‘Frannie’s running about three hours late,’ he whispered from the front of the house. He cast his eyes up and down the street out front. No Frannie.

‘Three hours?’

‘I thought you might check around.’ Hardy’s casual tone didn’t camouflage much for Glitsky. He knew what his friend meant by check around – accidents, hospital admissions, or the worst, recently dead Jane Does -unidentified women.

‘Three hours?’ Glitsky repeated.

Hardy looked at his watch, hating to say it. ‘Maybe a little more.’

Glitsky got the message. ‘I’m on it,’ he said. Hardy hung up just as Vincent let out a cry in the kitchen.

The Cochrans – Big Ed and Erin – were the parents of Frannie’s first husband, Ed, who was the biological father of Rebecca. Their son had been gone a long time now, but Ed and Erin still doted on their granddaughter and her brother Vincent. They loved Frannie and her husband. Hardy and his wife, with no living parents between them, considered them part of the family.

Now, after getting the word about Frannie’s absence, they had come to Hardy’s house. Erin was shepherding the kids through their homework at the kitchen table, trying to keep their minds engaged. Hardy and Ed were making small talk, casting glances at the telephone, waiting.

Hardy was on the phone before the ring ended. It was Abe Glitsky with his professional voice on. ‘She back yet?’

Hardy told him no, and endured a short pause. ‘OK, well. The good news is nobody’s dead, not anywhere. I checked Alameda, Marin, Santa Clara’ – the counties surrounding San Francisco – ‘and it’s a slow day on the prairie. Barely a fender-bender. No reports of anything serious. Nothing in the city at all.’