Five Days in Summer

asked Harmon.
    “I’ve been his caseworker for three years. He’s been rehabilitating well.”
    “I’m at his house,” Amy said, “and I wouldn’t agree.”
    Fifteen minutes later, as the officers continued their search of the house, attic and basement, and carried archives of child pornography to their trunks, Sally Harmon’s powder blue Hyundai ground to a stop in front of 2 Squaws Lane. The door opened and out stepped a woman with bleached blond hair teasedaround her face. She wore pink lipstick, blue eye shadow and false lashes. Her brown-penciled eyebrows were drawn in an ironic arch. She looked worried, but when she saw Amy she managed what appeared to be a smile.
    “Sally Harmon.” She shook Amy’s hand and a gold charm bracelet jangled on her wrist.
    “Detective Amy Cardoza,” she introduced herself. “This is Dr. John Geary, my partner.”
    Geary’s glance was half surprise, half smile, half thank-you. She hoped her decision to trust him added up better than had her first impression, which had been less than a hundred percent.
    Sally turned to look at the beach. “Bobby has a gorgeous view.” She shook her head. “He was doing so well.”
    Amy described the trove of material they’d found in his house. “Does that sound like rehabilitation?” she asked.
    Sally considered the question. “I know it sounds horrible, but it’s not as off target as it looks to you. We know we can’t change the core of these people. We just aim to change their behavior. Has Bobby committed a crime?” Her face seemed to darken as she waited for the answer.
    “If he’s trafficking on the Internet, yes,” Amy said. “We’ve seized his computer but there’s more. A woman is missing. It fits into a larger picture, going back years.”
    Sally’s expression lightened. “A woman? He’s terrified of women. He wouldn’t touch one if his life depended on it. That’s partly what we work on in our sessions.”
    “He wouldn’t necessarily tell you everything,” Geary said, “would he?” He looked at Sally critically, as if trying to see under the makeup and the hair.
    “I suppose I can’t really know,” Sally said. “But I’ve been seeing him twice a week for three years. I doubt he’s capable of overpowering an adult.”
    “Just a child?” Amy said sharply.
    Sally Harmon’s face pinched around the mouth.
    “Do you always shop with Bobby?” Geary asked.
    Sally nodded her head. “Sometimes. It’s part of the therapy.”
    “You were seen arguing with him at the store,” Amy said.
    Sally thought back. “That’s the woman? Ash-blond hair, lovely smile?”
    “You remember her,” Geary said. “Did you see him with her?”
    “They were picking through the corn bin at the same time. Her bracelet fell in and I returned it to her.” She shook her wrist to rattle her charm bracelet. “Hers was silver.”
    “Bobby was behind her at the checkout. What were you arguing about, Ms. Harmon?” Amy noticed that Sally Harmon’s teased hair barely flinched in the wind.
    “I told him he’d bought too much corn, just because it was on sale. We’ve been working on his flexibility.”
    “That’s it?” Amy asked.
    “Pretty boring, huh?”
    “No,” Geary said, “I wouldn’t say that.”
    A wave snarled onto the shore so fiercely it captivated Sally’s attention. After a second she looked back at Geary and narrowed her eyes. “He’s a sick man, I grant you, but he isn’t capable of taking a grown woman against her will. I was with him that day. We drove back to the clinic together and he dropped me off. So you see?”
    “Did he stay, or did he leave immediately?” Amy asked.
    “He left.”
    “How far is your office from the grocery store, Ms. Harmon?”
    Sally Harmon looked at Amy a moment before answering. “Three or four minutes.”
    “That’s plenty of time for Emily to load her trunk, John, don’t you think?”

Chapter 17
    Bobby Robertson fit the profile but Geary knew it was rarely that easy.
    “We’ve got no evidence,” he told Amy as she drove them back to the station.
    “We’ve got the pictures, we’ve got the tapes. When they check out his hard drive we’ll probably have more.”
    “Circumstantial. It’s not enough.”
    “We’ll get him. If we could get his car into forensics, we’d have him cold. But he’ll lead us to Emily Parker before we have his car, so it’ll be homework by then, dotting the i’s—”
    “Crossing the t’s, yeah yeah yeah.”
    She