“Yeah, of course.”

“Her place.”

“Her place? Why her place?”

“The kid’s been staying there. Kind of hiding out, but not very well. About a dozen or more people wandering on the street out front, waving signs, the usual.”

“What’s the connection? Why here?”

“Plimpton’s the little bastard’s great-aunt or something. Her niece Gloria is the kid’s mother. What I hear is, the kid’s been getting all kinds of harassment in Albany, so they came up here. But there’s a contest or game on some website inviting people to report sightings. Remember the Craig Pierce thing?”

“I do.”

“Kind of like that.”

“It’s a strange world we live in now, Shirley.”

“Hey, tell me something I don’t know. You need anything else?”

“No. Catch ya later.”

Duckworth ended the call. The mention of Craig Pierce prompted him to make another call.

“Chief Finderman’s office,” a woman said.

“It’s Barry Duckworth. Chief in?”

“Hang on.”

A pause, then, “Barry?”

“Rhonda,” Duckworth said. The detective’s working relationship with Promise Falls police chief Rhonda Finderman had had its ups and downs over the last year or two, but things had been reasonably amicable lately. “The Craig Pierce thing.”

Duckworth could almost hear her wince on the other end of the line.

“Jesus, yeah,” she said. “What about it?”

“Where are we on legal challenges with that?”

“Still trying to get that site—Just Deserts, I think it is?—to reveal details of the video posting that could lead us to whoever took the picture and put it up there, but it’s with the lawyers. Could take forever, and we might never get the answer we want. Even though they’re not, by any standard, a legitimate news organization, they’re saying they have an obligation to protect their sources, that it’s a freedom-of-the-press thing. It’s total bullshit, is what it is.”

“There might be another approach.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, I’m not the expert. But I was talking to Pierce today, and—”

“God, how’s he doing?” Finderman asked. “I mean, he’s a loathsome character, but what happened to him, no one deserves that.”

“You might change your mind if you met him. Anyway, he suggested that if we were doing our job properly, we’d be going at this another way.”

Finderman hesitated, then said, “Victims often feel that way.”

“Thing is, I think he might be onto something. Have we got any computer experts in the department?”

“If we don’t, I’ll find somebody. What’s the idea?”

“You look at all the postings, look for I guess you’d call them signatures. Turns of phrase, misspellings. Search the Internet for those signatures. That kind of thing.”

“Sounds like it might be worth a try,” Rhonda said.

“Okay. Talk later.”