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Investigate this!”
    Stride smiled politely. “I’m really sorry. I can’t help you.”
    “I’ve got money. I’ll pay whatever it takes.”
    “It’s not about money.”
    Hope crumpled the paper into a tight ball and shoved it inside her purse. Her face was flushed, which matched her lipstick. “Sure, you cops all stick together. I get it. Brush it under a rug. Percy Andrews didn’t care. He didn’t spend ten minutes finding out what happened to Greg. He practically hung up on me whenever I called. Now Weik is doing the same thing.”
    “I sympathize with you,” Stride told her. “Investigations often don’t move as fast as families want. That doesn’t mean nothing’s happening.”
    “You think I don’t know what people are saying? Everybody says Greg left me. He disappeared because he wanted to get away from me. Well, trust me, my husband would never do that.”
    Stride slid his sunglasses over his face and unzipped his leather jacket as he swung open the door of his truck. His breath made a fog. “I really hope you find him, Mrs. Hamlin. Believe me, I do.”
    “Then help me figure out where he is. I already told you I’d pay. I’m sure it’s more than a cop like you makes.”
    “I’m sorry, that’s a job for the local police, not an outsider like me. If you do want to hire your own investigator, you can find a list of state-licensed private detectives online. I’m sure one of them would be happy to work for you.”
    Hope Hamlin, who wasn’t even wearing a coat to battle the cold morning, turned on her high heels and stamped away toward the county courthouse building with her elbows flying. Stride watched her go. He understood her frustration, no matter how annoying she was. People who had lost loved ones didn’t want to be patient. They wanted answers. Now.
    Just like Kelli Andrews.
    He also realized that something was bothering him. Hope Hamlin had said that Percy Andrews could barely find time in his day to search for her missing husband. He didn’t care about the case. He’d brushed it under a rug. He’d ducked her calls. Maybe it was just his way of dealing with a difficult, demanding crime victim, but it still didn’t make sense.
    Kelli Andrews had said the opposite was true.
    She’d said Percy was obsessed with finding out what happened to Greg Hamlin.

6
    The baby monitor squawked from the bookshelf. Stride had heard a child playing happily for half an hour—and the off-key voice of a teenage girl singing Lady Gaga songs—but the baby was crying for her mother now. Anna Bruin put down her cup of tea with a smile and apologized as she left the room.
    Seconds later, Stride heard Anna through the speaker as she took her child from the babysitter and comforted her. The baby’s cries immediately quieted.
    Stride got up and wandered to the patio doors. The rear of the Bruin house overlooked a snowy back yard and the half-frozen Wolf River. He saw a fishing boat mounted on a trailer and a boat dock waiting for the spring thaw. This was a doctor’s house, large and comfortable, with the best view in the area. The lot was situated on the western riverbank, on a long dead end street lined with similar luxury homes. On the far shore, he saw the industrial section of town, where lumber mill workers could eat their lunches by the river and stare at the waterside mansions.
    Shawano was like most Wisconsin small towns. It had a tiny professional upper crust and a much larger population of hourly workers and farmers. Beyond the cluster of city streets on the river, the quiet roads led into vast swaths of rural fields and densely forested land. The town was located on Highway 29 between Wausau and Green Bay, but the expanded four-lane highway no longer crawled through the center of town as it had for decades. The highway diversion had cost Shawano tourist dollars, but the nearby lakes and woods still attracted campers and fishermen during the summer and hunters and snowmobilers during the frozen