His Camaro’s speedometer needle quivering over the eighty mph mark, Rob shot home from San Gregario Beach along California 84, bearing south-southwest through fog and drizzle, trying to gobble some highway miles without getting nailed by the staties. Under the best driving conditions he would have to lighten up on the gas pedal around La Honda, where the road really started to loop-de-loop, then slow his pace to a virtual crawl as he turned onto the even twistier local routes . . . and he had a hunch the weather would soon become a problem. Slated over with rain clouds, the sky looked about ready to spill its waterlogged guts and compound the hazardously poor visibility with a slick, wet blacktop.

Rob frowned, his face sullen under the bill of his Oakland A’s baseball cap. There was no question he’d started out the day on tenuous ground, not from the moment he’d read yesterday’s indecent game score on ESPN and abandoned any chance of falling back asleep. But he didn’t have any idea how he could have forgotten the weekly payroll ledger. How he could’ve been so careless. And what was more bothersome was that he wasn’t sure where it might be.

When he’d finished preparing the ledger on his home computer late the previous afternoon, Rob had copied his entries to a recordable CD, made a paper backup, then slipped both into an accordion folder, which had in turn gone into his briefcase on its chair by the door. That had been about four o’clock, four-thirty. Then, a short while before game time, say six o’clock, he’d pulled the folder just to give the printout a quick eyeball, and compare it with his updated employee list to be certain there hadn’t been any omissions . . . and that was where his recollection developed a few critical gaps.

Rob had been trying to mentally retrace his steps ever since he reached the Fairview at seven-thirty this morning, sat down at his desk to transfer the entries onto the hotel’s computer, and been dismayed to realize it was missing from his briefcase. He could remember browsing through it on the living room couch, where he had intended to settle in for the A’s-Mariner’s playoff seed duel. But then Cynthia turned in early—she had been fighting off a head cold for the past week—and he’d decided to keep her company and watch the game on their bedroom TV set. At some point in between, Rob needed to give the baby a feeding and had gone to warm up her formula under the hot-water tap. He distinctly recalled that he’d meant to bring the folder with him, re-deposit it inside his briefcase on his way to the kitchen sink . . . but might he have inadvertently carried the folder into the kitchen with him?