Archie’s office was a square room with one window, a desk, three chairs, and a bookcase. It was bare-bones. Susan thought it looked like one of those porn sets from the eighties in which the intern gets bent over a desk by an executive wearing nothing but a blue-and-red-striped tie. She’d never told Archie that. Obviously.

His desk chair didn’t even have arms.

She spun around slowly on it.

He’d blame himself. For losing the kid.

There was a computer on Archie’s desk. The monitor was flat and black, but the CPU was older than the ones at the Herald. It was probably password-protected. But it didn’t matter. Susan plucked her phone off the desk and Googled “missing ‘Patrick Lifton’ Washington.”

A page of results popped up.

Smartphones. You had to love them.

She clicked on the first result. It was a Web site run by the family. The home page had a snapshot of Patrick Lifton, age eight, grinning and holding a soccer ball under his arm. He was missing one of his top front teeth. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? cried the bold letters above his head.

The information was all there. Patrick Lifton had been born and spent his first eight years in Aberdeen. Susan knew the place—a small town at the gateway of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula that had been gritty even before the mills had closed down and the local salmon runs had dried up.

His father worked at one of the remaining paper mills, and his mother was described as “self-employed.” Their son left home on a Saturday afternoon to walk three blocks to his friend’s house. It was the third time he’d been allowed to walk there alone. The mother of the friend called a half hour after Patrick left. He’d never arrived.

The rest was too familiar. Patrick’s parents searched for him. The police were called. Soon a massive search was under way. An Amber Alert was issued. No one saw anything. It was a rental neighborhood. There were a lot of apartment buildings. People didn’t really know each other.

There were no witnesses. And no suspects.

Susan hoped the police report had more information. If the man who’d poisoned Henry and killed three other people had taken the kid, then the kid had probably been through hell.

And it had been at the hands of a man who had been close enough to her to drop a key in her purse. She ran through it again and again in her mind. Had she been alone, in a crowd? All the others had happened near the river. That’s where it must have happened. She and Archie and Claire had moved through so many people, looking for Henry. All those faceless raincoats. She shivered. Had he planned on poisoning her and then changed his mind? Or had she turned away at the last minute?