“I thought it was weird too,” Archie said, “so I checked to see if he might have a second phone and hit pay dirt. The one we dumped is his FBI-issued phone. The second one is his personal phone, and that’s where all the action was yesterday.”

He handed out stapled pages to each of the detectives.

“We’ll go through this today,” McBride said.

“We’ll help you,” Carlucci added.

“Can we talk about Courtney Hamilton?” Malone asked. “She told us she spoke to her husband in the afternoon. She was very nonchalant about that call, which was made at a time when her son was technically missing, and her husband had issued a public statement about the son that we’ve since learned was misleading. To our knowledge, Josh Hamilton is not on any medication that would affect his behavior.”

“In general, I thought her behavior was odd,” Avery said. “Remember how she referred to Hamilton as the man who raised Josh? Isn’t that a bizarre way to refer to her son’s father, even if the child was adopted? Would you guys ever refer to yourselves as the people who raised Scotty?”

Seeing that question had infuriated Nick, Sam answered for them both. “Never. We’d describe ourselves as his parents. What do we know about her?”

“I looked into her background last night,” Avery said. “She’s from a wealthy Connecticut family. Her maternal grandfather was the governor of New York in the sixties. The family is well regarded. She met Hamilton at a dance on Long Island the summer between her junior and senior years at Vassar. They were married one week after she graduated from college. He had just joined the Bureau and was on the rise. They lived for a time in the San Francisco Bay area, where they had a son, Mark, and a daughter, Maura, eighteen months apart. Mark is a board-certified neurosurgeon in Chicago. Maura is a partner in a Boston law firm. Their son Josh was born five years after Maura, at the end of Hamilton’s tour in Knoxville. Courtney told us he was adopted. She said he was the son of the administrative assistant in the Knoxville office, and they’d taken him in because she couldn’t afford to care for him on her own.”

“In the time I spent with him, he never said anything to me about being adopted nor did he mention it to Detective Cruz, who would’ve passed that along,” Sam said. “In fact, Josh made a point of telling me he’d never fit into his accomplished family.

“Courtney told us Troy didn’t want Josh to know he was adopted, so they never told him.”

Sam shook her head in disbelief. “The poor guy. They kept him in the dark about everything.”

“So we’re operating under the assumption that Hamilton’s murder and the son’s kidnapping-adoption-abduction are related?” Tyrone asked.