“I asked him that, and he said it wasn’t, because he was still just a patrol officer. But he did go to high school with Colleen Hicks, although he claims they didn’t run around with the same crowd of friends.”

Corey still looked puzzled. “Did he have any idea how this file would have ended up here, with a bunch of his stuff?”

Drue placed a plate, napkin and cutlery on the table, carefully pushing aside the binder, and poured herself a glass of wine. “I told him I found a file of old newspaper clippings about the disappearance, in my mom’s stuff, but I didn’t mention finding this thing.” She nodded at the binder.

“Why not?”

She took a sip of wine. “I’m not sure. Maybe because I’m still not a hundred percent sure I trust him. There are just a lot of unanswered questions, you know?”

“Like what?”

The microwave dinged. Drue transferred the hot plate onto the kitchen table. She took a bottle of Cholula sauce from a cabinet and doused the burrito in it.

“To start with, what’s the official police file doing in a box in my grandfather’s cottage, more than forty years after this woman vanished? Who put it up there? I’ve read through it. There’s no mention of Dad’s name in any of the reports.”

She tasted a forkful of her dinner, paused, then sprinkled more hot sauce atop her burrito.

“But I’ll tell you whose name is in the file—and that’s Jimmy Zilowicz, who everybody calls Jimmy Zee and who is not only my dad’s oldest friend but a former St. Pete police detective, and currently case investigator at the law firm.”

“Coincidence?” Corey asked.

“I asked Zee if he had a theory about the Colleen Hicks case. He said his role was minor, that he just did some legwork.”

“And did he have a theory?”

“He said that Colleen Hicks and her husband were into some kind of kinky stuff. And that right before she vanished, she cleaned out their joint savings account. Allen Hicks, that was the husband, was a control freak, according to Zee. He says she probably disappeared on purpose.”

Corey leafed through the binder, pausing at the black-and-white photos in their clear plastic envelopes. “Do you believe him? Do you believe it’s possible that she’s alive?”

She poked at the burrito with her fork, took a bite, chewed and swallowed. “If she’s still alive, she’d be around my dad’s age now. Why would she stay hidden all these years?”

“Suppose she did start a new life? Remarried, maybe had kids, now she’d have grandkids. Whatever happened to her husband?” Corey asked.

Drue reached for her cell phone and typed the name Allen Hicks into the search engine. The search yielded more than three dozen citations. She pulled up the first two and read them.