“So I’ve done some research,” she said as he backed the Jeep up, then put it into DRIVE and maneuvered around a department cruiser that was just wheeling into the lot.

“On?”

“A couple of things. First, I checked with Deputy Mercado, who had talked to Megan Travers’s folks about her going missing, but it was strange. They didn’t sound all that worried, not the mother in California nor the divorced father, Donald Travers.”

“Sounds like she’s pulled this kind of disappearing act before.”

“Never quite this bad, but yeah. And I double-checked their alibis.”

“Solid?”

“Mom was at a wine tasting in Napa, the dad in Chicago with his family. And then I did a little digging on the Cahill family.” She was into her phone again, scrolling down. “They’re worth millions, and it’s been that way for generations. The family owns a huge mansion on a hill in San Francisco with views of the bay and the Pacific. The matriarch, James’s grandmother . . . let’s see, her name was—oh, here it is. Eugenia Cahill.”

“She’s dead?”

“Murdered.” Mendoza slid him a glance. “A lot of that in the Cahill family,” she added, still reading. “Really thinned them out. James’s father and mother are alive, along with his sisters. They live in southern Oregon. Then he has a half-sister, Cissy, who’s got a couple of kids and lives with her husband, still in San Francisco.”

“That’s it?”

She was still reading as Rivers avoided the knot of traffic in the center of town and took side streets as far as the bridge, where he melded in with pickups, cars, and vans heading south. “Well, not exactly. There’ve been some scandals in the past, scuttlebutt about kids born out of wedlock, which is kind of ironic because one of the big philanthropic organizations in San Francisco that Eugenia was involved with is Cahill House. It was established years ago as a home for unwed mothers when they had such things. Now it looks like . . . let’s see. Now it’s a resource for victims of family abuse as well as serving pregnant women with no place to turn.” Mendoza looked up from her phone as the town fell away behind them and the first snowflakes started to fall. “But the long and the short of it is that James Cahill is going to be hella rich.”

He knew that much already, as well as about the scandals in the Cahill family. You just couldn’t be a cop in San Francisco for as many years as he had and not be aware of one of the most socially prominent and notorious families in the City by the Bay.

“Is Cahill at his hotel?” she asked, turning up the heat, adjusting the fan.

“He claimed that he was in his shop where they build the tiny houses.”

“A hotel and Christmas tree farm aren’t enough for him.”