Miller let her rant.

“Kid knows something. Notice the way she shut down the moment we got past bedtime? She heard something, saw something, I don’t know. But we need a forensic interviewer, someone who specializes in children. Quick, too. More time that girl spends around dear old Dad, harder it’s going to be for her to recall any inconvenient truths.”

Miller nodded his head.

“’Course, we’re also gonna need doting Dad’s permission to interview his child, and somehow, I don’t think he’s gonna grant us access. Fascinating, don’t you think? I mean, his wife vanished in the middle of the night, leaving their daughter all alone in the house, and far from cooperating with us, or asking us any logical questions about what we’re doing to find his wife, Jason Jones sits on that sofa as mute as a mime. Where’s his shock, his disbelief, his panicked need for information? He should be calling friends and relatives. He should be digging out recent photos of his wife for us to canvass the neighborhood. He should, at the very least, be arranging for someone to watch his daughter so he can personally assist with our efforts. This guy—it’s like a switch has been thrown. He’s not even home.”

“Denial,” Miller offered up, trudging along beside her.

“We’re gonna have to do this the hard way,” D.D. declared. “Get a search warrant for Jason Jones’s truck, get an affidavit permitting us to seize the computer, as well as requesting printouts of the wife’s cell phone records. Hell, we should probably just have the entire house frozen as a crime scene. That’d give Jason Jones something to think about.”

“Tough on the kid.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the kicker.” If the house was declared a crime scene, Jason and his daughter would be forced to evacuate. Pack a bag, move into a motel under escort from a police cruiser kind of thing. D.D. wondered what little Ree would think, giving up her garden oasis for a cheap hotel room with brown carpets and the stale scent of a decade’s worth of cigarettes. It didn’t make D.D. feel too good about things, but then she had another thought.

She stopped walking, pivoting toward Miller so abruptly, he nearly ran into her.

“If we move Jason and Ree out of the house, we’ll have to assign officers to cover them twenty-four/seven. Meaning there’ll be fewer officers actively searching for Sandra Jones, meaning our investigation will slow down during a time when it’s critical to ramp up. You know that. I know that. But Jason doesn’t know that.”

Miller frowned at her, stroked his mustache.