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dad?”
    “The police were asking Mom if they had relationship problems. They think maybe Dad ran off.”
    “That doesn’t sound like your dad.”
    He was watching my face closely. “Or maybe he was kidnapped. Isn’t that possible?”
    “Kidnapped? I doubt it. Look, we’ll figure this out. I don’t want you to worry, Gabe.”
    “Yeah,” he said dubiously. “Sure.”
    I turned toward the door, and he said, “Uncle Nick, will you teach me how to use a gun?”
    “It’s late. We’d piss off the neighbors.”
    “I mean, like, at the range or the gun club or whatever.”
    “I don’t belong to a gun club, and I don’t shoot at a range. In fact, I rarely use a gun. I always prefer to use my hands.”
    His eyes widened. “To kill people?”
    “For database searches, mostly,” I said.
    “I’m serious, Uncle Nick. I want to learn how to use a gun.”
    “I don’t think teenagers who wear all black should use guns,” I said. “Bad stuff tends to happen. Don’t you watch the news?”
    “I’m talking about protecting Mom. And self-defense and like that.”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    I opened the front door, and he said, “Uncle Nick?”
    I turned.
    “Thanks, man,” he said. “For being here, I mean.”

8.

    I ’d always thought that the only smart decision Roger ever made was to marry Lauren. She was strikingly attractive—glossy black hair and milky white skin and caramel brown eyes; lips that pulled down at the sides when she smiled. Lauren was a beautiful and elegant woman.
    But most of all, I thought, she was a really good human being. Totally unself-centered. She’d devoted her life to three difficult men: her husband, her son, and her boss, Leland Gifford. That couldn’t have been easy. Just being the administrative assistant to the CEO of a major company was more than a full-time job; it was more like a marriage. No doubt Roger was jealous of her devotion to her boss. And maybe her boss was jealous of her devotion to her husband.
    She gave me a big hug as I entered, and I stared in shock for a few seconds. Even though I knew she’d been hurt, seeing the evidence of that attack was unnerving. She had a bandage on her head, and the left side of her face was scraped up, with yellowish bruising around her eyes.
    She thanked me for coming, and I asked how she was doing and told her she looked good.
    “I just lost respect for you,” she said with a disappointed shake of her head. “I always thought you were a real straight shooter.”
    “You’re right. I lied. You look pretty rough. I’m worried about you.”
    She laughed. “Thanks for your honesty. But I do feel better than I look.”
    She led me through the marble-tiled foyer and into their huge kitchen, which smelled like gingerbread or maybe pumpkin pie. She handed me a mug of coffee: black, the way I like it. The mug had a shield on it and said ST. GREGORY’S , Gabe’s private boys’ school. She sat on a stool at one corner of the big black granite island, and I sat facing her.
    “The hospital let you go home already?”
    “The doctor thinks I’m okay as long as I take it easy. And I can’t leave Gabe alone in the house.”
    “No word about Roger?”
    She shook her head slowly.
    “Listen,” I said. “The first thing is, I don’t want you to assume the worst.” She needed me to be calm and unworried, and I did a fairly good job of faking it.
    Tears came to her eyes. “I don’t even know what the worst is .”
    “Tell me what happened,” I said.

9.

    I listened, asked a lot of questions, and mostly tried not to feed her worst fears. But the more I listened, the stranger it seemed.
    A sudden, unexplained attack as they were walking to their car. No blood on the ground, no signs of struggle: nothing to indicate that my brother had been killed or even wounded. The hospitals and morgues had been checked for bodies, and no one matching his description had turned up.
    There had been no word from him in the two days since the