“Any particular reason?”

“No,” I said. “We had common interests, but not a lot of them. And of course, that was about the time she met Jasper. Her husband. Ex-husband now, I gather. I guess if there was any one thing you could call a reason, it would be Jasper.”

“You didn’t like Jasper?”

“Not really,” I said. “And it was mutual. That does have a cooling effect on a friendship, you know, when she says ‘Isn’t he wonderful!’ and you have a hard time saying anything more than ‘If you say so.’ And I hadn’t heard that they broke up. Maybe she was afraid I’d say ‘I told you so.’”

“So you haven’t seen Mr. Walker recently either?”

I shook my head.

“You have no idea what he did?”

“Do you mean did for a living, or are we talking about something in particular he did that brought him to your attention?”

He looked over his glasses at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be nosy. He did some kind of tech work. I think Karen met him when he fixed her computer. Look, something’s happened to Karen, hasn’t it? I can understand now why she wasn’t answering her phone, but she’s not answering her cell phone either, and that’s a bad sign.”

The chief frowned for a moment.

“Try calling her again,” he said.

I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Karen’s number. I could hear her phone ringing in stereo—from my own cell phone, and from a nearby cruiser.

“Chief,” one of the officers called. “The cell phone we found—”

“Just ignore it,” the chief called back. “You can hang up now,” he said to me.

I ended the call. The ringing in the cruiser stopped. We looked at each other for a long few seconds.

“Now let’s go over what happened yesterday,” he said. “In detail.”

I winced. Chief Burke’s appetite for details usually far exceeded my ability to remember them. This could take a while. I hoped Sammy was up to the job of entertaining Timmy for that long.

Nine

It was nearly eleven by the time Chief Burke finally let me leave, and even then I suspected he was only taking pity on Sammy and the other officers who’d been keeping Timmy busy. And he gave me no hint of what was really going on—surely that many police wouldn’t turn out for a simple burglary. Even more frustrating, from the questions he’d asked he was clearly assuming that Karen was involved in something illegal. I found myself fuming. Yes, there were a lot of small-time drug dealers and petty criminals living at the College Arms, but there were also a few impoverished grad students and honest, hardworking, but badly paid people. Like single mothers whose husbands skipped out on them and weren’t paying any child support, which I suspected was what had happened to Karen. And all the chief could do was ask about her known associates.

And was he looking for her? Looking for her effectively, that is? He seemed to be assuming she was a suspect, or at least what the media call a “person of interest.” And while I didn’t know much about police procedure, I suspected the way you looked for a person in jeopardy might be radically different from the way you hunted down a suspect.