Janet Crane had clearly been asleep. Though she was in a smart red velour tracksuit, her makeup was smudged on the right side, making her look a little drunk. She blinked at Dixon as she tried to gather her wits about her.

“I’m sorry, Sheriff,” she said. “What is this about?”

“We need to speak to Peter,” Dixon repeated.

“What about?”

“Is he home?”

“No, he isn’t.” She squinted to look past him at the SWAT commander standing in her driveway. “I want to know what this is about. Has something happened? Is Peter in some kind of trouble?”

“We have reason to believe he abducted a woman tonight, ma’am,” Mendez said.

“That’s insane!”

“Where is he?” Dixon asked.

Vince hung back, not trusting himself to speak. Renowned for his patience in interrogations, now he would have backed Janet Crane up against a wall and wrung the truth out of her with his bare hands.

She looked around nervously, as if she were hoping her husband might pop up out of a shrub. “I—I don’t know.”

Dixon’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean, you don’t know? It’s the middle of the night. Where’s your husband?”

“He went out,” she said.

“Out is not a place, Janet,” Dixon said impatiently. “We can step inside and discuss this further, or you can come down to headquarters with us and we can do it there. It’s your choice.”

She seemed genuinely rattled, stepping back into the front hall of her lovely home, allowing them access. The four of them moved almost as a unit into the house and took positions in a loose semicircle around her.

“Peter is sometimes restless at night,” she said. “He likes to go for drives.”

“In the middle of the night,” Dixon said.

“Are these drives related in any way to his fictitious Friday night card games, Mrs. Crane?” Vince asked. “Say, in your imagination?”

“I don’t know what you want from me!” she snapped. “I’ve told you everything I know.”

“I don’t think so, ma’am,” Mendez said. “As a licensed real estate agent you have access to a master lock-box key, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And that key will open any lock box on any listed piece of property, allowing you access to the keys to those properties. Is that correct?”

“Yes, but—”

“Do you keep your key here?” Hicks asked.

“Not as a rule, no,” she said, her attention bouncing from one of them to another to another.

“But . . . ?” Dixon said.

“But I had to show some property late in the day today, and—”

The sheriff held up a hand to cut her off. “Janet. A woman has been abducted. Her life is in jeopardy. We don’t want to hear about your day. Do you have the key? Can you produce the key and show it to us? Now?”