She reached across the table, took her own notes from where they lay by my elbow, leafed through them. “Yup. That’s what Trevor said.”

“Seems a long time,” I said. “A young woman—a businessman’s wife and probably upscale if they were living in Concord—she and her five-year-old daughter aren’t seen for twenty-four hours and nobody notices?”

“Neighbors are less and less friendly and less and less interested in their fellow neighbors these days.”

I frowned. “But, okay, maybe in the inner city or the lower-middle-class burbs. But this happened in Concord. Land of Victorians and carriage houses and the Old North Bridge. Main Street, lily-white, upper-class America. Sean Price’s child is five years old. She doesn’t have day care? Or kindergarten or dance classes or something? His wife doesn’t go to aerobics or have a job or a lunch date with another upper-middle-class young wife?”

“It bugs you.”

“A bit. It doesn’t feel right.”

She leaned back in her chair. “We in the trade call that feeling a ‘hunch.’”

I bent over my notes, pen in hand. “How do you spell that? With an ‘h,’ right?”

“No, a ‘p’ for pinhead.” She tapped her pen against her notes, smiled at me. “Check out Sean Price,” she said as she scribbled the same words on the upper margin of her notes. “And death by carbon monoxide poisoning in Concord circa 1995 through ’96.”

“And the dead boyfriend. What was his name?”

She flipped a page. “Anthony Lisardo.”

“Right.”

She grimaced at the photos of Desiree. “A lot of people dying around this girl.”

“Yeah.”

She lifted one of the photos and her face softened. “God, she is gorgeous. But it makes sense, her finding comfort in another survivor of loss.” She looked over at me. “You know?”

I held her eyes, searched them for a clear glimpse of the battery and hurt that lay somewhere behind them, the fear of caring enough to be battered again. But all I saw were the remnants of recognition and empathy that had appeared when she looked at Desiree’s photograph, the same remnants she’d borne after looking into the eyes of Desiree’s father.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“But someone could prey on that,” she said, looking back into Desiree’s face again.

“How so?”

“If you wanted to reach a person who was near catatonic with grief, but didn’t necessarily want to reach them for benevolent motives, how would you go about it?”

“If I was cynically manipulative?”

“Yes.”

“I’d form a bond based on shared loss.”

“By pretending to have suffered severe loss yourself, perhaps?”

I nodded. “That’d be just the tack to take.”

“I think we definitely need to find out more about Sean Price.” Her eyes glistened with burgeoning excitement.

“What’s in Jay’s reports about him?”