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listened to her more?”
    Paul said nothing and tried to keep the cynicism off his face, knowing that if he spoke he could not keep it out of his voice.
    “She was right about the van. And the bike.”
    “She’s got a friend at the station. She probably read the file.”
    “We should have her back and try—”
    “She took money,” he said with finality, “at the door.” He crumpled the flyer and fired it in the general direction of the trash can.
    Carol began to tremble. A sob started and died within her. Paul moved to hug her. She drew away and into herself and left him standing there, unable to put his arms around her. It was always that way now, the turning away from each other. They didn’t touch intentionally anymore. There was a gulf between them in bed at night, and when an arm or a foot crossed the divide and contacted the other, it was quickly retracted in near apology. Their lovemaking was completely frozen over. The day Jamie disappeared was the first of its extinction. They were hardly friends anymore but lived as mere housemates. They were scrupulously polite to each other as they moved about the place.
     
SIX
     
    TROUBLE CAME IN BATCHES. That was Frank Behr’s experience. And he was sure he’d find a fresh lot if he went ahead and pursued the case of this missing boy. It was late in the afternoon after the quiet man, Gabriel, had left and he’d finished with his trash. As Behr sat back in his recliner, he saw the folder on the television tray. His first instinct had been to leave it where it was, to call information for Gabriel’s number and tell him to get the hell back over here and pick it up. A man should recognize when no meant no. He didn’t call information though.
    Instead Behr stretched, his knees and shoulders popping and cracking. He pounded out push-ups and wrestled with the idea of taking the case. Between sets four and five, he bounded up and flipped open the police file that Gabriel had left. He read the particulars, nodding to himself, unsurprised and unmoved at what he saw, until he came to the ranking officer’s signature at the bottom of the third page. Even now, nine years later, the cribbed, slanted writing was familiar to him. James P. Pomeroy, Captain Pomeroy now. He had been Behr’s lieutenant, his C.O., long ago. That signature, on change of duty orders, on poor performance reports, on demotion sheets, had changed Behr’s life.
    After reading the file, there was no question about calling the father and chiding him for leaving it behind. He couldn’t do that. So he put on gray sweats, tied his running sneakers, and filled a frame pack with a fifty-pound bag of road salt and hardcover books. He strapped on the pack, which now weighed more than seventy pounds, cinched the belt around his waist, and set out for Saddle Hill Road, near the junior high, to run sprints.
    As Behr sweated and chugged up the hill, he thought back to the days when Pomeroy had been his commander and personal hair shirt. It had long been his practice, despite the advice of numerous people, to comb through his history as he worked out. Whether it was the department shrink or his ex-wife, Linda, they had all warned him that he’d remain mired in the past if he kept it up. Fighting the burn of lactic acid and sucking in oxygen, Behr went back to the time right after his son, Tim, was born, after he’d guarded the witness in the hospital and been promoted. He’d gotten a pay raise and Linda had started looking for a bigger house he knew they still couldn’t afford.
    It wasn’t long, a little over a year into his new assignment, when Behr’s first partner as a detective, Ed Polk, got lit up. Ed was off duty, as was Behr, and they weren’t even together. Ed was out on a roust of an illegal social club, where liquor was served. The club was on the north side, and back in those days, before it was cleaned up a bit, even off-duty cops tried to avoid that part of town. Polk, though, was a graft taker