“About how you’d think,” Dixon said. “I assigned him to desk duty. He’s not a happy camper. But I didn’t have a choice. I can’t have any hint of impropriety in this investigation. When these cases go to trial, I’m not going to have some defense attorney get up and point out that we had a potential suspect working the investigation.”

“Are we supposed to consider him a suspect?”

“No, of course not.”

“His wife has a connection to the Thomas Center.”

Dixon looked at him. “How?”

“She’s a secretary at Quinn, Morgan.”

Dixon frowned darkly. “I asked him about the ticket he wrote Karly Vickers. He says he didn’t remember her, which is why he didn’t say anything about it.”

“He didn’t remember stopping a woman that we’re now looking for?” Mendez said. “We’ve all been looking at her picture for two days. We’re looking for a ten-year-old gold Chevy Nova. He stopped that car with that woman in it, and he didn’t remember?”

Dixon sighed and rubbed his temples. “I know. It’s lame. There’s no reason he shouldn’t have mentioned it, though. Frank writes half a dozen citations every day. That’s part of his job.”

“What did he stop her for?”

“He stopped her for doing twenty-nine in a twenty-five zone.”

“What an ass,” Mendez said. But that was just like Farman—by the book, no mercy. “What time did he write the ticket?”

“Fifteen thirty-eight.”

“Before her dental appointment. That’s good.”

On their time line, Farman wouldn’t be listed as the last person to have seen the woman. Not that it should have mattered. Farman had a clean record. There was no reason for anyone to look at him as a suspect. The fact that his son had been in possession of Lisa Warwick’s finger was the complicating factor.

Any defense attorney worth his salt would use that to plant the seeds of reasonable doubt. What if the kid didn’t pick up the finger at the scene? What if he found it at home hidden among his father’s things?

Defense attorneys loved nothing better than trying to make cops look dirty. They would find someone who had overheard Frank make a derogatory remark about women—not that difficult to do, him being the chauvinist he was. They would look at every traffic citation he had ever written and manufacture a pattern of harassment against women. They would drag in Anne Navarre and get her to say she believed Frank beat his kid, that he had a volatile temper.