Detective Anne Monteforte sat at her desk, staring at a photograph of George and Jane Wadlow. In the picture, George wore a Red Sox T-shirt and his tool belt, while Jane held a screwdriver to his ear, nose crinkled and eyes narrowed as though she was trying to figure out how to fix him. It was a cute picture, from happier times. A picture today would have shown a very worried George tending to a Jane whose face was bruised and swollen, and whose confidence had suffered a terrible blow.

In frustration, she pushed the picture away. They had nothing.

The two events—the mystery vehicles watching the Wadlow house in the small hours of the morning and the attack in the Wadlows’ driveway—had to be related. So the case created two jobs for the Medford P.D. The first was to figure out who these guys were and the second was to make sure they weren’t coming back. The prevailing belief seemed to be that someone—sexual predators or human traffickers or someone who just wanted a damn baby—had spotted Jane out with Leyla at some point and had targeted her. Detective Jarman had suggested that, as an older woman, Jane might have seemed like she wouldn’t put up much of a fight.

Surprise, assholes! Monteforte thought. Good for Jane.

Thought it hadn’t really been good for Jane. Monteforte winced at the memory of the woman’s injuries. She wanted to find the bastards responsible and hoped to have the opportunity to give them a few bruises of their own.

But as the day had progressed, Monteforte had begun to doubt the prevailing wisdom. If Jane and Cait’s stories about the cars working surveillance on Badger Road had been accurate, there had been a team prepping for the attempted abduction of Leyla McCandless. That didn’t sound like some pervert, kiddie pornographer, or baby black marketer. It sounded like someone who really wanted this child, which brought a slew of new questions to the table.

Monteforte had questioned A-Train herself. The guy was an asshole, no doubt, and the video of Cait kicking his ass had gone viral on the Internet and continued to be shown on the news all day, making its way onto national newscasts. He was pissed off and embarrassed, but he had an alibi and Monteforte had believed his denials. The guy was a dimwit, incapable of convincingly pretending to be mystified by her questions.

If it hadn’t been random, that left only two possibilities—a custody-related kidnapping perpetrated on behalf of baby Leyla’s Iraqi relatives, or something Monteforte and Jarman hadn’t even considered yet. Her instinct told her it was the latter, which pissed her off. Anne Monteforte was a smart woman and she didn’t like feeling clueless. There were pieces missing from the puzzle, and big ones.

None of the neighbors had seen anything helpful. Several had noticed the cars parked on the street, but either paid them little attention or developed their own theories about the presence of the unfamiliar vehicles. One old woman had thought the car must belong to a private eye out to catch a cheating spouse; Monteforte figured she watched too much television. The neighbors on either side of the vacationing DiMarinos, in front of whose house the cars kept parking, had not noticed more than one vehicle and had independently assumed it belonged to some friend or relative, there to check up on the house.

The supposedly untraceable license plate was a big question mark, but only if one assumed that Cait had written it down correctly. The woman had been a sergeant in the National Guard and spent more than two years in Iraq. She had been trained to pay attention, and her fight with A-Train showed that she was far more capable than the typical soldier. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t made a mistake about the plate number.

They had started to run down similar plate numbers, with one digit off from the number Cait had provided. Monteforte shuffled through a stack of papers on her desk, looking at the information they had collected on the owners of the cars with those near-miss plates. Thus far she had found only one potential suspect among them, a guy named Marcus Freiberg, who had two restraining orders against him and a sexual assault charge that had been continued without a finding. The sex assault beef had resulted in him violating a T.R.O. from his ex-wife, so maybe there was more to that story than the paperwork revealed. In any case, most of his ugly behavior seemed related to the ex, so the possibility of a connection to the Wadlow/McCandless case seemed slim. But they had to be thorough.

Nothing’s going to come of it, Monteforte thought. You’re not getting anywhere.

The thought infuriated her, but she couldn’t deny it. Unless they got a major break, this case would go cold. Whoever had put the Wadlows’ house under surveillance and then beaten Jane and tried to snatch the baby had left no trace behind. They were professionals, almost military in the execution of their crimes.

“Jesus,” she sighed, and glanced at the clock, to find it ticking toward six p.m. Sunday afternoon was about to give way to Sunday night, and Monteforte just wanted to go home. Unless they caught a break, they had done all they could for today.

With a shake of her head, she dropped the file on her desk and stood.

As she did, Jarman came into the office, looking pissed off and more than a little scary. Her partner had a kind heart and a quiet wisdom, but he didn’t smile nearly often enough and could be intimidating to people who didn’t know him.

“What is it?” Monteforte asked, even before he could open his mouth.

“It’s money. It’s always money, isn’t it?” Jarman muttered.

“What are you talking about?”

He sank into his desk chair and turned to her. “It’s August, and the damn weekend. We’re short-staffed and Hoffmeyer won’t approve overtime for anyone. I asked Tagliabue to drive past Cait McCandless’s place every hour or so—Parker’s off duty now—but he just told me Hoffmeyer’s asked him to sit on Wellington Station.”

“So talk to Hoffmeyer,” Monteforte said.

Jarman scowled. “I did. Where do you think I got the ‘short-staffed’ bullshit from?”

“So you’re coming around to the idea that this might not have been random?”

The question took the wind out of Jarman. He exhaled, settling into his chair, and then shrugged.

“Just trying to keep an open mind. But something goddamn weird happened over there today, and the fact that neither of us has a clue makes me nervous.”

With a deep sigh, Jarman stood up.

“You going home?” Monteforte asked.

Jarman nodded. “Just about to. Why? You want to get a drink? I sure as hell could use one.”

Monteforte glanced at the papers on her desk. “Not yet. I want to run down this Marcus Freiberg guy. I’m sure it’s a dead end, but I want to dot all the i’s, y’know?”

“All right. Let me know what you find.”

“Will do,” Monteforte agreed. “Listen, though. If you’re headed out, maybe you oughta take a drive past Cait McCandless’s place yourself. If we’ve got no one else who can do it …”

Jarman sighed, but then gave a firm nod.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “I’m gonna go home, change my clothes, and then I’ll go out for a drive. And if I happen to pass by the McCandless girl’s apartment, well, the department doesn’t have to pay overtime for what I do when I’m out driving around.”