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see her and Marcus during the following week. Not bad for an investigation, I thought.
    The house between the Great Dane and the Gillespie home was empty, so I trotted down to that home, hoping that someone was home.
    A man answered the door. He was shorter than I was as well as thinner. He had short blond hair and blue eyes that watched me warily. He was dressed in a suit that fit him well, and I suspected that he was on his way out to somewhere so I hoped that I could make my spiel interesting enough for him to stay around a few minutes.
    I looked at his face, seeing if I could recognize him, but nothing stood out. For the most part, my high school years had been a blur. After Susan’s disappearance, I had withdrawn into my own little world. Other people were just something to be feared and avoided. So I doubted that I could have pointed out anyone from my high school in a line-up.
    I started my spiel when he interrupted me. “You’re the guy whose sister was kidnapped. Fitz, Fitzpatrick, right?”
    So much for an opening line. I nodded. “Sorry. I’m bad with names,” I said, being somewhat honest.
    He held out a hand. “Adam, Adam Gillespie. I was a few years older than you, but my sister Amy was the same age as your sister.”
    I nodded like I remembered him, even though I still had no clue. I’d found over the years that it was easier this way. People would just come up and ask what I’d heard about my sister or if they’d solved her murder. Of course, everyone made the assumption that she would have found her way home after all these years if she’d still been alive. Still their insensitivity continued to shock me.
    It was no wonder that my brother had moved to Denver; he didn’t have to put up with the well-meaning questions and nosy inquisitors. I had stayed, but built up a wall around myself to keep the questions from hurting. Everyone does something to keep the pain under control.
    Today they didn’t hurt at all, because I knew that if I asked the right questions, Susan would be free to come home in the near future. So I tolerated the questions and comments from Adam with pleasure.
    “Did they ever find her?” he asked.
    I shook my head. “No, the police still don’t know what happened. No one does.” I was staying inside the lines of the truth here. “It’s hard not knowing.”
    He nodded. “Yeah, I can imagine. So what brings you here? I know you didn’t come here to rehash the past. What can I do for you?”
    I decided to change up my strategy. He’d brought up family crimes, so I decided to pay it back. “I remember you now. Didn’t something happen at your house? Like a gang killing or something?” I made it vague enough to sound like I was just remembering, when in fact I could have cited date, time and outside temperature. Photos of the crime scene were in the car if I needed them.
    A darkness clouded his face. “Yeah, our maid was killed there.”
    I shrugged, like I knew I’d been close. “Yeah, that was it. What happened there? Did the police ever find the killer?”
    He looked at me for a long minute before answering. I wondered if he knew about my work with the police in solving crimes. If he’d seen me on the news, then possibly he wasn’t buying my act at the moment. On the other hand though, his first comments had been about my sister’s disappearance rather than about my more recent activities. Maybe he’d missed the news reports and just remembered me as the scared kid who had attended school with him.
    “I’d really rather not talk about it. It was a long time ago, and nothing good comes from revisiting the past.” He shrugged as if he already knew the cognitive dissonance of what he’d asked me and what he said just now. Some people were like that. It was fine to ask about other people’s problems, but they guarded their own.
    “Well, I really didn’t come to talk about that,” I said, jumping into my spiel on talking to pets. He listened and nodded a few