FIVE

The woman was in her late forties. She wore glasses and her hair was long and gray and unfashionable. She did not look like the sort of woman who sat on a billion dollars. She looked like she worked at a library.

This is what Hastings thought, anyway. Like most detectives, he’d take a generalized guess if nothing else was available, and right now there wasn’t.

When Hastings was a young patrol cop, he responded to a call reporting an auto collision on I-64 near the Kingshighway exit. It was one of those bad ones involving an eighteen-wheel semi and a car. The car’s roof was completely sheared off; the sort of crumpled, twisted thing you see and you know that the odds of the occupant surviving the crash are slim. As he suspected, the woman driving the car had died upon impact, and the only positive thing you could think was that it had happened instantly without the person being burned first.

A few minutes later, a man drove up to the wreck and got out of his car and ran toward the carnage. It was Hastings who stopped him before he could see anything. The man said, “My wife’s in there. My wife—is she…?”

“Sir,” Hastings had said, “please step back.”

And the man said, his voice shaking, “She didn’t make it, did she?” Knowing in the way people seem to know.

Hastings paused for only a moment, wondering in that moment if someone else could do this, but knowing that he was there and he would have to. And he said, “No, sir, she didn’t. I’m sorry.”

It was a nasty, necessary part of this business. Passing on tragedy and watching some poor man collapse with grief. But it had to be done.

Hastings led the woman into Sam Fisher’s study, so they could talk alone. They were still standing when he said, “Are you Mrs. Penmark?”

“No, my name is Beckwith. Adele Beckwith. I took my maiden name after I divorced Cordelia’s father.” She said, “Where is my daughter, Detective?”

“We don’t know, ma’am. She may not have been with the young man when—”

“When he was killed?”

“Yes. The good news is, there’s no evidence as of yet that she’s been harmed.”

The woman stared at him. “No evidence? She’s missing, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“We don’t. I’m sorry.”

The woman sat down on the couch. She put her face in her hands. Hastings could see that she was trembling.

“Ma’am,” he said, “please don’t jump to conclusions.”

She looked up at him, her face screwed up with grief.

Hastings said, “We’re working on it.”

“Work—there’s a young man out there who’s dead. And you don’t know where she is. You don’t know.”

No, Hastings thought, I don’t. Because it wasn’t his daughter that was missing. He could empathize, but he couldn’t know.

He said, “Can you talk to me?”

After a moment, she nodded her head.

“When is the last time you talked to her?”

“… Yesterday … she called me yesterday.”

“Did she seem okay?”

“Yes … we talked about what we would do on Christmas.…”

“Was she in any distress when you talked to her?”

She struggled and then shook her head.

“You sure?”

She nodded.

“Do you want to talk about this later?”

She nodded again.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Beckwith. We’re going to do everything we can to get her back to you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to bring an officer back here to sit with you. All right? She’s going to sit with you for a while. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He went out to the front of the house and pulled Officer Annie Soames aside. To him, it was not a chauvinistic thing to ask a woman officer to comfort a woman. He knew from experience that it worked, and few cops, men or women, would dispute it. He had just escorted Annie inside when he saw Murph running up to him.

Detective Tim Murphy—Murph the Surf—had a build that was almost slight. But he possessed the air of fearlessness and menace that is inherent in Irish-cop DNA. Hastings had once seen him crook a finger at a man twice his size and say, “Come here,” and the man did. Quivering while he did so. In such circumstances, self-doubt was not an issue for Murph.

In front of the house, Murph said, “George. We’ve got the girl’s father on the phone. I think you need to talk to him.”

Hastings followed Murph to the command post that had been set up after Hastings delivered his lecture to the young sergeant. Murph handed him a telephone.

“This is Lieutenant Hastings.”

“Lieutenant? You’re the one in charge there?”

“Yes, sir. For the time being.”

“This is Gene Penmark. I’m Cordelia’s father.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve received a telephone call from a man who says he has my daughter.”