O n Monday afternoon, Detective Roy Barrott’s shift was up at four P.M. It had been a relatively slow day, and at three o’clock he realized that he had nothing to command his immediate attention. But something was bothering him. Like his tongue roving through his mouth to find the source of a sore spot, his mind began to retrace the day searching for the source of the discomfort.

When he remembered his interview with Carolyn MacKenzie, he knew that he had found it. The look of dismay and contempt he had seen in her eyes when she left him made him feel both ashamed and embarrassed now. She was desperately worried about her brother and had hoped that the note he’d left in the collection basket at church might be a step toward finding him. Although she hadn’t said it, she obviously thought he might be in some kind of trouble.

I brushed her off, Barrott thought. When she left she said she wouldn’t bother me again. That was the word she used, “bother.”

Now, as he leaned back in his desk chair in the crowded squad room, Barrott shut out the sounds of the ringing telephones that surrounded him. Then he shrugged. It wouldn’t kill me to take a look at the file, he decided. If nothing else, to satisfy myself that it’s nothing more than a guy who doesn’t want to be found, a guy who will one day change his mind, and end up on Dr. Phil being reunited with his mother and sister while everybody has a good cry.

Wincing at a touch of arthritis in his knee, he got up, went down to the records department, signed out the MacKenzie file, brought it back to his desk, and opened it. Besides the pile of official reports, and the statements from Charles MacKenzie Jr.’s family and friends, there was a legal-sized envelope filled with pictures. Barrott pulled them out and scattered them on his desk.