Her lips twitched as she slid inside, and once he was behind the wheel and driving out of the lot, she asked, “Bad morning?”

“Not so much bad as fruitless,” he grumbled. “And cooped up.”

“Well, now you’re not,” she pointed out.

That much was true. They were on their way to meet with Jennifer Korpi, and he’d be away from the phone and computer screen for a good while. He’d spent hours going over reports and statements from witnesses and watched reams of footage taken by street and business cameras in the area, looking for a clue, hoping to spot Megan Travers’s black Toyota. There was a tiny bit of hope when a Tacoma couple who had been driving east at the time reported seeing what could have been Megan’s car. The timing was right, and it had happened just before the summit, on the eastern slope, where the driver had been forced to ease closer to the side of the road as the Toyota, heading west and uphill, had blown by. But so far nothing had come from the tip.

The snowplow driver who’d been cut off, Bud Frandsen, had come in and talked to Rivers. Frandsen was a big, beefy guy in a baseball cap who was looking at retirement and had been behind the wheel of a plow for nearly thirty years. When asked who was driving the car that had careened out of James Cahill’s driveway, he’d adjusted the hat on his head and replied, “I had to hit my GD brakes so hard I nearly slid. Didn’t pay attention to who was driving. But the car was a black Toyota, that much I can tell you.”

“Was there anyone else in the car, other than the driver?”

“Don’t know. Don’t think so,” he said and, when handed Megan Travers’s driver’s license picture and asked if she could be the driver, he’d swung his big head side to side and said, “Maybe. Maybe not. I was just trying to keep the rig on the road while cussin’ a blue streak.” As if to underscore that, he added, “Fuckin’ idiot. Coulda got me killed.”