“She never really liked Kelsey, you know.”

  The words come at me, but they are so very hard to process.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t. What do you mean? Was Kelsey abused? Are you telling us that you think your wife might have done something to your daughter?”

  Silence fills the interview room.

  “She never really took to Kelsey,” he says. “Samuel’s everything. He has been from the day he was born. Kelsey, she came into the world with a mother that didn’t seem to bond with her.”

  I think back to my own mother, how she was so willing to just walk away from Stacy and me. We were nothing to her. And yet, every day until we were in our teens, we looked for her wherever we went. The mall. At school events. I even thought I saw her at the DMV the day I got my driver’s license.

  It wasn’t her, of course.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he says. “I can’t even sleep, you know. Even saying this to you makes me feel as though I’m going to the worst possible place and, honestly, I don’t want to go there.”

  More silence. Danny and I stay quiet. We want Julian Chase to talk. We want to follow his words.

  Julian stands up. “This is a mistake,” he says. “I shouldn’t have come. God knows that Kelsey is out there somewhere. Someone has her. We have to find her. Bring her home. My wife—”

  “Please stay,” I tell him. “Please help us find her. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  He sinks back into his chair.

  “Yeah. That’s why I’m here.”

  Over the next 45 minutes, Julian fills us in on life with Angela. She was born in France to an American father and French mother and holds dual citizenship. She comes from money. She works at a boutique in downtown Bellevue part-time “because she wants something to do.” She speaks five languages. She occasionally blogs about gluten-free baked goods. She placed in the top ten in the Miss Washington Teen USA pageant. They met online.

  “She’ll consider this a betrayal,” he says as he continues dumping her biography in the interview room. But he goes on. “She’s obsessive-compulsive about cleaning,” he says, holding those words in the air for a moment.

  “You’re thinking of something,” I say.

  His eyes latch on to mine. “Yeah,” he says. “When we got home from Target that night, the house smelled of bleach.”

  Danny glances at me, but says nothing.

  “Is that unusual?”

  Julian looks away. I can see that he’s close to breaking. “Yeah. It is. We don’t have the housekeeper on Wednesdays.”

  “Maybe she altered her schedule because of the holidays?” Danny asks.

  Julian doesn’t think so. “I called Marta,” he says. “She told me she wouldn’t be coming until after the holidays.”

  “You’ve made some pretty big statements about your wife,” Danny says. “Something else to back it up, besides a clean house?”

  Danny’s tone surprises me. It’s more than a little confrontational, given the circumstances. I shoot him a quick glare.

  He gets the message and I’m all but certain he’ll bring it up later.

  “The Christmas gifts,” Julian says, looking at me. I can tell that he’s drawn to me. He knows that I actually care about Kelsey. Danny cares about the case. His case.

  “What about them?” I ask.

  “That night, I couldn’t sleep. I just sat there in my chair looking at the Christmas tree and wondering where in the world Kelsey was.” He starts to get emotional just then. It’s a quiet cry, the kind men do. No real noise, just the tears and the struggle to stop them from pouring from his eyes. “She told me she went shopping for stocking stuffers at Target.”

  “Yes,” I say, urging him to continue in the gentlest way that I can. “She told us that.”

  I watch him fight those tears again. He sputters. He’s doing everything he can to keep going.

  “There wasn’t anything for Kelsey in those bags.”

  His wet eyes stay on mine.

  “You said that she favored Samuel. Maybe she was doing that again.”

  He shakes his head slowly. “No. She specifically said that she was shopping for both of them. Why would she only get things for Samuel?”

  “She was mad at Kelsey,” Danny says. “She pitched a fit in the store.”

  Julian takes a beat to find some composure. He puts his hands on his face and pushes back a little. He locks in his best attempt to keep it together. “Right,” he says. “But she told me both kids.”

  “Both,” I repeat.

  “What are you getting at, Julian?” Danny asks.

  Julian ignores Danny. He looks at me. He thinks I somehow understand what he’s going through.

  “I don’t think that Kelsey was ever at Target,” he says, his vocal chords tightening and his words coming at us nearly in a whisper. “I think my wife might have done something with her.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  We linger, scanning the space around the double-wide that is our destination once more. A carved sign proclaims who lives there: “The Dawsons.” Danny swings open the torn screen door and knocks.

  A woman in her twenties answers. She’s dressed for work. I recognize the uniform. She works for Panera Bread. She’s pretty, with strawberry blond hair, green eyes, and a swath of freckles over the bridge of her nose. Her teeth are crooked but white. If I’d seen her outside of this mobile home park, in something other than her uniform, I would never have guessed that she’d married a sex offender.

  “Charlene Dawson?” Danny says.

  “I figured you’d be here,” she answers. “You people always come around when something like this happens.” Her tone is stiff, but more resigned than angry.

  “I’m Danny Ford and this is Nicole Foster; we’re detectives with the Bellevue Police Department,” he says. “We’re here to talk with Alan. Is he home?”

  “He’s at work,” Charlene says, inching the door closed.

  “No, he’s not,” I say. “Officers have been to the body shop. He’s out.”

  Something flickers in her eyes. “I can’t help you,” she says. “I have to go to work. Why don’t you just do your job and leave us alone?” Anger has crept into her voice.

  Danny sticks his foot onto the doorjamb so she can’t close it completely. “Where is he?” he says. “Or do you need to come down to the department and make a statement?”

  “I have to work. And I don’t know where he is right now. Why can’t you people understand that what Danny did ten years ago has nothing to do with the missing girl at Target?”

  “He’s a sex offender,” Danny says. “He’s always going to be our first stop. That’s the way things work.”

  Her face is suddenly red. “Leave us the hell alone!”

  I pull back slightly, my hand instinctively brushing against my holstered gun as she reaches for her purse behind her, but she just grabs it and pushes out the door.

  “I’m going to work,” she says, slamming it shut and storming away down the steps. “Alan is a good man,” she calls back at us. “You people continue to make the same mistake over and over. He’s not a predator. I love him. I always have.”

  Charlene gets into her car, an old Toyota that struggles to turn over. Through the foggy windows and the smear of water over the driver’s-side window, I catch a last glimpse of her. Her face is now red, and I’m all but certain she is going to cry all the way to Panera Bread.

  Danny twists the doorknob, but it’s locked, and we head back to the office.

  Alan Dawson was eighteen and attending classes at Bellevue College when he was arrested and convicted for statutory rape. His victim was Charlene Canter, a fifteen-year-old student at Sammamish High School. Her father, a low-level manager at Boeing, was the type of man who had done everything by the book but never seemed to get anywhere. When his wife left him and their children for a man with a higher pay grade, he had appeared to adjust. While no one could see it, though, his anger had become one of those jagged, subterranean fault lines unknown until the earth decides to shift. When he’d discovered that Charlene was having a sexual relationship with Alan, he made a beeline to the police and reported it.

  Alan, as the reporting officer told the sergeant on duty, wasn’t the “brightest bulb in the chandelier” when questioned. He admitted his involvement with Charlene, though he said he didn’t know it was illegal.

  “We’re both teenagers,” he said. “Boyfriend and girlfriend. I really love her.”

  “That’s what all pervs say,” the officer who took the statement said.

  Eventually, Alan pled guilty and was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary at Monroe, an hour northeast of Seattle. It was one of those stories that went mostly unnoticed and unreported. When he was released, he and Charlene got married and moved into his mother’s trailer.

  And though they’d made a life for themselves, there was one little thing neither could escape: Alan’s crime put him on the sex offender registry.

  The list, police like to say, that keeps on giving.

  When I see her later at the police department, Viola Richards stands stiffly at the front desk with worried eyes and a black plastic bag. Alan Dawson’s neighbor and staunch defender is now suddenly transformed into an adversary. She called earlier to say she had found something.

  “What?” I had asked her.

  Though she’d made the call, silence filled the phone.

  “Ms. Richards?”

  “I’ll bring it to you,” she said, her voice clipped and distracted. “It isn’t good. It isn’t good at all.”

  I persisted. “What did you find?”

  But Viola had hung up. I sat there at my desk for twenty minutes wondering if I should get in my car and drive over to Lake Washington Mobile Estates.

  And wondering what she had found.

  Viola is wearing a light-pink jogging suit that I suspect owes more to her size than the fact that she’s been out jogging. She sees me and turns away, toward the door.

  “Ms. Richards,” I call to her.

  Again, as on the phone, a pause.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” she finally says, slowly turning around to face me. I can’t be sure, but I think she’s been crying. Her dark-blue eyeliner is smudged.

  I keep my eyes on hers and indicate to her to follow me.

  “I really shouldn’t have come,” she repeats. Her hands are jittery and the bag makes the crackling sound of plastic against plastic.

  Against whatever was inside.

  We go to a small room adjacent to the front desk. It’s not an interview room used by the department for interrogations, but one set up to offer clerical and other administrative job applicants a place to fill out paperwork—from the days before everything was done online.

  She puts the bag on the table. It’s black, with yellow handle-ties that look like a fancy bow.

  A present.

  Not one Viola had wanted to find, I’m sure. Not one she wanted to bring to me. Yet that’s what’s happening. I offer coffee or water. She declines. She doesn’t want anything. She wants to be anywhere but here. I keep my eyes on hers as I untie the loops of yellow plastic that keep the contents secure in their black, plastic cocoon.

  I peer inside. What I see takes my breath away. I know exactly what it is.

  “Where did you find this?” I ask her.

  Viola stares at the bag and then clasps her hands to stop from trembling. Her world has been rocked. Everything she’d wanted to believe has been challenged. “Detective,” she says, her voice halting, “I’m sick about this.”

  “Ms. Richards,” I say, pushing gently, “where did you get this?”

  Viola Richards doesn’t break down, but she’s on the edge of it. She tells me that she was taking care of the Dawsons’ cat, Tracks, while they were away.

  “They keep Tracks in the bathroom when they’re gone because he’s the kind of cat that claws up the furniture when he’s angry—which is all the time when Charlene isn’t around. I opened the door to feed him, and the little shit got out. He was like a bolt of lightning. Ran right out the front door and under the porch.”

  She stops to take a breath. She’s looking at the bag now. She’s remembering how it felt when she made the discovery.

  “I feel sick,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. “Did you find it under the porch?”

  She nods. “Yeah. That’s where I found it.”

  I think she’s going to throw up. She’d loved her neighbors. She had been convinced that Alan was innocent of any wrongdoing. She’d even said so on the local news. I can tell that the part of her that sees good in their love story is now not so sure anymore.

  “I remembered what the little girl was wearing from the TV,” she says. “My grandson has the same shoes . . .”

  She stops talking and presses her shaky hand to her abdomen. Her skin is ashen. By handing me the shoe, she knows that her life has changed forever. Yet I sense that Viola Richards is less concerned with what will happen to her. She was devoted to the Dawsons. She loved them. She was sure that they were underdogs that would prevail in life one day.

  Not anymore.

  “Do you need to use the bathroom?” I ask.

  She lifts herself up from the chair. “Yeah, I think I’m going to throw up.”

  The evidentiary value of the Elmo shoe Viola recovered while cat sitting is questionable. It wasn’t collected properly and a defense attorney would have a field day if the shoe ever found its way into a courtroom. Christine Seiko and her team ran it through the gauntlet of lab tests and were unable to pick up any DNA.

  “It’s like it was wiped clean,” she says. “Some hairs. Not surprisingly, feline.”

  “Kelsey was wearing shoes like that when she went missing,” I say.

  “Right,” she tells me as we look at the shoe, now tagged and missing a piece of fabric that a forensic lab tech cut out for additional analysis. “There are a lot of shoes like that running around.”

  She laughs at her line.

  I smile, a reflex more than anything.

  Danny is practically turning cartwheels in the break room. He’d been working out at the fitness center and the veins in his neck plump like ziti in vodka sauce—his favorite at our Italian place. Danny likes to be pumped up. He likes to be the center of attention. It’s who he is. He always wants everyone to see that he’s tough, smart. I think there is a gentle side to him, a softer side; I’m just not sure where it is and whether I should keep looking for it. I don’t know if he’s my last chance. But he could be.

  He’s pouring himself a cup of coffee and regaling the officers, including our lieutenant, with the Elmo shoe and what it all means.

  He glances at me.

  “Look, we don’t need to use them in court,” he says, as though I’d already voiced my doubts. “We’ve got leverage now to push that perv to the wall. He killed Kelsey Chase. Dawson’s one sick fuck. Can’t wait to wipe that smug look off his face. Once a perv always a perv.”

  I hate to break up his little party, and I know I’ll hear about it later, but I have to say it.

  “There’s no proof the shoe is Kelsey’s.”

  He shrugs and rolls his eyes a little. He’s dismissive. “I was doing this when you were still in the academy,” he says. “I know what I know.”

  I want to kick him in the balls and let him know that I’m not going to let him do that anymore. I can imagine the tip of my shoe going right to where it would bring him to his knees.

  “There’s proof enough,” he says. “Enough to rattle his fucking cage and see what falls out.”

  “There are a million shoes like those,” I persist. “It could belong to anyone.”

  The others feel the unspoken tension and all but our lieutenant file out of the break room.

  “Doesn’t matter who the shoe belongs to,” Danny says. “We have it, and we’re going to use it to nail the motherfucker.”

  “Let’s bring him in,” Cooper says.

  “Let’s crush the piece of shit,” Danny says.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The air in the interview room is stagnant. Quiet. No one is saying anything. Danny and I sit on one side of a long, white Formica-topped table that looks like it belongs in a hospital cafeteria. Alan Dawson, wearing a Metallica T-shirt, black jeans, and boots, stares vacantly into space. I smell the cigarettes and coffee that seep into the air with each nervous breath he takes. He’s six feet tall, 175 pounds. His hair is longish, not because he favors the style, I think, but because he doesn’t go in for regular cuts. Unlike Danny. I haven’t seen Danny’s hair grow a quarter inch. It’s like he has doll hair. Always the same length. Alan’s eyes are dull brown and empty. Only the bead of sweat on his upper lip betrays the nervousness that I’m sure he’s experiencing. He’s been in a room like this before. Few people are happy repeaters. Those who make return visits seldom do so willingly. Alan sits alone. No lawyer. Charlene is outside in the waiting area. She hugged him before he followed us into the room. I can smell her Jennifer Lopez perfume, clinging on his shirt.

  “You know why you’re here,” Danny says.

  “I’m not stupid,” he answers.

  I hold back. I told Danny before the interview that I’m fine playing good cop, but I will not be mute cop.

  “No,” Danny says. “No one says you are. You’re here because we’re on a fact-finding mission. You understand that, right? You’re here because you told officers that you want to help.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I know all about that. But there’s one thing you need to know. I don’t know nothing about that little girl.”

  Danny tightens the muscles in his arms as though he’s about to slam his fist on the tabletop. But it’s an act and I know it. Half of what we do in this room is an act. We lie. We cajole. We promise. We pretend like we care. And indeed we do. We care about making a case and righting a wrong. Danny’s more gray area than I am, but when it gets right down to it, I don’t ever complain about his sometimes strong-arm tactics.

  “That’s fine, Alan,” I say. “We just need to go over some things. You know how some people are about procedure,” I say, glancing over at Danny as though I’m irritated.