“Believe me, I know all about how revered he is. I hear about it on a regular basis.” He looked at her beseechingly. “You have to help me. I don’t know who else to turn to. Besides some of the people who work for my father, I don’t know any other cops, and you’re the best. And...I’m scared.” The last two words were said on a faint whisper.

Sam wanted nothing to do with the snake pit this case could turn out to be, but the detective in her was far too intrigued to walk away. “How’d you get here?”

“I took the Metro.”

She took a look around to see if anyone was watching, but the parking lot was deserted, and the usual band of reporters that stalked the MPD were taking the day off. They tended to do that when it was freezing. “Come with me.” She led him to the tricked-out black BMW her husband had recently given her and gestured for Josh to get in the passenger side.

Though she had no idea what she planned to do with him or the information he’d dropped in her lap, she couldn’t walk away from what he’d told her. “Tell me more about this website where you saw the photo.”

“It’s a blog run by parents of missing children.”

“How did you end up there?”

“I read a story about a baby who was kidnapped from a hospital in Tennessee the day after he was born and how his parents have never stopped looking for him. The thirtieth anniversary of the abduction is coming up, so they’ve gotten some regional publicity. There was a link in the story that led to the blog where the age-progression photo was.”

“So the photo hasn’t been picked up by the media?”

“Not that I could tell, but I was too freaked out by what I was seeing to dig deeper, especially since my thirtieth birthday is next week. I told my boss I had an emergency. I left the office and came right to you.”

“Why me?”

“Are you serious? After what you did at the inauguration, the whole country knows what an amazing cop you are. Who else would I go to with something like this?”

Sam winced at the reference to her crowd surfing stunt during the inaugural parade. She wished people would forget about that and move on, but the media attention on her and Nick had been even more relentless than usual since the inauguration and since their interview last week with one of the network morning shows. They’d hoped the interview would diffuse the interest, but that had backfired. Andrea, her White House communications director, had been inundated with hundreds of new interview requests for Sam, all of which she’d declined. The last thing she needed was more attention focused on her.