He didn’t say anything for a second. “Well, no. She was a sole proprietor, didn’t even have a secretary. It was our impression from the beginning that she worked alone, stole the Kiefer money, and when Kiefer said he was going to audit the account she panicked and left the country. It fits the timeline to a T.”

“Then she didn’t have a business partner. So who would kill her?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said with a half smile.

Nate said in a low voice, “We don’t have to guess. We have to investigate.”

“You’re talking about a three-year-old case. The woman had many clients. Maybe she stole from someone else. Ask your people in the FBI, they have all her client records. Maybe one of them discovered she’d embezzled from them and killed her. They would then have no reason to come forward. Why are you giving me shit on this when your people took the case three years ago?”

Lucy said, “You are the detective of record and you talked to Denise’s friends, family, neighbors. The files were … well, incomplete.”

“Because when we learned they left the country there was no reason to continue beating a dead horse. Their credit cards didn’t pop, they didn’t call friends or family, we had no reason to believe that they’d returned.”

“So it was a closed case,” Nate said.

“Inactive,” Douglas corrected. “Now active again.” He looked at Lucy, who she figured he felt was more reasonable. “So what do you think happened to their son? His body wasn’t found with the others. Are you buying the PI’s theory that someone in the family called the grandparents in Arizona the Christmas after they disappeared?”

He certainly remembered the case—or had read up on his files when he knew they were coming in.

“This is just conjecture,” she said, “but logically, he was killed at the same time as his family but for some unknown reason was buried elsewhere. We have cadaver dogs out looking at an expanded grid. I hope we find him so we can lay him to rest with his family.”

“Me too,” the detective said, showing compassion for the first time. But was it an act? She couldn’t be sure. Maybe she’d adopted Nate’s theory that the cops were incompetent—which she fully believed—or corrupt, which she didn’t want to believe.

She didn’t like Douglas. His investigation was mediocre at best, and he was being an ass to her and Nate. She didn’t think he was guilty of anything but incompetence, except that one question seemed off. Calculated. He wanted to know what they knew about Ricky Albright.

They were going to have to investigate this case without the help of Detective Douglas. Not just because he was ineffective three years ago, but because they didn’t trust him.