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hard to take in?
    “You free for dinner?” He’d loosened his grip but was still holding me against him.
    “Yeah.”
    “Come to the truck. It’s parked where it was last night.” He plunked a kiss on the top of my head, pushed a spare key into my pocket, and was gone.
    The whole time I hadn’t seen his face. To a stranger, his voice would have seemed normal, but not to me. I tried to rewind the reel of the last twenty seconds but didn’t have enough information. I had to stop myself
from racing upstairs to ask Leo, which would have been a really bad idea on a bunch of levels. Instead I walked into the courtyard, poured a cup from the after-service tea table, and introduced myself to a pair of new-comers. Then I went to the gym, spent an hour in the weight room, and took a yoga class. I left my phone on, bad luck as that is when you want to hear from a guy.
    The only call was from my brother John as I was walking out.
    “You’re serious about this?” he demanded. No pause for pleasantries. Not that I’d expect it from “the enforcer.”
    “About what? Do you mean the all-out search for Mike?”
    “All or nothing ?”
    Was he furious, frightened, or merely affronted? After all, he was the professional, the police detective who’d been on the case for two decades. “Nothing’s what we’ve got now. Much as this may terrify us, we’ve got to do it for Mom.”
    “Do you imagine there’s any hint of irregularity I haven’t investigated?”
    “Listen, you’ve turned night into day, you’ve followed every lead, you’ve probably spent more money on p.i.’s than Gary has on alimony. And time! John, I think no person on earth could have done more.”
    “Well, I’m not the only one,” he said, clearly taken aback. “Gary’s been under my feet the whole time re-interviewing leads because he thinks he can do it better.”
    Because you’re a heavy-handed cop and Gary’s had years of negotiating settlements and charming juries.
    “And Katy’s kept Mike in the news. Like coming up with the earthquake retrospective year,” he pointed out.
    Katy had used all her newspaper connections to keep Mike’s story alive the entire time since he disappeared. The twenty-year anniversary of
the Loma Prieta earthquake was a natural for a newspaper series. Weaving Mike’s story into newspaper stories had become natural for my oldest sister. “She’s behind the review of all the buildings in the Marina?”
    “No. That’s from the building trades unions. Big waste of time. Dad did some of the work there. Had me on the sites with him the summer before I went into the academy.” He paused. “Even Janice checks the missing persons’ sites.”
    Even Janice. What did that mean? I’d done that only once. Once was plenty. You stare at the dead whose pictures were taken in the morgue, or at faces reconstructed from their skeletons years after their bodies had been tossed in the woods. Janice—referred to as “the nice one” of my older sisters—was sure tougher than she seemed.
    “I’m telling you, we’ve covered every lead. But now—I’m not going to say this in front of Mom—but now if we find Mike, it’ll either be by some crazy fluke, or because he just walks in the door.”
    I nodded. Not that he could see that.
    “Guys his age who go missing—and late teens, early twenties is the most common—they’re naïve. They think they’re invincible. They hitch a ride; it doesn’t occur to them they could be climbing into danger. Girls, they ought to know better, but the boys, they figure they can take on anyone. Makes them easy marks.”
    I couldn’t believe he was saying that, not about Mike. “Do you really think that’s what happened to—”
    “No. I don’t think that. I’m telling you what any Missing Persons division guy would. And if it was someone else’s brother, I’d think that, too.” A muffled noise came through the phone, possibly my brother’s attempt to get control of himself.