At the top, he marveled at the view. The church steeple, the town hall, storefronts, the ballpark, Route 58, and the old frame houses were clearly visible from this height, as was the motel at the edge of town, the Green Rolling Hills Inn, where that girl had vanished.

“George! George!”

Hilda had come from the house and was standing at the foot of his ladder.

“We’re supposed to call the Vermont State Police!”

He looked down at her, puzzled. “Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s a pretty old message. Something about an investigation!”

CHAPTER 23

Derby, Vermont

Pat Lyndon, the office manager, poked her head into Rod Noble’s office at Derby Barracks. “Ray Wyatt is here.”

Noble glanced at her from his computer monitor. “Thanks, Pat. Can you take him to the conference room? I’ll be there in two minutes.”

Preparing to meet Wyatt, Noble gathered his notes and his thoughts as Samantha Moore watched from her photo on the corkboard on the wall next to his desk.

It had been more than five months since Moore’s disappearance. Even though he was working his ongoing cases, and new ones—like a shooting at a gas station in Glover, an assault at a bar in Westmore, a string of burglaries in Craftsbury, and a meth lab in Troy—the Moore case remained his priority.

Noble stared into Sam’s eyes, and then glanced at the framed photo of his own daughter. His gut tensed, reminding him that he’d made promises to Sam’s aunt, uncle, and boyfriend, who called him every week.

I give you my word we’re going to find her.

It was a promise he wasn’t certain he could keep, but it was one he would never give up on.

And that’s guaranteed.

Noble didn’t mind meeting with the press these days. Unlike early in the investigation, when the media’s appetite for the story had been insatiable.

Now, with the attention all but evaporated, he’d do what he could to keep the case in the public eye, and had agreed to meet Ray Wyatt.

Walking to the conference room with a file and his phone, Noble took a mental inventory of all the work they’d done and were doing, and of what he could and couldn’t release to Wyatt.

Among the elements Noble would keep back: the lead on the light configurations on the mystery vehicle that had stalked Moore, and how they were getting the vehicle numbers down, but were still working through a huge pool of possibilities.

He’d also withhold the discovery of Moore’s blood and hair at the crime scene, and that additional DNA analysis was under way with results still pending.

He’d also keep back how, with the help of local police, they’d run down all the registered sex offenders in the region. All had solid alibis.