Lucy thought about Stanley Grant embezzling the money from MCG. “The methodology is very similar to Stanley Grant embezzling money after Victoria Mills was killed. Sean and Max think that whoever threatened Grant embezzled the money—essentially hacked into the MCG accounts—to give Grant a viable motive to have killed her. What if Denise never stole the funds? What if someone else did and framed Denise so that the police would have a clear motive for her skipping town?”

“And she was killed for a completely different reason.”

“Exactly.”

Lucy’s cell phone rang. It was JJ Young. She put him on speaker.

“Why do you want to talk to my kids again? They’re in school.”

To the point.

“We have reason to believe that Ricky is alive and has been hiding out in Mexico, and we have a general region—the greater Tamaulipas area. In the process of reviewing all the evidence found at the Albright house, we have reason to believe that Ricky arrived there safely after he left your house, then left at some point that night or in the morning on his bike. His bike has never been found. It wasn’t at the house—we double-checked photos and the inventory list. His backpack was also missing—but his schoolbooks were in his bedroom.”

“That’s good news, right?”

“Yes, but we still need to find him.”

“What do my kids have to do with it?”

This is where things got dicey, and Lucy had to be careful because JJ was protective of his children. But she also believed that he would encourage them to do the right thing.

“Denise’s parents hired a private investigator. The investigator interviewed Mrs. Durango, who saw Ricky on Friday night riding toward your house. She wasn’t certain it was Friday, but she’s almost positive, and Nate and I don’t think that a nine-year-old would have been allowed out at night on that road.”

“No, he wouldn’t have. He had to be home by dark, just like my kids.”

“We looked at a map and realized that she lives on the far end of your street. Ricky would have had to have taken his bike through the fields, not the roads, for her to see him.”

“It’s a shortcut,” JJ said. “The kids always go that way. They have dirt bikes.”

“The point is, if it was that night, Ricky was going to the one place he felt safe—your house.”

“I told you he didn’t come back. I asked Joe flat out and he said no.”

“Did you ask Ginny?”