Here She Lies

she’s got here,” he said in the easy, professional tone of a doctor saying open wide and searching for infection in places you yourself cannot see.
    We stood behind him for a while, watching, but there was little that made any sense to me. He navigatedthe system deftly, discarding most of what he came upon. Finally he launched a search and sat back, arms folded, to wait while the screen filled with unrecognizable (to me) data. It appeared to be some kind of code. Smith reached into his back pocket and withdrew a small pad, then turned around to ask any one of us, “Is there a pen I could borrow? Forgot mine.” Bobby leaned forward and nudged a blue ballpoint so it rolled in Smith’s direction. His freckled fingers caught it before it rolled off the desk. He made a few notes, then shut down the computer.
    “So what do you think?” Lazare asked Smith.
    “Looks like it’s loaded,” Smith said in a tone that was matter-of-fact, even unconcerned. Like Lazare, he was at work, doing his job and probably (hopefully) doing it well. Julie’s computer being “loaded” was just another development in just another case, nothing like the life-changing shift it was to me. Bobby took my hand and squeezed it as we stood there, listening to the cops chart their plans.
    “I’ll bring it with me to Boston,” Smith said. “It’ll take some time, but I can e-mail you a preliminary report tonight.”
    As soon as the screen blanked, Agent Smith began to pull out plugs and loop cords up and down from his elbow to the crook of his thumb, creating a stack of neat bundles, which he left on the desk. In fifteen minutes, he had Julie’s hard drive and keyboard packed into the trunk of his car. Bobby and I watched from the window while Lazare shook Smith’s hand and waited as he drove away.
    In the light from the window, the skin beneathBobby’s eyes was a translucent blue-green mottle. Exhaustion, collapse, had appeared in his face when I wasn’t looking. I took his hand and he smiled at me.
    “I don’t think Julie would put Lexy in any danger,” he said.
    “Of course not,” I said. “She loves Lexy.”
    I put my arms around him and for a minute or two we just held on, trying to keep at bay our worst fear: that our baby could be lost to us. I knew Julie would care for her lovingly, but we wanted more than that. We wanted Lexy back.
    Downstairs, six officers from the Great Barrington Police Department were searching the house. Julie’s catalog rooms with their pretty surfaces were now overturned and upended. Bobby and I didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Everywhere we went we seemed to be in the way, so we just floated from kitchen to dining room to living room until we heard Detective Lazare’s voice in the backyard. I opened the French doors in the living room and we went outside, where the early afternoon sun made mirrors of rain puddles on the slate patio.
    When Lazare finished speaking with one of the officers, he turned his attention to us. Smiling a little, he said, “These waits are hard, I know.”
    “What about the Amber Alert?” I asked him. “How long do they usually take?”
    “No good answer there,” he said. “They take as long as they take. We’ve thrown a wide net — we’ll find them.”
    But how could he be sure?
    He pinched the bridge of his nose between forefingerand thumb, briefly closing his eyes. “This Thomas Soiffer thing has thrown me a little, I admit,” he said. “I made a call and found out that your Clark Hazmat was right about Soiffer getting his identity stolen, too. But without the murder weapon, we’ve got nothing to check against Soiffer’s prints on file, so we’ve just got to go with what we’ve got. Here’s what I’m thinking: Soiffer, he was mad as hell” — Lazare paced back and forth, tracking wet footprints from the damp grass to the slate — “and he came here, right here, to Julie’s house. He stalked her, waiting for the right moment. And Zara Moklas, poor kid, who happened to resemble you two in the dark, walks by and she gets it for all the damage your sister did to the wrong guy.” He stopped pacing and looked at me. “How does that sound to you?”
    “About right,” I said quietly, despising the presumption that any of that could actually be true. Despite what Julie may have done to me, the possibility that Thomas Soiffer had really wanted to kill her was deeply painful.
    “But what I can’t get” — Lazare talked and paced —