“You know the girl you met yesterday? Janey Harris?”

“Sure.”

“She didn’t come home from a friend’s house last night.”

“I was at the Dark Harbor Shop, and the soda jerk told me a little girl was missing. There were a lot of state cops in Jimmy’s office, and she said they’re organizing a search party.”

“I’m worried about her,” Rawls said. “You saw how upset she was yesterday?”

“Yes, I noticed that. Even more upset than her parents. You said she and Don were close.”

“Right, but there was more going on, I think.”

“What was going on?”

“I don’t know, but I’ve been thinking about this since I got the call about Janey a few minutes ago, and I think her disappearance has to be connected to Don’s death.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Remember where you are, boy. Things like this just don’t happen on this island. There are no perverts kidnapping seventeen-year-old girls on Islesboro.”

“Right, and no hit men murdering ex–CIA officers and their families, either. Do you have any details of the girl’s disappearance?”

“Her mother told me Janey went to a friend’s house for dinner last night, and when she wasn’t home by ten o’clock, Martha called the house, and they said Janey had been gone for over an hour. The houses are only a quarter of a mile apart, and Janey would have walked home along the road. She had a flashlight. The Harrises went looking for her, and they found her flashlight in the road. That was all they found.”

“I don’t suppose there are bears on the island?”

“Not since before World War Two, and I doubt if she was attacked by raccoons.”

“What could possibly connect Janey’s disappearance with Don’s death?”

“All I can do is guess. Maybe they both knew something about somebody that they shouldn’t have known.”

“But what could they possibly know?”

“Maybe they found out who killed Dick and his family.”

“That seems farfetched; if Don had known something about that, he’d have told you, wouldn’t he?”

“He would have, if he’d lived through the night,” Rawls said. “Remember, he wanted to meet the next day, said he had something to tell me.”

“Why didn’t he just tell you on the phone when he called?”

“People in our line of work have a nicely developed aversion to passing important information on the phone. It’s not that he would have thought his line was tapped; it’s just that he would have been uncomfortable discussing something like that, except face-to-face.”

“But how does Janey come into it?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” Rawls said. “I’m going to talk to everybody who clapped eyes on Don and Janey the day Don died. I should have done it sooner.” He got into the Range Rover and drove away.