DUCKWORTH brought everyone in. The crime-scene unit, the cor-oner, extra police to cordon off the area near where Carol Beakman’s car had been found and to interview possible witnesses. Dolores, also known as Dolly, had no identification on her so Duckworth had no last name or address.

But he did know where she worked.

“What about Carol?” Trevor asked. “Where the hell is she?”

That was the question.

Her car had been found with someone else’s body in it. That didn’t bode well for Carol, no matter how one looked at it. She could end up being a second victim, or she might have had something to do with what happened.

The first place Duckworth instructed the uniformed officers to start looking was the Dumpster that sat right next to the silver Corolla. But it was nearly empty, and it didn’t take much of an examination to determine there was no body in it. There might, however, be something in there the killer, or killers, had discarded.

Everything had to be gone over with the proverbial fine-toothed comb.

Now Duckworth had to decide where to focus his attention. He had a homicide and a missing person case.

And those two events tied back, it appeared, to Brian Gaffney.

Brian Gaffney was abducted just after leaving Knight’s.

Carol saw someone she knew as she and Trevor were leaving.

Carol told Trevor she was going to talk to that woman and suggest she get in touch with Duckworth if she saw anything.

Carol disappeared.

Dolores, who worked at a tattoo parlor where a tattoo gun was supposedly stolen, turned up dead in Carol’s car.

And speaking of tattoos, Duckworth now thought there was a strong likelihood that Gaffney was not the intended target. He had more than a passing resemblance to someone else in that bar who Duckworth was now sure was the kid from that court case that had garnered national attention, the one who got off with probation after running a girl down with a car because he’d never been taught to appreciate the consequences of his actions.

God, what a world.

There were plenty of people, Duckworth now realized from the Craig Pierce incident, who’d like to teach that young man—Jeremy Pilford was his name—a lesson or two.

The night before, after he and Maureen returned from their dinner at Knight’s—the best meal Duckworth had had in months, by the way—he went online to refresh his memory on some of the details of the Pilford case.

When he saw the name of the girl Jeremy Pilford had run down with that businessman’s Porsche—Sian McFadden—it all came together for him. It was very possible that whoever had written that tattoo on Brian Gaffney’s back had made a spelling error. “Sean,” he was betting, was supposed to be “Sian.”

As theories went, it wasn’t a bad one.