“I’m afraid we’ve heard nothing,” he said solemnly.

“Paul told me. He’s a nice young man.”

“He is. I’m going to set him up in a dealership of his own one of these days.” He shifted on the metal chair. “Will and Stew got to Pittsburg around 5:30 this morning. Checked into the Hotel Besse, caught a little sleep—Will had been up forty hours. They were at the Western Union office at seven when it opened. They took along fresh clothes for Bobby, including a topcoat.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was just so goddamned sad.

“They’re maintaining a sort of vigil,” he said. “We talk on the hour. Do you have any suggestions?”

I told him it was time to let Agent Grapp take over. “Bob, the FBI have cracked hundreds of kidnapping cases over the last several decades, almost always with a successful outcome. Sometimes kidnapped parties stay in their captors’ hands for weeks before their return. So this is far from over.”

He nodded, his expression dazed; his dark blue eyes rarely blinked behind the browline glasses. “We’ll let the Pittsburg thing play out,” he said. A light wind was turning the wispy white hair atop the rounded square of his head into dead-dandelion tufts that refused to fly away.

“Bob, is there anything more I can do for you on this end?”

His head shake was understandably weary. “I don’t believe so, Nate.”

I got out my billfold and removed the check. As I handed it his way, the light wind whipping it a little, he raised two palms.

“That’s not necessary, Nate. You’ve earned it.”

“No. I’ll send you an invoice for five hundred dollars—that’ll cover my time and any expenses. Hotel and airfare were pre-paid, so this isn’t generous of me in the least.”

I kept the check held out and it flapped like the golf course flag on a nearby hole. Finally he took the thing before the wind did.

The thin line of his mouth said, “But if I need you…”

“You’ll have me. I’m opening a New York office next month, so you may have to get in touch there. My people in Chicago will help you on that score.”

“You sound busy.”

I leaned an elbow on a glass tabletop. “Listen. I have a six-year-old myself, remember. You need me, I’m here. In the meantime—and you’ve probably thought of this—I’d get a priest in to talk to the family. Maybe a nurse for your wife.”

He looked alarmed. “Nate, do you anticipate bad news?”

“Let me ask you. Is Bobby high-strung?”

A rare blink came. “No. I suppose it’s fair to say he’s been sheltered. Pampered, perhaps. We love him very much. Such a good boy.”

Which was why he’d been trusting enough to go with a strange woman when she came for him at his school. To a child, the world of adults is unknowable—you did what they told you to.

“That ‘piss and vinegar’ remark,” I said. “Did that ring true to you?”