A glimmer of a smile. “I’ll enjoy my coffee. I know you’ll tell me when you have something.”

That, too, was a milestone, not just that he didn’t feel the need to watch over my shoulder, but that he wanted to relax with his coffee, not gulp it down as a mere vehicle for the caffeine required to jump-start his day. In that moment, Gabriel seemed happy in a perfectly average way, pleased by nothing more than a quiet morning, fine coffee, and agreeable companionship. It looked good on him. It really did.

It only took a moment to confirm that he was right about Kirkman. The man had gone missing almost twenty years ago.

“A month before the Tysons killed Amanda Mays and Ken Perkins,” I said. “I don’t like the timing of that.”

“It may only mean that Seanna was clever enough to find an open missing person case from the same time period. That would allow her to suggest she had evidence to wrongly accuse your parents of killing Kirkman. Which is exactly the sort of scheme she’d attempt.”

“Clever enough to find a case fitting the time frame. Yet not clever enough to realize that Kirkman doesn’t fit the pattern. They were convicted for killing couples.”

“She could suggest he was murdered with a secret lover. It’s a ridiculous stretch, but…” He shrugged.

“Typical for Seanna.”

“Yes.” No hint of anxiety or discomfort touched his eyes, as if that coffee contained a generous shot of Irish whiskey. He took my cup and rose to make another, saying, “Keep looking.”

“Yes, boss.”

I searched while he fixed me a second coffee and added chocolate chip cookies.

“Little early for sweets, isn’t it?” I said.

“Carpe diem.”

I had to sputter a laugh. For Gabriel, eating cookies for breakfast was indeed seizing the day.

“So, Greg Kirkman,” I said. “Thirty-two years old when he disappeared. Never married. Last seen in Chicago. He went out drinking with friends, got in his car, and disappeared.”

“Did his route cross any bridges or inconveniently located steep embankments?”

In other words, after that night of drinking and then getting behind the wheel, had the police thought to check anyplace where Kirkman’s car might have plunged off the road?

“Actually, that is a possibility,” I said. “Kirkman lived outside the city. He was a construction worker and had built his own house in the forest.” I ran searches as I spoke. “Which was apparently about five miles from here.”

That had Gabriel’s coffee cup lowering, his eyes focusing. “Any connection to Cainsville?”

After a few minutes of searching, I shook my head. “Nothing’s jumping out. It seems he’d built the place only a few years before he vanished, and he hadn’t made any local ties. Only one of the regional papers even mentioned his disappearance.”

“City business.”