“Well, here’s the thing, Chief, and it’s going to sound a little out there.”

“You have some new theory about the Yates woman offing her husband?”

“No. This is about Caleb Benner.”

“Benner kid? Don’t tell me that’s your new pet project, ’cause I’m sure you got plenty other work to do there. Best to leave Bury crimes to us.”

Colin tried to swallow but found his throat dry. “I agree, Chief. I’m not trying to step on any toes. But worlds are colliding and I’m just trying to make sense of things.”

The sigh of a man with little patience and a backlog of work came through the phone. “Okay,” Sike said. “I got a few minutes. But just a few. I know how you Midwesterners like to drag on, so I’m asking you not to. So go on now, tell me.”

And so Colin did.

With great efficiency, Colin told Sike everything that intersected about the Riley McKay death and the Caleb Benner disappearance. The connective threads were few and frayed but strong enough to make shape of something, even if Colin didn’t quite know what that something was. His main points were:

1. Riley McKay’s death was too suspicious to be ruled an accident, in Colin’s opinion. The man died of an overdose of alcohol and sleep medication, the same way a character died in one of Rose Yates’s books. When he approached Yates, she quickly became defensive and uncooperative.

2. Twenty-two years earlier, Caleb Benner disappeared in Bury. The last person he was seen talking to that night was Cora Yates, sister of Rose. The transcript of her interview with the police felt oddly abridged, ending at the point in which the Yates patriarch, Logan Yates (in attendance), mentioned some of the flooring and stairs in his house had just been restained.

3. In her upcoming novel, Rose Yates writes about a sixteen-year-old boy who is murdered in a struggle with his girlfriend. He’s stabbed and then falls down a flight of stairs, breaking his neck. The character’s name is Corey Brownstein. Same initials as Caleb Benner.

Colin barely got these points out before Sike interjected.

“You trying to pull my pud here, Detective?”

“Sorry?”

“You are a detective, right? I’m just trying to confirm I’m talking to Milwaukee PD Detective Colin Pearson and not an eight-year-old with a junior G-man badge.”

Colin had no idea what that meant. Sike didn’t wait for a reaction.

“Because this is Conspiracy Theory Bullshit 101,” he said. “And you want me to do something with this? What am I supposed to do with this?”

Colin heated up, a bit due to anger, another bit due to embarrassment. But he pushed through, trying to keep his voice steady.

“Excuse me, sir, but I wasn’t done.”

“Oh?” Sike said. “Do tell. I have another thirty seconds to spare.”

“I called her publisher,” Colin said. “Her editor.”

“Yeah?”

“I told her we were just looking to confirm that the story wasn’t based on any actual open-case investigations,” Colin said, “given Yates’s history of working with the police in her stories. I mentioned the upcoming book, the one with the murder on the stairs. I asked if she knew if any of that book was based on fact. The editor didn’t have anything helpful there. But she did say about a few weeks ago, Yates wrote her asking to remove the Brownstein murder from the book entirely, or at least change the character’s name. I asked if that kind of request was unusual, and she said it was, mostly because of how close they are to releasing the book.”