Which left Caroline plenty of time to think about the events of the previous evening. To think and to try to pick at the knots of the mystery in hopes of untangling them a little.

But all her efforts yielded nothing. She searched the local papers and Internet news sources for stories of urban violence that might connect with the bruises they'd seen on the girl's neck, but found nothing that matched both the crime and the girl's description. The man who'd left a streak of his blood on the strange gun also seemed to have slipped back into the shadows without any notice. She spent what seemed like hours on hold at the Missing Person's Bureau, only to come up empty on both the girl and the man.

She didn't talk to Roger at all that day. Sometimes he called her at lunch, but today she was so busy with the Internet that she never even noticed it was one-thirty until the twelve-thirty lunch shift swept back into the office. For an hour after that she worried about whether she should have called him, even if he hadn't called her, and spent the rest of the day sitting vaguely on pins and needles as she wondered if interrupting his afternoon would make things better or worse.

It was with considerable relief that she returned home that evening to find Roger not only not angry with her but already working on dinner.

"Hi, hon," he greeted her, giving her a distracted sort of kiss. "How was your day?"

"Slow," she said, hanging up her coat and returning to the kitchen. "Yours?"

"The same," he said, opening a can of tomatoes. "Judge Vasco is down with the flu, so the contractdispute argument I was putting together for Bill is on hold for at least a week. And Sam and Carleton are out in the wilds of corporate Delaware on some big rainmaking expedition."