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gesture. “So while I’m snooping, just one more thing?”
    “If I can help…”
    He dropped his hand. “Earlier tonight, when the carjacker tried to make your sister get out of the car…”
    “Casey?”
    He gave a short nod. “Casey seemed to be worried that the men wanted Ashley.”
    “Well, they did try to take her, didn’t they? They were going to use her as a hostage.”
    “No, I mean well before that. When there was no reason to think they wanted anything but the car. And the little girl seemed worried about the same thing.”
    “She’s a little kid. She was scared to death. Kids personalize everything, don’t they?” Megan sounded genuinely puzzled.
    “It seemed odd at the time. That’s what stuck out for me.”
    She was silent; then she turned and started back across the parking lot. “I don’t know what that’s about, Nick. Heck, I haven’t even had time to find out much of anything about Ashley. But why are you so interested? It seems like such a little thing.”
    He surprised himself with a self-deprecating laugh. “Nothing seems little after you’ve just gone head-to-head with a gun-toting sociopath. Maybe I’m making too much of the whole thing, trying to find meaning where there’s absolutely none.”
    But he knew better. He knew where his interest in the “imaginary” man sprang from. For reasons he had no intention of sharing, he could not, would not, banish that image of a man swaddled in layers of clothing from his mind.
    She stopped near the back door of the saloon. “Aren’t you too old for this? Don’t you know that most of the things that happen to us are completely arbitrary and senseless?”
    Her cheeks were dusted with snowflakes. He realized for the first time that the snow Casey had predicted earlier was falling. He watched it settle in Megan’s short curls and catch on her eyelashes. He had the oddest need to reach out and capture a flake at the tip of her nose.
    He kept his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know you, Megan, but I don’t think you really believe that.”
    “You’d lose money if you bet your hunch.”
    “I’d take those odds.”
    She bristled. “You happened to walk by here tonight. You could just as easily have walked down the next street or the next. Now, I’m glad you didn’t, of course, but I don’t think it was part of some divine plan that you were here to help out tonight.”
    He grinned at the barely controlled ferocity of her response. “I can hear your Whiskey Island ancestors spinning in their graves, Megan Donaghue. You’ll make the sign of the cross the minute my back’s turned.”
    “It would be the first time in a decade.”
    “A lapsed Catholic…”
    “Is still a Catholic? Not likely. Only when the Holy See starts a parish for atheists.”
    It was time to let her go back inside. Niccolo realized he’d been baiting her simply because he wasn’t ready for this contact to end. He wasn’t used to that feeling, hadn’t even recognized it at first. For a moment he didn’t know what to do.
    Then reality asserted itself. “Maybe I’ll be able to sleep now. I guess I’d better go and try.”
    “That’s what this was about? Insomnia?”
    “Unanswered questions keep me awake.”
    “So apparently you got the answers you needed?”
    Again, as before, he thought a lot of energy was going into this conversation, even though she seemed pointedly nonchalant. “Not really.”
    “I’m sorry you hit a dead end. But I suspect there really wasn’t anything to learn.”
    Two things occurred to him. The first was that Megan was absolutely determined to convince him he’d been seeing things tonight. The second was that she was too smart not to know that the more she protested, the more interested he would become.
    He wondered if, on some level, Megan Donaghue wanted him to discover more. Even if she hadn’t admitted it to herself.
    She opened the back door, nodded one final time, then closed it behind her.
    The parking lot was