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myself. I wouldn’t wait for a snowball to roll up a hill.”
    Parker laughed.
    Geary liked him.
    Snow returned with the girl with long dark hair. Geary let out a little snort but luckily no one heard. He went back to the coffeemaker, poured himself another cup, and stayed just long enough to hear Snow introduce her.
    “This is Detective Amy Cardoza. She’s on shift for the rest of the day. She’ll take care of the photo and she’ll present your wife’s case at roll call.”
    Amy stepped forward to shake Parker’s hand. She was younger than he was, maybe thirty, smooth skin, no tan, nice eyes.
    “We’re going to do our best to find your wife,” Amy said. Her gaze shifted rapidly to Snow, then back to Parker. “I know this is frustrating for you.”
    Parker seemed to appreciate the acknowledgment. “I’ll need that fax number.”
    Amy handed him a Post-it note with the number on it. “There’s a phone on the wall. When you’re done I’d like to ask you a few more questions.”
    Parker turned his back to them, flipped open his cell phone and pushed two buttons.
    Geary walked out of the room. He had something he needed to do.
    Geary drove the seventeen minutes back to his house at Cotuit Bay Shores. It was a nice little postand-beam prefab just right for a retired couple. That was what the broker had said. Not too big, not too small. Cozy. A screened-in summer porch. Fully winterized. All the amenities. What sold them in the end was that there was a groundskeeper who took care of the whole community for a small annual fee. John and Ruth were done with cleaning gutters and shoveling snow. And Roger Bell’s house was just two dead ends away.
    Geary pulled into the driveway but not the garage. He’d only be home a few minutes. He unlocked the front door and went straight to his desk in an alcove off the living room. It was a mess but he had a system; he knew where everything was. The file he wanted was from the Woods Hole precinct. It was on the left side of the desk, between an oversized street atlas and a copy of Ruth’s last diary: a half-filled book of blank pages with a pale green cover on which she had sketched a sprig of dill, her favorite herb. He had never read the diary and never would, but he liked to keep it near him.
    There wasn’t much in the manila folder, just a few cold cases from over the years, but one in particular made him think of Emily Parker. On top of the file was a yellowed copy of a report from the local paper.
    Shocking Discovery Under Wharf
Woods Hole, Massachusetts. September 13, 1994.
    A severed arm was discovered Monday when three seven-year-old boys were scraping barnacles from beneath the dock near Stony Beach. One of the boys, Brian Lee, thought he saw a circle of dark rocks in the wet sand. A collector of rocks and shells, Brian went to investigate, and made the discovery of five fingertips protruding just above the sand. The boys immediately notified a passerby, who called the police. The police retrieved the arm, and the area surrounding the docks was sectioned off by investigators. While it has not been confirmed, some believe the arm may belong to Chance Winfrey, age seven, a resident of Brewster. Chance has been missing since Friday, following the disappearance of his mother, Janice, the previous Monday.
    Geary read the article then skimmed through the file. The boy’s arm had been knifed off at the joint. The day after the arm was found, Janice Winfrey turned up, alive, stretched out on a bench outside the Woods Hole Aquarium. She was starved, dehydrated and delirious. Two weeks in the hospital stabilized her vitals but her mind never came back. The file hadn’t been notated since the case was marked closed, two years after the boy’s arm turned up at the beach. The rest of his body was never found. One of the strangest things about this case was that there was only one clue, a footprint in the sand that had outlasted the tide. The cops did a Cinderella but it was