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to us with their gray uniforms and those wide-brimmed state trooper hats. They had the coolest uniforms, I thought. But they could use a little more color. All that gray. Black stripe up the side. Too dull. Mason set the bag with the phone in it on the roof of Amy’s car, freeing up his hands to fish out his badge. He wasn’t too happy with me. I could tell from the vibes wafting from him. I liked when he was liking me a lot more than when he wasn’t.
    Why wouldn’t he be pissed, though? It seemed as though I was always doing things to jeopardize his career or make him jeopardize it on my behalf. We were so not good for each other.

Chapter Six
     
    I hung around long enough to get bored with procedures. The troopers ran the pickup truck’s plates, and they came back as stolen from a Mercedes six months ago. No help there. I told them what I knew, including that I’d found the phone and sent myself the pic, in hopes that would keep Mason out of trouble. I even helped string a little police tape from a few feet behind Amy’s car to thirty feet in front of it, to include the spot where the mysterious pickup truck had pulled over. But by the time the crime scene techs arrived to start gathering evidence I was itching to be moving instead of standing still.
    “Mason, can’t we leave now? I want get back on the trail. Amy’s in trouble. There’s no doubt of it now. We have to find her, and we have to do it fast.”
    He nodded. “We’ve already got an APB out on that pickup. The minute we get a hit on it, we’ll go. No point in leaving sooner when we could be heading in the wrong direction.”
    “We won’t be heading in the wrong direction. They were going that way.” I pointed. “Everyone on this side of the highway is going that way.” Hell, he was looking at me, but not really seeing me. He was in full cop mode.
    “They could’ve got off the highway at the next exit. They could’ve pulled a Uey in the next turnaround and headed east.”
    “They say once a bloodhound is onto a scent, he’ll follow it right off a cliff if you don’t hold onto him. Are you in bloodhound mode, Mason?”
    His blinked twice. I thought I saw the normal-guy light come back on behind his eyes. “I’m sorry. We’ll go soon. Just give me a few more minutes. I don’t want to miss anything the forensics guys turn up.”
    I rolled my eyes and stomped back to the Monte Carlo, got into the passenger side and pulled out my phone to check the photo Amy had taken. “What about that truck made you so nervous, Amy?” I studied it, enlarged the photo as far as it would go and then scrolled around it, looking for details. There were two men in the shot. One was sitting on the passenger side, nothing showing but the back of his head, and that was in shadow. I thought his hair was short, neat and dark—though that could be the shadow—and I could extrapolate from the shot that he was a tall guy. I stared at him, mentally slotting in Mel the plumber like a transparent overlay in my mind. It could be him. It could also be about a million other guys of similar bs iCuild and coloring.
    I could see a little bit more of the driver. He’d been in the process of opening his door and getting out when Amy had taken the shot, so one arm was extended, and he was leaning out a little, one foot on its way down to the road. His hair was thick and dark brown, tufts of it sticking out from under a navy-blue knit hat. His face was in profile, aiming downward. A little blurry. I made the photo smaller for a clearer look, and then the details were too small to see. I needed to get the thing onto a bigger screen. Not that I expected to recognize the guy. There was nothing familiar about him.
    The truck itself was an older model, an off-white—or maybe once-white—Chevy. With the tailgate up I couldn’t see if anything was in the bed, but the plates were clear as day, which was a plus.
    “Her credit card was used last night at a gas station five miles