“She may not know about Jasmine,” Shelly Duke prompts him. “Their dog,” she says to me.

“Our shar-pei vanished on March eighth,” Lott explains. “The landscapers left the gate open again. It had happened before and Jasmine got out. Last time she was found frantic and lost, the police spotted her. The local police know her and an officer picked her up and brought her back to us. Then we weren’t so fortunate, it seemed at first. Police suspected someone stole her, a rare purebred, a miniature and not inexpensive, and Millie was beside herself. There aren’t words to describe how upset she was.” Channing Lott blinks back tears.

“Your dog vanished three days before your wife did,” I say to him.

“Yes.” He clears his throat.

“Did Jasmine ever show up?”

“Two days after Millie disappeared, Jasmine was found wandering several miles north of our house, close to the Annisquam River,” he says, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s cat. “In an off-leash walking area with a lot of brush and boulders above Wheeler Street. Some people out with their dog found her.”

“Do you think she’d been loose the entire time she was missing?” I ask.

“Couldn’t have been, not for the better part of a week in the rainy raw weather, down in the low forties at night, without food or water. She was in too good of shape to have been out that entire time. I think whoever took her changed his mind. Jasmine can be aggressive, unpredictable, isn’t fond of strangers.”

Someone who has no regard for human life but wouldn’t harm an animal.

“The Ransom of Red Chief.” Channing Lott’s laughter is hollow, and what is significant to me is the chronology.

Most likely Peggy Stanton’s cat got out or was put out after her owner had disappeared and possibly already was dead, yet Mildred Lott’s dog vanished before any crime had occurred.

“It’s been suggested that my wife might have drowned accidentally.” He gets around to asking my opinion about that, and I can’t possibly have an answer. “Or maybe took her own life.”

He goes on to describe the theories, which have been endless and far-fetched, some of them recited by Donoghue in court. Mildred Lott was drunk or on drugs and wandered outside and fell into the ocean or deliberately went into the frigid water to drown herself. She was having an affair and ran off with whoever it was because she feared her husband’s wrath. She’d been stashing millions of dollars in offshore accounts and is now living under an assumed identity in the Caribbean, on the Mediterranean, in the South of France, in Marrakech. Alleged sightings of her have been all over the Internet.

“I’m interested in your opinion.” He presses me for one. “A person drowns either accidentally or is murdered or commits suicide? Wouldn’t the body turn up eventually?”