned to Danny. "We need all incoming and outgoing phone calls to the Ryans' house in the past few months and get me the name of the mailman or woman who delivers to that address. I need to see him or her as soon as possible."

Martin looked as his watch. "It's ten after ten."

"And…?"

Martin exchanged a brief look with Danny that reminded Viv a little of the looks Reggie and Marcus would exchange when she came home bad tempered after a long hard day, before saying obediently: "I'm on it."

***

Samantha still felt as if she were engaged in a jigsaw puzzle in which only half the pieces were present but, if this were a landscape, she now had a reasonable amount of sky and clouds, and even a smattering of treetops. She felt wired with too much caffeine and was missing having another agent to bounce ideas off. She had almost called Elena before she remembered how selfish that would be. The last thing anyone wanted when they were home with the flu and a temperature of a hundred and three and had a sick kid to look after was a work colleague ringing up at midnight to talk about a case.

But this one was getting to her, this white rabbit of a case, fleeting and fantastical, and likely to lead one astray. Usually when one started digging a few things were revealed, tantalizing fragments, some of it significant, some of it fools' gold panned from the rich silt of irrelevant information, a glittering distraction that wasted hours or sometimes even days. But this one led on and on. Just not to Margaret. She was still a dead end.

One chilly February evening when the nights were dark even as the children were heading home from school, a car had pulled up by the bus stop and a man had asked for directions. Margaret, who was shy but obedient, had gone over when he asked her directly to help him read his map. Wiser, more cynical children had hung back. Margaret had pointed out something on the map to him, he had thanked her and possibly murmured something in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. Margaret had come back to the bus stop. The bus had pulled up and she had been the last in the line. No one had looked back to see if she had gotten on but the bus driver swore that every child waiting at the bus stop when he opened his doors had climbed on. Margaret had been behind Heather and Phoebe when they had seen the bus approaching; Phoebe remembered turning to say that here it was at last, and Margaret had been behind her then. In the jostling to climb aboard no one had looked back and certainly when the bus had reached her stop, Margaret had not been on it. None of the children had gotten a good look at the man in the car that had spoken to Margaret and all confirmed that he had driven off before the bus had arrived. He had never come forward despite repeated requests for him to do so. No one had seen his license plate. The girls hadn't even agreed on the color of his car, or the make, although two of them thought it was a dark-colored sedan, one thought it was blue, and the other black. An hour later, fifty miles west of Honesdale, a gas station security camera had shown a man in an overcoat stopping to buy a cheeseburger which he had heated in the microwave and then carried out to the car. He had paid cash. Just visible, sitting in the passenger seat of the car was a girl who looked very like Margaret. Ryan had said that Margaret's favorite food was a cheeseburger but she was only allowed one on special occasions at home. Neither she, the man in the overcoat, or the car had been spotted on any other security tapes or ever definitely sighted again.

A couple of the girls at Margaret's school had said that on the day she went missing she had been excited and distracted, as if she had known something was going to happen, the teachers had said she had seemed exactly the same as usual. In the end no one had been able to draw any firm conclusions.

Sam had been o