She gave him a disappointed look, probably hoping she could sneak onto the sofa with him and put her head in his lap, although she knew very well she wasn’t allowed on Great-Great-Aunt Ida’s antique loveseat.

  So she stepped over Carrie, gently this time, and curled back up on the pillow with a human-sounding sigh. Rafe made one that sounded quite similar when he dropped down on the loveseat.

  “Any news?” I asked.

  “I wish.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “And sure, there’s some. Just not what I’d like to have after fourteen hours of effort.”

  Hard to blame him for that.

  “I went by Tucker’s house,” I told him. “There was no sign of Bob. None of the drapes were drawn and there doesn’t seem to be a basement or anything like that. I only saw gardening stuff in the garden shed.”

  He’d opened his eyes again as soon as he heard Tucker’s name, and had raised his head to watch me finish my statement. The expression on his face was somewhere between incredulous and entertained. “Tucker?”

  “Sergeant Tucker. Harvey. The same guy you’ve spent the day with.”

  “I know who Tucker is, darlin’. What made you think he might have Bob hidden away somewhere?”

  “They’re old friends, or at least old acquaintances. We only have Tucker’s word for the friendship. Just because they’ve known each other for a long time, doesn’t mean they’re friends.”

  “No,” Rafe agreed, “but—”

  “Bob would have taken his call if he’d contacted him on Saturday, even if it was Todd’s wedding day. If Tucker had asked for help, Bob would have probably gone out to see what he could do.”

  “Yeah,” said Rafe, “but—”

  “And he inserted himself into the investigation. He wanted to be part of it. You’ve told me that people who do that sometimes are guilty and want to know what the police know.”

  “Tucker coulda figured out what the police know without working fourteen hour days alongside me trying to find Bob,” Rafe said. “Everybody at the PD knows what I know almost as soon as I know it. Tammy’s disseminating anything we learn to everyone as soon as we learn it. Everyone in the department is looking for Bob, or any sign of Bob, even if they’re not actively working the case. Tucker didn’t have to attach himself to me to learn what’s going on.”

  Fine. “He doesn’t seem to be guilty, anyway. There’s no indication that he’s keeping Bob at his place. So you’re welcome.”

  “Thank you, darlin’.” But he grinned. “You really thought Tucker was guilty?”

  “I just want to find Bob,” I said. “Mother’s fraying at the edges. It was something we could do, to make ourselves feel like we were contributing. And I knew he was with you, so there was no danger of him coming home and seeing us.”

  Rafe nodded, putting his head back against the sofa again.

  “Although the lady across the yard was watching me peer through the windows. So if Tucker mentions it tomorrow, try to steer him away from figuring out who it was.”

  My snooping around his house (and suspecting him of kidnapping Bob) wasn’t likely to make his working relationship with Rafe go any smoother.

  “Sure thing, darlin’,” my husband said.

  “Other than that, I didn’t accomplish anything. I pissed off Reena Ellison and put my foot in it with Mother, although I was able to try on my bridesmaid dress, so at least that’s done.”

  “That’s good.”

  “So tell me what you found out today. There has to be something.”

  He roused himself a little bit. “Not much, to be honest. We tracked down the phone company. Or Tammy did. Turns out the ten o’clock call on Saturday came from Scotty Green’s phone.”

  “Scotty Green? The same Scotty who disappeared with Mark Ellison and Glenn on Friday night?”

  “That’s the one,” Rafe confirmed. “So we know who called Bob, or more specifically, whose phone was used to call him. We don’t actually know who made the call or why. And the phone hasn’t been active since then.”

  “You can’t ping it? Find out where it is?”

  He shook his head. “It was turned off after making the call.”

  “What about where it was when the call was made? Do you know that?”

  “Southwest side of Columbia,” Rafe said.

  “So in the area of Tucker’s house. Possibly on the road to Damascus.” (Why did that sound familiar?) “Or maybe someone who was headed for the Devil’s Backbone?”

  “Any of those would make sense. We took a look at the general area this afternoon, and there’s not a lot out there. Woods, sparsely populated neighborhoods, fields.” He wiggled his toes, having removed his boots, I guessed, inside the kitchen door. “My feet are killing me. I must have walked twenty miles today.”

  “Would you like a foot rub?”

  “No,” Rafe said. “I wanna shower, and then I wanna crawl into bed and sleep. We’re starting again at seven tomorrow.”

  “Go ahead and do it. I’d come with you if I could,” to rub his feet or any other part of his anatomy he wanted rubbed, “but it’s too early to put Carrie to bed yet. She’d just wake me up again at midnight. If I wait until eleven, she might make it through the night.”

  He nodded and hauled himself off the sofa. “I’ll see you later, darlin’. Sorry I’m not better company.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “I’m just glad you’re home safe and sound.”

  He stopped in the doorway to glance back at me. “Your mama holding up OK?”

  “She’s hanging on. Some of it by her fingernails, I think, but she’s holding. The sooner you can find him for her—for all of us—the better.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Rafe said, and padded down the hallway to the stairs.

  Chapter Twelve

  He headed out again in the morning, bright and early. I took my time, having breakfast and feeding Carrie and then taking her and Pearl for a proper walk in the open air before it got too hot in the middle of the day. I even vacuumed and dusted the master suite, where Grimaldi’s father and girlfriend might end up staying if Bob didn’t come home by tomorrow night. It might actually be better for Mother if they came to stay in Bob’s house—it would give her something to focus on other than Bob—but I wasn’t going to suggest it. If she mentioned it herself, sure, I’d agree that it was a good idea if we proceeded according to the plan we’d already outlined. But I wasn’t going to force them on her. Not when we had plenty of room here.

  That done, I loaded Carrie into the Volvo and gave Pearl a biscuit and told her to guard the house. I was going to go crazy if I had to stay there all day. Surely I could find something to do outside the house for at least a few hours. I’d seen Mother and Audrey and Mrs. J yesterday, along with Darcy and—briefly—Charlotte. I hadn’t seen Dix, Catherine, or Jonathan, or for that matter Todd and Marley. Although Todd was married now, and it was three days after their wedding. It was probably too soon for the old girlfriend to do an unannounced drop-by.

  I’d been to the Devil’s Backbone twice, with nothing to show for it, and I knew better than to go back there. It was the kind of place where it would be pretty easy to make someone disappear, and I wasn’t about to set myself up to be that someone. As Mother and I had decided yesterday, let Cletus handle that part of the investigation.

  I had checked Tucker’s house, and Bob wasn’t there. And I had pissed Reena off by asking—suggesting; implying—that Mark and his friends had criminal records. I hadn’t asked Rafe whether they did or not—he might not have told me anyway—but at this point I wasn’t sure it mattered, when it had been determined that it was Scotty’s phone that had made the call to Bob on Saturday morning. Clearly, the connection between the three of them on one hand, and Bob on the other, had been established.

  So the question was, why did they call him? For help? Or so they could kill or capture him?

  There’d been no ransom note, so kidnapping wasn’t a likely scenario. The idea I’d toyed with, that they had—or someone had—wanted Bob out of the way because something criminal was going down later that day that they didn’t want him to be able to stop, didn’t seem to hold water, either. According to Estelle, nothing particularly big or exciting had happened on Saturday night. And besides, it wasn’t like Bob would be on patrol then even if he hadn’t disappeared. He’d be busy celebrating his son’s nuptials. If anyone wanted to commit a crime, and wanted Bob, in particular, not to get involved in it, Saturday would have been the perfect time to do it. Bob would be busy anyway.

  While these thoughts had been rattling around in my head, I had made the—short—drive back to the Sweetwater town square, and parked, yet again, outside the law office. Dix hadn’t been here yesterday. Maybe he’d be here today.

  When I walked into the lobby and asked, Darcy nodded. “He’s back there. And you’re in luck: he’s between telephone calls. Go on back.”

  I headed for the hallway to the back offices, and she added, “Leave that baby with me.”

  “You sure?”

  “I can answer the phone and play with the baby at the same time,” Darcy said. “Go.” She waved me away. I went.

  The door to Jonathan’s office, first on the right, was closed. I could see a stripe of light on the bottom and hear the murmur of his voice. Catherine’s door, second on the right, was open and the light was off inside. Dix’s door, across the hall from Catherine’s, was open and the light was on. I knocked on the doorframe and stuck my head through. “Hi.”

  “Sis.” He put down the pen he’d been using on a yellow legal pad, and leaned back in his chair. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Just checking in,” I said, moving into the office and perching on the edge of one of the chairs. “Darcy said you went to see Todd and Marley yesterday. How are they holding up?”

  He grimaced.

  Dix is two years older than me, and like me, resembles Mother’s family, the Calverts. Fair hair, blue eyes, tallish. He was down to his shirt-sleeves, and they were rolled up to bare his forearms and a nice watch.

  “That well?”

  “Imagine if it was Mother,” Dix said. “You’d be frantic.”

  Of course I would be. And I didn’t have to imagine that it was Rafe, since I’d had that experience just a year ago. It had been over faster, though. Wherever they were holding Bob—and I had to believe that someone was holding him somewhere, because the alternative was that he was dead, and I refused to believe it—must be more secure than where Hernandez had kept Rafe. It had taken Rafe just about twenty-four hours to get out of there, and we were beyond that with Bob. It was more like seventy-two at this point. The magical moment where, if you haven’t solved a crime, you’re not likely to.

  I pushed that thought aside. “I haven’t wanted to go over there. A little weird under the circumstances, you know?”

  Dix nodded.

  “There’s nothing I can do, right? Nothing they need that I can help with, or anything?”

  “Find Bob,” Dix said. “It’s really the only thing that’s going to help right now.”

  Of course it was. “I’m trying. So is everyone else. Rafe’s been working almost around the clock since it happened.”

  “Anything new?”

  “They know who made the call on Saturday morning. That person is missing, too.” I told him about the three men from Damascus, and watched his eyes, blue like mine, go distant.

  “Scott Green? I think I might have gone to high school with him.”

  “Really?” I straightened up. Here was a connection of sorts. “What do you know about him?”

  “Not much,” Dix said. “We had some classes together, but didn’t really hang out. He wasn’t someone Mother and Dad would have approved of.”

  Probably not. And Dix hadn’t pushed that envelope back then. Nor had I, come to that.

  Of course, now we were both pushing for all we were worth, but it was fifteen years later.

  “Do you remember Mark Ellison and a guy named Glenn who hung out with them?”

  “I don’t remember Mark,” Dix said. “Or not well. I think maybe he was older? I do remember Glenn vaguely. Glenn… Tipton? Or maybe Cordell?”

  “How can you get Tipton and Cordell mixed up?” They sounded nothing alike.

  “Towns in south Georgia,” Dix said.

  Ah. Cordele, not Cordell, then. “I think you’re probably thinking of Tifton, not Tipton. How about Madison? That’s in Georgia, too.” And was a particularly lovely, historic town full of beautiful, old houses that made my realtor heart beat faster.

  He shook his head. “Definitely not Madison. And I don’t think it was Tifton or Tipton. Could have been Cordele. Or… Perry. I think it was Perry.”

  Another town in Georgia, I guessed. It was the only way to account for this association, since Perry sounded nothing like either Tipton/Tifton or Cordele.

  “Glenn Perry?”

  “Something like that. Small guy. Never said much.”

  “Do you know anything about them since you all left high school?”

  “No,” Dix said. “Haven’t heard either of their names again until now.”

  “Would you have said they were the type to do something criminal? Or kidnap the sheriff for some reason?”

  “They wouldn’t have been my first choice,” Dix said. “Glenn never did much of anything. Scotty had problems at home, I think. He was always walking around with bruises. And like I said, I don’t remember Mark Ellison well at all. The name is vaguely familiar, but I don’t think he was in my year.”

  “And no criminal associations with him, either?”

  He shook his head. “They walked out of the house on Friday night and vanished?”

  “Something like that. They left the trailer Mark shares with his wife and two kids in Scotty’s truck a little before seven. They said they were going drinking. They spent the night at Dusty’s Bar in Columbia. When it closed, they left, and no one’s seen them since. But one of them called Bob at ten o’clock on Saturday.”

  “Or someone else did, using Scotty’s phone,” Dix said.

  Yes. That was also possible. “Why would someone do that?”

  “So he wouldn’t have to use his own phone?”

  Well, yes. That was fairly obvious. “So what do you think happened?”

  “Me?” Dix said, sounding sincerely surprised. “I have no idea. I’m just throwing out suggestions based on what you’re telling me.”

  Right. We sat in silence a few seconds.

  “I talked to Grimaldi the other day,” I changed the subject. “Your betrothed. Your fiancée.”

  “I know who Grimaldi is. Or rather, I know that you call her that. What did you talk about?”

  “Under the circumstances,” I said, “she thought maybe you should postpone the wedding.”

  “We’ve discussed it,” Dix nodded. “Bob’s important to her. He got her the job down here. If it hadn’t been for that, she might not be here.”

  “You knew her before she got the job, though. It would have worked out the same anyway.”

  Dix shrugged. “She’s here now, so it doesn’t really matter. But Bob does. To her, and to Mother. So we discussed whether we should postpone the wedding until he’s found.”

  “Grimaldi and I discussed it, too,” I nodded. “I think I managed to talk her into going through with it. Or at least she hasn’t called me in the past two days to tell me to stop what I’m doing. I’m trying to pick up some of the tasks she has to do this week, to make things a little easier for her.”

  Dix nodded. “I told her I think we should carry on. The preparations are so far along that to cancel now will mean a whole lot of trouble down the line. Her family, the caterer, the event company, the flowers… If Bob isn’t back by Saturday, or Bob turns out to be dead, it won’t be much of a festive occasion, I guess. But maybe something happy will help. And I don’t see how not getting married is going to make anything better.”

  I didn’t either. “Let me know if you think of anything I can do to make things easier for the two of you. I can’t do anything to help find Bob, and it’s driving me crazy. But I can at least do something to keep the wedding on track.”

  Dix nodded. “I’ll let you know if I think of anything.”

  “You’ve got the bachelor party under control? And you’re ready for Tony to arrive tomorrow?”

  He said he was. “You’ve got the event company and the flowers?”

  “And the catering. And the dresses. Have you got the tuxedos?”

  “It’s a suit,” Dix said. “Navy blue, to match the dresses. Everyone’s got a blue suit.”

  In his world, maybe. He probably had multiple blue suits in his closet. So did Todd, I was sure. And Jonathan. Lawyers, all three of them.

  Did Rafe have a blue suit? I made a mental note to check the closet at home when I got back there.

  “Tony’s all set?”

  “Should be,” Dix said. “I’ll have Tamara make sure.”

  I told him I appreciated it. “I should go take Carrie away from Darcy so she can get some work done. Be sure to let me know if there’s anything else I can do for either of you.”

  “Just keep praying that Bob is found,” Dix said. “If he’s not, both Todd and Mother will lose their minds. And while Todd has Marley now, to take care of him, Mother will end up back at the mansion with you and Rafe. Maybe that’ll be incentive for you to come up with some idea or other.”

  If anything could do it, that would. “Why would you say something like that to me? That’s awful.”

  “I know,” Dix said and waved at the door. “Go. Share that thought with your husband and see if it doesn’t light a fire under him.”

  “My husband’s doing everything he can,” I said, but I got up and headed for the door anyway. “He hasn’t slept more than four hours a night since Bob drove away on Saturday. Scaring him isn’t going to make him work any faster.”

  “You never know,” Dix said. “I’ll talk to you later, Savannah.”