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  Good luck with that flashed through Behr’s mind. The woman’s eyes were sparkling and alive. There was the hint of someone’s arm wrapped around her shoulder. Perhaps the picture was taken at a party and cropped. The billboard was visible in the passenger window for a moment, and then it was gone from Behr’s peripheral vision and thoughts, his concentration fixed in front of him. He decided not to head home, but to go see Trevor instead.

  Behr knocked on Susan’s door and entered to find her preparing dinner.

  “Hey! You’re back,” she said, turning her face toward his for a kiss before resuming the chopping of red peppers. Even though they were living separately, they were doing their best to try to make it work. A wok was on low sizzle on the stove and smelled delicious.

  “There he is,” Behr said, crossing to the Pack ’N Play where his son, Trevor, sat, banging away with a block on a shape-sorter toy. The boy smiled up at him. “That’s a triangle, son. It goes in this slot.” Behr helped him and the wooden piece dropped away, then he picked the boy up and turned toward Susan. “Trying to fit the wrong peg into the round hole—just like his old man.”

  “He’s six months old, what’s your excuse?” Susan asked.

  Behr didn’t answer and instead lifted Trevor, tossing him aloft, pretending to miss the catch, before grabbing him up. The boy squealed in delight. Behr stared into his eyes and thought of Tim, his first son, long gone now, as he did every time he saw Trevor. Surging joy and piercing pain mixed inside him. It was something he’d been unable to escape in the past six months and doubted he ever would.

  “So how’d it go?” she asked.

  “Good,” Behr said, turning toward her. “Weather was perfect. Les got a big one. I didn’t fill. But it was good.”

  “All right, a long walk in the woods then,” she said.

  “Pretty much,” Behr said, his attention pulled to the television, which was tuned to the news. There were a slew of official vehicles behind Sandra Chapman, the reporter from WTHR, who was doing a stand-up from a familiar-looking park playground.

  “Is that … that looks like Northwestway. What happened?”

  Susan glanced over. “They found a body out there in the park. A woman. It’s been all over the news while you’ve been away.”

  “Murder?” Behr asked.

  “Yeah. Cut up in pieces. Awful.”

  “Christ,” Behr said, turning away when the news switched back to the anchors and the next story, about a local high school basketball all-star team.

  “I’m making stir-fry. You want to stay?”

  “Sure.”

  Behr sat at the table and bounced Trevor and watched Susan move about the kitchen as she finished preparing the meal. She was nearly back to her pre-baby weight, just a bit of extra fullness remained around her hips and breasts. Behr saw her wrestle with the cork on a bottle of Pinot Grigio.

  “Trade you,” he said, handing her Trevor and opening the wine.

  She poured and served, after putting the baby in a little bucket seat that rested on the table. Behr drank the white wine to keep her company even though he didn’t like it much. As they ate, they talked almost solely of Trevor and his activities and accomplishments, like rolling over and commando crawling, which were limited but endlessly fascinating to them. They finished eating and cleared the dishes, and then gave the boy a bath together. She fixed the milk while Behr read him Show Me Your Toes. Then Behr fed the boy the bottle, passing him back to Susan so she could burp him and put him down.

  When all was quiet and they’d closed the door to his room, Susan bumped up against Behr in the hall with intent. He put his hand behind her head and pulled her in for a kiss. He tasted the wine on her lips and felt her respond. Soon they found their way to her bedroom and their clothes came off.

  Afterward, once they’d dozed for a while, Behr’s mind returned to a state of restlessness. It was the crossroads moment of whether to head home or to stay where he was and try to go to sleep for the night. None of this was unexpected. A cycle of domestic bliss that came to its ultimate, restive end was their routine of late. Another moment passed and Behr extricated his arm from beneath her and swung his feet to the floor.

  “You have an early morning?” Susan asked from half slumber as he dressed.

  “They’re all early,” he said. It was true. Even though he wasn’t currently working cases, his nights often dragged on late before he managed to get in bed, and he was up long before the sun.

  “Lock the door on the way out,” she said.

  “Yep,” Behr said, bending and kissing her on top of the head. He stopped in Trevor’s room. It smelled of baby lotion and diaper ointment. He stood over the boy and watched his tiny chest rise and fall rhythmically. Behr reached in and touched his son’s hair, which was smooth as corn silk, and then he left.

  4

  Irvington is quiet in the light of the moon. The streets that had been so busy in the morning now sleep. But he drives the grid, letting the layout of the neighborhood sink deep into his cortex: the houses and small apartment buildings, the alleys and cul-de-sacs, the fences, the garbage cans and detached garages. He turns onto East Lowell and thinks of her, his little Cinnamon, walking along with her cigarette. As he passes by the homes, only a few with lights on, a few others with televisions glowing behind window shades, he wonders in which one she lives. He’ll find out. It will take days or weeks, but it will happen eventually. It’s a question of luck and timing, of schedules and effort invested.

  He’s seen enough for now. It is time to clear out, but he can’t go home. Not yet. Instead he steers north toward the airfield and parks in the near-empty lot of Lover’s Lane. The adult bookstore’s red neon sign shines down on the hood of his car. He gets out and whiffs the jet fuel on the cold night air, and then he goes inside, where the chemical smell of bleached filth takes its place.

  There are only a few people shopping at this hour—two other men around his age, and one much older. The clerk strokes his ponytail, a worn paperback copy of Game of Thrones facedown on the counter, as he speaks to the only other customers, a young couple who already have their cylindrical purchase in a black plastic bag.

  He moves past them into the store, beyond the expensive lingerie and high-heel shoes, down the rows of DVDs and sex toys. The shop is a little high-end for his taste, but there aren’t many like it left anymore. The Internet has replaced them and threatens to render them obsolete altogether, just like it will do to people one day. But he’s grown up with magazines, and they are still what he prefers, and this is where to get them. He thinks of the hundreds he has in his garage, maybe a thousand. The frozen images and the slick feel of the paper in his hands bring him back to his childhood. He still remembers the day when he was eight years old and discovered the cache of blue magazines at Grandfather’s house. His young body and mind had exploded in excitement at the sight of the pages.

  All the pretty women, with their cone-shaped breasts and tight-fitting girdles, standing with a leg up on the bed, or bent over chairs, as they looked back at the camera. His heart had pounded at the images. He understood then, deeply and immediately, that it would always be the images for him. What he didn’t understand was what the magazines were doing there in Grandfather’s study in the first place. Did Grandfather look at them? The question didn’t stay in his mind long, because soon, mixed in with the others, he’d discovered some old-school crime journals. Startling Detective, True Crime, Police Tales. They were even better than the porno books.

  While he didn’t dare take the nudie magazines, he had cadged two issues of Detective Dragnet. Leather-gloved hands were wrapped around the neck of a startled-looking young blonde in her underwear on the cover of one issue. He had to have it, and another with a similar scene. He was shocked and relieved that Grandfather had never discovered them missing or at least hadn’t pursued where they’d gone.

  But then, weeks later, Mother had. She thought he’d stolen them from a newsstand, and he’d kept Grandf
ather’s secret.

  You little thief …

  Then came the smack and thump of her open hand.

  You little thief …

  His head hit the wall.

  You little thief …

  It went on. Oh, how it had gone on.

  He didn’t cry at the beating, he never did, even though that made Mother go after him worse, and he hadn’t been able to get out of bed and go to school for a week afterward. But it was worth it.

  There is a jingle as the young couple exits the shop. He reaches the “literature” section, passes by what he doesn’t want, Hustler, Genesis, Club, and the like—fluffy crap—and then rounds the aisle and finds what he is looking for: the vintage stuff. Stalked, Captured, and Fettered. He waits for the familiar flutter in his stomach, the tingle in his limbs, at the sight of the buxom young women on the covers, shackled, gagged, staring pleadingly out at the reader. The colors are supersaturated, the lighting stark and procedural. The images pop in a highly detailed way. His reaction to the covers has hardly waned over the years. He gathers up a few issues he doesn’t already own and goes to the register to pay.

  While the clerk makes change of his fifty-dollar bill, his hand goes into his pocket and his fingers slide around the smooth souvenir there. It was white once, years ago, but has aged down from exposure to air and his touch. He used to carry the piece every day, though now he takes it out only when he’s feeling a certain way. It is a length of bone, the first proximal phalange from someone very special that he’d known briefly long ago. It is both a reminder of the past and a promise of the future.

  “Have a good night,” the clerk says, perhaps recognizing him from his other visits, perhaps not. At some point he needs to stop coming to places like this. There are cameras and it isn’t wise to continue. Of course, he’s thought that for years and years and nothing has happened, nothing has changed. The fact is: he’s invisible.

  “Thank you,” he says to the clerk.

  He leaves the store and heads for home.

  5

  Behr got home and carried his hunting gear inside. His clothes went straight into the washing machine, his boots back in the closet. The slug gun got a wipe-down with a chamois, but since it had gone unfired, it did not require a full cleaning before it was placed in the gun cabinet. It was late and he was nearly ready for sleep, but something kept him from his bed and steered him toward his computer.

  Kendra Gibbons, Indianapolis

  He typed the name from the billboard into a Google search. He didn’t know what caused him to do it. Four articles about her came up: three within days of each other dating back eighteen months, and then a more recent one, from the beginning of the month. Behr read them in chronological order. The first piece was a brief posting about a twenty-three-year-old woman who’d gone out for the night and hadn’t come home or called, which was highly unusual.

  Her mother, Kerry Gibbons, age fifty, of the Millersville Boulevard area, had called police. “I know something bad happened to her, because I was watching my daughter’s baby girl, and she always comes for her first thing in the morning, or at least calls. She always calls. Always. Even from jail.”

  Jail? Behr thought.

  The second bit talked about police efforts to locate the woman and intimated that she was a prostitute who had gone out to work for the night. A shoe had been found, a lavender-colored pump. Kerry Gibbons was trying to positively ID it as one of her daughter’s but wasn’t sure. The third article linked the Gibbons disappearance to a few others that had occurred over the past three or four years. “Women get into cars with these men around here or out at the Dr. Gas truck stop on 70, or the one on 465, and a lot of them don’t come back and we don’t see ’em again,” a neighbor commented.

  Behr felt the familiar cold weight of parental grief as he read the last, most recent piece. It was about the unveiling of the billboard he had seen and the reward fund that Kerry Gibbons had established.

  “I appreciate all those who’ve sent in their money. I will find out what happened to my daughter so my granddaughter doesn’t have to wonder, if it takes my whole life and every cent I can spare.”

  Doing something for the money usually ends up costing plenty.

  Behr had risen early, and this was the thought in his head as he tied his running shoes and slipped on a heavy pack. He hit the street, his breath clouding in the cold morning darkness. The pack strap cut into his recovering collarbone and reminded him of what had happened six months ago. How the shotgun blast had come out of nowhere and leveled him in falling rain. He set out for Saddle Hill, hoping to outrun the memory.

  If there was one positive by-product that came along with the paucity of work lately, Behr thought, it was his cardio. His empty plate and inability to lift heavy weights allowed him to run more regularly, and for longer than usual. While ten sprints up and down the long steep of the Hill used to constitute his morning run, he’d lately built to thirteen, then fourteen. He didn’t time himself, but he was pretty sure his pace had picked up. His strength at the finish surely had. He’d gone to swim with Susan a few times at the I.U. Purdue pool too. They took turns, each watching the baby on the side while the other swam laps. She put him to shame, though. She sliced through the water like a game fish, while he just wasn’t buoyant. He was made of lead apparently. She’d be done and toweling off while he churned up a lane, his thrashing dissuading other swimmers from sharing with him, mostly ignoring her pointers, until his heart was chugging like a steam engine and he’d finally call it a day. No, the asphalt was where he belonged. One foot in front of the other, just like his life. He hammered up the incline, road salt shifting and shaking in the pack like a seventy-pound maraca.

  It’s a stupid idea, he thought about the Gibbons case, on the way down.

  How could it hurt to just take a look? he wondered his next time up.

  If the police have nothing, how can you do better? Up he went.

  Because I have time. He huffed his way down.

  Why bother?

  A hundred grand. Trev and Susan.

  The thought repeated itself on the way up. The same thought stayed in his head on the way back down.

  By the time he was finished, he’d decided.

  6

  Irvington in the morning again. The streets are becoming familiar now. Some of the same joggers jog. The mothers with the strollers stroll. He is starting to recognize coats, scarves, faces. Several passes by Lowell and Ritter and Arlington. No soaring feeling. No luck. No Cinnamon. Time to go to work.

  7

  Behr’s Toronado rolled to a stop on a patch of pea gravel outside a modest but well-kept brick bungalow in Millersville. There was a Ford Taurus parked in front, and a pink tricycle tipped over against the side of the house next to a small plastic Playmobil jungle gym and slide set. He also noticed a once-yellow ribbon that had been tied around the trunk of a maple tree. It had faded to a pale buff color and was frayed along the ends. Behr continued toward the door and knocked.

  “Mrs. Gibbons?” he said when a petite woman, around fifty years old, with cropped platinum hair opened the door.

  “You’re that detective? Call me Kerry, and come on in.”

  “If you’re here to get hired, you can forget it,” Kerry Gibbons said, handing him a cup of Vanilla Bean Taster’s Choice.

  “Ma’am?”

  “It’s not that I won’t spend the money, it’s that I been down that road. A couple three-thousand-dollar rides to nowhere. So there’s no retainer or hourly or anything on this one.”

  “I understand,” Behr said.

  “She’s dead, my little girl. I know it in my bones,” the woman said without excess emotion. “I know there’s no finding her alive. I just want to know how. Who …” It was only then that her anger rose up beneath her words. “I want the son of a bitch who did it sent to Terre Haute and shot full of juice.”

  “Well …” Behr said after her words had settled. “This kind of thing isn’t easy.�
��

  “How’d you end up coming to me?” Kerry Gibbons asked, lighting a slender brown More 120 from a red pack.

  “The billboard,” Behr said. He’d already mentioned it on the phone, but he supposed she had a lot on her mind.

  “Of course,” she said. “I figured I’d get a lot more phone traffic after it went up. Even cranks and such.”

  “And?”

  “Not as much as you’d think,” she said. He couldn’t tell if she was disappointed about it.

  “Ma’am, if you don’t mind my asking, where did you come up with this reward money?”

  “Raised it,” she said, tapping her ash into a coffee cup with no handle. “First six months I offered ten grand—that’s all I had. Posted flyers everywhere. But that didn’t stir the pot. So I upped it. Had a series of community benefits and drives. People knew Kendra around the neighborhood. They cared about her.”

  “I’m sure they did,” Behr said.

  “Kendra’s friends and me out at intersections with buckets.” Then she smiled. “And those friends of hers, those little girlies, had a couple carwashes last summer in their short-shorts and halter tops, splashing around. Ten dollars a car. Twenty dollars a car. Plus tips. I was there too, but just organizing. No one’s paying to see these old things get soapy anymore.” She juggled her breasts and barked out a nicotine laugh that Behr couldn’t help joining.

  “Well, it is a lot of money,” Behr said, “but still …”

  “I know, I know, it’s impossible,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette in the cup and waving away the smoke. “But I’ve learned in my time that you can do damn near anything if you put your mind to it.”

  Behr nodded. It was something he’d learned too. After spending a moment in thought over her Taster’s Choice, she put it down and the photos came out. They were snaps of Kendra. One was of her smiling brightly in her high school graduation gown, another with a bunch of friends in jean shorts on the hood of a Dodge. Party shots. She seemed to be a vibrant, beautiful young woman. Then came picture after picture of the girl with an infant. There was the full version of the photo that had been cropped for the billboard. This one featured a swarthy, muscular young man with a proprietary arm around Kendra’s shoulder.