“Why is that, Mrs. Crane?” Vince asked. “It seems an innocent question to me. Why would your son think it was anything else? I wasn’t there, but I feel safe in assuming Miss Navarre didn’t ask Tommy if his father is a serial killer.”

“He found out that was the night that girl went missing. He’s a bright boy.”

“I guess so,” Vince said. “I should start recruiting him for the Bureau now, because that’s quite a leap in a ten-year-old’s logic system. How did he know anything at all about the disappearance of Karly Vickers?”

“He saw it in the newspaper.”

“Your fifth grader sits down and reads the newspaper in the evening?”

“His father was reading it.”

“Does your husband have an unusual interest in following these cases?”

“No more than anyone else in town.”

“Has he been keeping the articles?”

“Why would he do that?”

“He was the last person to see Miss Vickers that day,” Mendez said. “You’re aware of that, Mrs. Crane?”

“Yes. That doesn’t make him guilty of anything.”

“And you don’t remember if he was home that evening?”

She glared at him. “I told you he was.”

“But you don’t remember if he went out of the house later that evening.”

“No. I’m sure he didn’t,” she said. “Peter doesn’t go out that much.”

“Except to golf and play cards with people you don’t know in places you have no idea about,” Vince said, his own tone of voice becoming harder, colder. “Now that seems odd to me, Mrs. Crane, because you strike me as the kind of woman who would keep a short leash on a man.”

The whites of her eyes showed all around the iris. “I beg your pardon?”

“You’re controlling,” he said without rancor. “You want to be in charge. I’ll bet if I go into your kitchen or laundry room you’ll have a big whiteboard calendar and everything on it will be color-coded. Am I right?”

She was getting angrier by the second now. “There’s nothing wrong with being organized.”

“Not at all. Controlling, however, is a different thing,” he said. “Controlling is getting pissed off at people who don’t toe your line, people who don’t follow your script, people who ask questions you don’t want to answer.”

He let the last shred of the Mr. Nice Guy act fall away. “That’s the flip of the switch that sets you off and makes you think you can scream at people and threaten them, and be a Class A bitch to anyone who crosses you.”

Her jaw dropped, astonished anyone would speak to her that way. “I beg your pardon?” she said again.