As he walked back to the police station, he thought that there hadn’t been any one thing that had broken them up. They’d just grown apart and moved like strangers through the house with nothing to say to each other. The last time they’d had sex, he noticed she kept her eyes closed—she wasn’t there, or at least she didn’t want to be there. And he found he didn’t want to be with a shell of a wife.

That began a slow move to the spare bedroom, starting with him sleeping on the sofa, then the spare room so as not to wake her as he researched all night. Marla seemed to have the same thought, because she asked him to leave the following month. It had been a shock to him that his stuff was leaving first in suitcases and then black trash bags. The first night in his new apartment, he didn’t even have a sofa or a mattress, and he’d ordered a free pizza from a coupon he’d gotten with his phone hookup.

But then Todd Sutton went missing and he’d thrown himself fully into the case. To see someone like Lara aching for Todd made him realize that he could have that kind of love, too.

Lara. Was Marla right in that he liked a damsel in distress? He dismissed the thought, but he remembered Marla in the months after her mother died and him piecing together her life. Then he did it again with Lara.

He’d just walked back into the office when his office line rang. Ben picked it up. “Archer here.”

There was a pause and a crackle. “Ben?” The voice sounded far away. “This is Gaston Boucher. I’m with Lara Barnes here in Paris.”

“Hey, Gaston.” Ben started tearing open the morning’s mail, sorting the junk from the essentials while he cocked the phone on his neck, but he stopped. Something was wrong or Gaston wouldn’t be calling. “What is it?”

“Well…” The man stammered.

“Well, what?” Ben felt his stomach lurch and his blood pressure drop. He almost didn’t want to hear the next thing out of Gaston’s mouth.

“Lara’s gone missing.”

“Gone missing?” The police chief in him knew the importance of the next question even if Gaston didn’t. “How long?”

“Twenty-four hours now.”

Chapter 23