Five Days in Summer

cast him one of her razor-sharp glances and he toned it down.
    “If he leads us to Emily, and if we find her alive, then it’s easy. But what if he doesn’t?”
    She pulled into a parking spot by the back entrance. “He will.”
    “Maybe. There’s something bothering me, though.” Geary liberated himself from his seat belt and got out of the car. Amy slammed shut her door and faced him over the hood.
    “What?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Something.”
    One of Bell’s comments over lunch kept ringing: “Professional, certainly. He has the facility to hide his victims and control when and where he presents them. That takes not only ingenuity, but means.”
    Geary agreed with this assessment. But as far as he could see, Bobby Robertson was a professional basket case and whatever means he had probably came from the state. The man was a crazy salad of nerve and nervousness that did not sit well in Geary’s stomach.
    “You’re right,” she said. “We should keep our options open.”
    She opened her door, leaned in and jabbed a button on the console to radio dispatch, even though they were right behind her through that brick wall. A voice answered, scratching the air with codes followed by a plain vanilla hello.
    “Buzz Landberg and Graves,” Amy told the voice. “Tell them to head over to eighteen Gooseberry Way. Tell forensics to meet them. If no one’s home, tell them to get into the garage and tag a rolled-up rug in the left corner by the automatic door. If someone’s home, tell them to wait, and I’ll come right over with the warrant. I’ve got it with me.”
    She ended the call and shut her car door in one swift action. “Happy now?”
    “ Happy ’s not the word. Neither is impressed . You’ve got the right idea but it’s the wrong option.”
    “So where else do we look then?”
    Geary shook his head. There was nothing worse than pitching a tent on wet sand. No foundations and no support.
    “I’m reporting in to the boss,” she said. “Coming?”
    On the way down the hall, Amy poked her head into the dispatch office. “You reach them?”
    They must have said yes, because her dark featuresclouded over with that determined look he was getting to know so well. She snaked through the hall and turned into the front lobby to collect her phone messages. Funny, Geary thought, that they were all rigged up with cell phones and beepers on top of all the high-tech gear in the patrol cruisers, but they still used those pink message slips instead of voice mail. It was a damn good thing, too, because he would have drawn the line right there and told Kaminer to keep his name off the payroll; he would have kept on cowboying the case instead. Voice mail. Like traveling blind through a maze, turning and turning and never reaching the destination of a human voice.
    Amy reached her hand through the slot opening in the Plexiglas divider, then lifted her eyes to Suellen at the front desk and froze on something. Geary came up behind her and saw what. Sitting at either side of Suellen, like assistant receptionists, were the two Parker boys. They were wearing police hats on their heads and badges on their T-shirts. They were playing cards.
    “Hello?” Amy’s breath fogged the Plexiglas. “What’s this?”
    Geary winked at the boys. The little one waved and the big one just stared. He wondered why they were still here; where was that sister of Parker’s?
    “They’re sitting with me while their dad’s meeting with the chief.” Suellen looked like a grandma in her element. She made Geary think of Ruth again; she would have made a fine grandma, but for that you needed kids of your own. He pushed that old disappointment back down.
    “Where?” Amy asked.
    “His office.”
    Geary followed Amy as she turned back into the hallway, left then right then left again, and came to adoor at the end with the seal of the State of Massachusetts like a target dead in the center. She knocked briskly.
    The door swung open at Kaminer’s hand. Roger Bell and Will Parker sat next to each other on two of the visitors’ chairs facing Kaminer’s big wooden desk. They pivoted toward the door at the same time. Bell nodded at Geary. Green short-sleeved shirt, green eye patch. Classic Bell.
    Geary looked at Will, who lifted his chin in greeting. “Saw your boys out front.”
    “My sister’s out of the country. I’ve got friends on their way up.” Will turned to Kaminer. “I’m trying to get the boys off the