Five Days in Summer

swayed at her ears. “Later, after he was finished checking out too.”
    “So the first lady was gone, the one we’re looking for, and he was here in the store arguing with the blond-haired beauty queen?”
    Susannah laughed. “Pam’ll love that one! They weren’t arguing together, like, she was just kind of letting him have it.”
    “And what did he do?” Geary asked.
    “He just listened. He didn’t really even look at her. Then he pushed his cart out of the store. She waited a second then left too. Now that I think of it, she didn’t have a cart.”
    “Did he have a lot of groceries?”
    “Not really. Just a whole bunch of corn on the cob. It was on sale yesterday, a dollar a dozen.”
    Geary nodded. “Anything else you can remember?”
    Susannah was now bagging her customer’s groceries. “Not really. He was like regular height, regular weight, just mainly on the older side and all white and weird.”
    “How can I get in touch with Pam?” Geary asked. “She might remember something else.”
    Susannah’s eyes flashed to Geary; it took her a split second to decide to trust him with her friend’s number. She jotted it on an old receipt someone had left behind and handed it over.
    “I’ll tell her I talked to you.”
    “Thanks.” Geary winked.
    Susannah winked back and started scanning the groceries of her next customer.
    Will and Geary walked past the checkouts, through the automatic doors and into the clear morning light.
    “Borrow that phone of yours?” Geary asked.
    Will handed him the slender, folded phone. Geary turned it over in his hand and figured out how to flip it open. Then he handed it back.
    “You dial.”
    Will dialed each number as Geary read them off the crumbled receipt, then gave back the phone. From the way Geary’s eyes rolled up, it was clear he’d reached a machine. His message was wordy but got the point across. He left his home number for Pam to call him back.
    They moved under the shade of a broad awning.
    “How are we going to find Emily?” Will asked.
    “We? You mean you and the Mashpee PD?”
    “Do you think I should call in the state police?”
    “Not just yet. They’re good, but they’ll file it too. A missing persons gets a blast of attention up front, then dries up fast. Unless there’s money involved, or it’s a kid.”
    Will’s eyes stayed on Geary’s face. “What are you thinking?”
    “I have a hunch. Was I part of that we, Will?”
    “I’ll hire you, I’ll pay you whatever you want.”
    “I don’t need money. I just want permission to use whatever I might find in my book.”
    “Your book—”
    “Cold cases. Unsolved crimes. If my hunch is right, one of the nuts I found sleeping in a file cabinet might have done a little grocery shopping yesterday.”
    “Mr. White?”
    “Maybe, maybe not. When they’re not caught, we don’t know who they are. That’s the puzzle. My job was to build a lens to focus them, create the picture, then use it to find them. Behavioral profiling. We gather what we know and we go from there. You’d be surprised. It’s a science. Eight out of ten times, it works.”
    “What about the other two times?”
    Geary shook his head. “It’s not a perfect science.”
    “Why yesterday? Why Emily?”
    “If I’m right, it had to be yesterday. I don’t know if it had to be Emily.”
    A tremor passed through Will. Wrong place, wrong time. An overlap of timing and misfortune, as arbitrary as good luck. “What am I supposed to do, Dr. Geary?”
    “Give me a little time. Don’t talk to anyone beforeI have a chance to figure this out. The local police might leak it to the papers, and that might spook our guy.”
    “But wouldn’t the publicity help us?” Will thought of all the television bulletins, faces flashing on the screen, a disembodied broadcaster’s voice earnestly requesting information on the disappearance of a woman or man or child. And the strangely painful details: date of birth, weight, hair color, missing from what place on what day at what time.
    “There’s a right time and a wrong time to bring in the media,” Geary said. “I’d like to discuss this with a criminologist I know, get his take on it. He’s helped me crack a lot of nuts in the past.”
    “What if waiting makes it too late?”
    “It’s always a risk. But think about it, Will. You’ve got more to gain now than lose.”
    “How long?”
    “I’ll call you at three o’clock, three thirty at the latest. Give me until