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She’s my mother.” Johnny looked around, as if for a stick or a bat, but there was nothing. “What’s wrong with you?”
    Uncle Steve’s eyes showed rare desperation. “I just opened the door. I didn’t mean anything by it. Swear to God, Johnny. I’m not like that. I’m not that kind of guy. I swear it. Hand to God.”
    A sheen of greasy sweat slicked Uncle Steve’s face. He was so scared, it was pitiful. Johnny wanted to kick him in the balls. He wanted to put him on the ground, then find the pipe under his bed and beat his balls flat. But he thought of Alyssa’s picture, and of the things he still needed to do. And he’d learned this year. He’d learned how to put emotion last. His voice came cold and level. He had things to do, and Steve was going to help him. “You tell her you took me to school.” Johnny nodded and stepped closer. “If she asks, that’s what you tell her.”
    “And you won’t say anything?”
    “Not if you do what I tell you.”
    “Swear?”
    “Just go, Uncle Steve. Go to work.”
    Uncle Steve slipped past, hands still up. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”
    But Johnny had nothing else to say. He closed the door, then spread the map on the kitchen counter. The red pen was slick between his fingers. He smoothed his palm across the wrinkled paper, then slid a finger to the neighborhood he’d been working for the past three weeks.
    He picked a street at random.
     
     
     

CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    Detective Hunt sat at the cluttered desk in his small office. Files spilled from cabinet tops and unused chairs. Dirty coffee cups, memos he’d never read. It was 9:45. The place was a mess, but he lacked the energy to deal with it. He scrubbed his hands across his face, ground at the sockets of his eyes until he saw white streaks and sparks. His face felt rough, unshaven, and he knew that he looked every bit of his forty-one years. He’d lost so much weight that his suits hung on his frame. He’d not been to the gym or the shooting range in six months. He rarely managed more than one meal a day, but none of that seemed to matter.
    In front of him, he’d spread his office copy of the Alyssa Merrimon file. A well-thumbed duplicate was locked in a desk drawer at home. He flipped pages methodically, reading every word: reports, interviews, summaries. Alyssa’s face stared out at him from an enlarged copy of her school photograph. Black hair, like her brother’s. Same bone structure, same dark eyes. A secret kind of smile. A lightness, like her mother had, an ethereal quality that Hunt had tried and failed to identify. The way her eyes tilted, maybe? The swept-back ears and china skin? The innocence? That’s the one that Hunt came back to most often. The child looked as if she’d never had an impure thought or done an ill deed in her entire life.
    And then there was her mother, her brother. They all had it, to one degree or another; but none of them like the girl.
    Hunt scrubbed his face one more time.
    He was too close, he knew that; but the case had a grip on him. A glance at the office showed the depth of his fall. There were cases here that needed work. Other people. Real people who suffered just like the Merrimons did; but those cases paled, and he still did not know why. The girl had even found her way into his dreams. She wore the same clothes she had on the day she disappeared: faded yellow shorts, a white top. She was pale in the dream. Short hair. Eighty pounds. A hot spring day. There was no lead up when it happened; the dream started like a cannon shot, full-blown, color and sound. Something was pulling her into a dark place beneath the trees, dragging her through the warm, rotten leaves. Her hand was out, mouth open, teeth very white. He dove for the hand, missed, and she screamed as long fingers drew her down into some dark and seamless place.
    When it happened, he woke sheeted in sweat, arms churning as if he were digging through leaves. The dream found him two or three