“I can do it, Lance,” Ginny said, “but it has to be done slowly, and I don’t think your people at Langley could do it any faster. I know it would be nice to do this in a lab, to better preserve the diary as evidence, but we have a different priority here, and that’s to get Holly back as quickly as possible.”

Stone stood up. “I’m going to go call Tom Young and see if he’s all right.” He left the room.

Ham watched him go. “I think Stone is almost as tightly wound as I am.”

Stone came back. “I got his voice mail. I’m going to wait another half an hour, and then I’m going over to Caleb’s house.” He sat down and tried to eat the apple pie in front of him.

“There are dead spots on this island,” Lance said. “Maybe Tom is in one of those.”

The doorbell rang, and Stone got up and went to the front door. A moment later he came back into the kitchen with Sergeant Young.

“What happened over there?” Lance asked.

“Let’s take a look at those thermal images,” Young said.

Stone went to get them and spread them on the kitchen table.

“I searched the whole house,” Young said. “Caleb didn’t give me a hard time; he seemed to be happy for me to look around.” He tapped a finger on two of the sleeping figures. “This is the twins’ room,” he said, “and it would appear that they’re sleeping there. However, there’s a guest room one floor up, directly over the twins’ room, and Caleb says they had people sleeping there last night.”

“Who?” Stone asked.

“A couple named Bill and Julie Robertson from Boston. I checked, and there’s a phone listing there, and I got an answering machine. Caleb says they’re spending the whole summer cruising the coast in their sailboat and that they came in by sea yesterday and left the same way early this morning. He didn’t have the boat’s name or description, so I can’t ask the coast guard to look for it. I’ve got somebody checking the Massachusetts yacht registry for the information we need to launch a search.”

“So, we’re back where we started?” Stone asked.

“I wish to God we could nail down the twins on Nantucket and confirm the past four days of their alibi. I’m beginning to get the feeling we’re wasting valuable time on those boys.”

“Funny,” Stone said, “I’m getting the feeling that they are less and less of a waste of our time.”

HOLLY JERKED AWAKE, feeling pain. She felt it again; somebody had slapped her sharply across the face. Then she heard an odd, mechanical-sounding voice.