“You killed her and we all know it,” she snapped after Kraemer had pulled her off Luke for the second time. Her face burned and her shirt had come untucked at the front. “We just don’t know how you killed her, or what you did with her body. But we’ll find out.”

Luke shook his head and started to cry. He sometimes had to cry on film, but it was nothing like this: large, hot tears bubbling up from his ruined soul, his chest loaded with smoldering rocks, his brain wrapped in gauze.

“No,” he whimpered. “No . . . no . . .”

“You think I’m tough on you, just wait until you get out of here.” Detective Montecino tucked her shirt back into her jeans and flicked the platinum hair from her eyes. “The press, the internet trolls, Lisa’s fans . . . there’s no limit on how long they can make you suffer.”

That was when Luke called a lawyer.

In the eyes of the law, there was no crime without a body. In the eyes of everybody else, Luke was a guilty man. It was exactly how Detective Montecino had predicted: he was tied daily to the trailer hitch of some rumbling black machine and dragged through the hard streets of the press and the internet.

His life collapsed, a magnificent and violent undoing. It was like watching an earthquake in slow motion. Luke saw every building first crack, then crumble. He watched the ground tremble and rift and accept everything that had once been upright.

“Nothing is anymore,” he’d said to his psychiatrist, the only Hollywood professional who hadn’t cut him loose. “Everything isn’t. My marriage. My career. My fucking Tesla.” And it was true. He slept and ate and shat in a crater. Even his friends had stopped calling. No more poker nights with Ben Affleck and the boys. No more movie nights at Tarantino’s.

Maintaining his innocence was futile. Luke knew that the only way his life was getting back on track was if Lisa, alive and well, returned home, or if the truth behind her disappearance was uncovered. He made his own inquiries, but to no avail. Lisa’s friends and family refused to talk to him. He hacked into her e-mail account (something the police had already done) and worked his way through every correspondence. Too much was at stake for him not to be thorough. He returned to Uncle Lizard’s, hoping a critical memory might be jolted into place, but there was nothing.

The press jumped on his “returning to the scene of the crime,” but Luke didn’t care. There was another reason for going back:

He wanted to ask about the bat-faced man.

It was a long shot, but maybe one of the servers or bartenders remembered him. Maybe they could dig up a credit card receipt, a name.

No cigar.