He clicked back on her old e-mail folder, scrolling to the oldest dated spam with a hand that was starting to tremble again. Sixty-four clicks and there it was: Oldest e-mail sent had been delivered Tuesday at 4:42 in the afternoon, over twenty-four hours before Sandra had disappeared.

Jason sat back, hands clutched against his knotted stomach while he sought to make sense of this.

Someone had systematically purged Sandra’s AOL account. If it had happened Wednesday night, the same night as her disappearance, one logical conclusion would be that whoever had taken Sandra had also cleared the account, possibly as a way of covering his tracks.

But the purging had come first, by nearly twenty-four hours. What did that imply?

Occam’s razor, right? The simplest explanation is generally the correct explanation. Meaning Sandra herself had probably purged her account. Most likely because she had been doing something online she now felt a need to hide. An Internet flirtation? A genuine physical relationship? Something she didn’t want him or anyone else to find.

That explanation was less ominous than the image of a shadowy man, first attacking Sandra, then sitting smugly at the kitchen table and covering his computer tracks while Ree presumably slept overhead.

And yet that explanation hurt him more. It implied premeditation. It implied that Sandra knew she was leaving, and had wanted to ensure that he wouldn’t be able to find her.

Jason lifted a weary hand. He shielded his eyes, and for a moment, the flood of emotion that choked his throat surprised him.

He had not married Sandra for love. He was not a man who had that kind of expectation out of life. And yet, for a while … For a while, it had been very nice to feel like part of a family. It had been nice to feel normal.

He had screwed up in February. The hotel room, the dinner, the champagne … He never should’ve done what he’d done in February.

Jason cleared his throat, rubbed his eyes. He pushed his own exhaustion away, and gazing down at his sleeping child, forced himself back to the matters at hand.

Sandra was not as technologically gifted as he was. He assumed that if she had been the one to purge the account, she’d done it through purging the cache file, meaning the information was all still on the hard drive, just the directory identifying the location of each data point had been removed. And, by utilizing any number of simple forensic programs, he could restore most of the deleted information.

Time was the issue. It would take at least an hour to run such a program, and then hours more to comb through the re-created data until he found what he was looking for. He didn’t have hours. Jason glanced at his watch. He had thirty minutes. Crap.

He rubbed his face again with tired hands, and took a deep breath.