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regard. He’d done more than his share of stupid things in the three years they’d been partners. She’d often wondered if matching him up with her had been the powers-that-be’s way of trying to keep him out of trouble until he was able to retire. After all, she did have the well-earned reputation of being levelheaded, while his rep was somewhat less complimentary.
    Since it was easier to not make eye contact with anyone, she stared straight ahead as she passed from the parking lot onto the street. In the rearview mirror, she could see them turn their backs and walk back toward the building.
    If she said it didn’t sting, she’d be lying.
    On the way home, she stopped at a fast-food drive-through at the edge of a strip mall for a cold drink. The all-brick strip had once been home to a somewhat fashionable clothing store, a florist, a pet shop, and a bookstore. Now those same storefronts housed a Laundromat, a pizza parlor, a nail salon, and one boarded-up newsstand.
    She drank the soda as she drove, hoping to push back the lump in her throat. Inside her house, she forced the incident behind her, behind that wall she’d thrown up a long time ago, where she tossed everything she wanted to hide or push from her mind, and settled down to read the file.
    By the time she was finished reading, the events of the day were behind her, and she was, as Joe had predicted, hooked.

FOUR
    M allory pulled up a chair to her small kitchen table, typed “magellanexpress.com” into her laptop’s browser, and wondered how many other people had used the mechanism named for the man to follow the story that had, by all accounts, destroyed his life.
    Many thousands, at the very least, she figured.
    She stuck a straw into the can of Diet Pepsi she’d just opened, and read through several accounts regarding the disappearance of the mogul’s wife, along with their six-month-old son, in March of the previous year. The results page had brought up countless articles describing how Beth Magellan had driven herself halfway across Pennsylvania to her sister’s home in Gibson Springs to attend a baby shower for their cousin, how she’d left for home in a hurry the next morning.

    “Beth said there was something Robert had wanted to do on Sunday afternoon, and she had to get home,” Pamela
Clement, sister of the missing woman, said in an early interview.
    “When Beth arrived here on Saturday,” Clement continued, “she parked her car—a Land Rover—up near the garage. When she came out to leave the next morning, she found that my husband, Rick, had parked behind her when he came in late Saturday afternoon. By the time Beth was ready to leave for home, Rick had left for an early golf game, and I couldn’t find the spare keys for his car. She was in a big hurry to leave, so she borrowed our old Jeep. The plan was that I’d drive down on Monday or Tuesday in her car to make the exchange.”
    At this point in the story, Pamela Clement broke down. “If she’d taken her own car, we’d know where she is. We’d have been able to track her, but the Jeep doesn’t have GPS.”
    Clement added that Mrs. Magellan had left her cell phone in her car when she arrived at the Gibson Spring home and had neglected to retrieve it before leaving on Sunday.
    “I’m sure she forgot she left it on the seat,” Clement said. “She hadn’t needed it while she was at the house, and I think Beth just assumed it was in her purse. Ian had been fussy when they were leaving, and Beth was distracted.”

    The article, like many others that appeared as the result of her search, was accompanied by photos of the happy family. Several had the same photo of a grave Robert Magellan walking side by side with Father Kevin Burch.
    Interesting, Mallory thought as she tapped a pen on the tabletop, recalling her conversation with Joe Drabyak. The two men certainly did look more like brothers than cousins. Both tall—though Robert appeared to have a few inches on the