Over his shoulder I saw movement in the Millers’ home. A silhouette in the upstairs window. I tried to watch it without watching it. I said, “I’m worried about Diane.”

“What?”

I had his attention. I repeated my concern.

“Your partner? That Diane?”

“She went to Las Vegas a couple of days ago. I was talking with her on the phone last night from one of the casinos and the call suddenly went dead. She’s disappeared. Her husband flew out there a couple of hours later and he can’t find a trace of her. The Vegas cops aren’t interested.”

Sam moved the flashlight beam away from our faces. A second glance next door revealed the silhouette moving from the Millers’ window. In an instant, it was gone.

“Your friend Diane went to Las Vegas?”

Sam knew precisely what I had told him by telling him that fact. With Sam I rarely had to say things twice. “To talk to someone,” I said, as a way of underlining my point, just in case.

He nodded, wetting his lower lip with his tongue. “You’re looking at something behind me. Don’t do it again. Look at me. Eye contact. Good, good. What is it?”

“Somebody watching us in an upstairs window.”

“Still there?”

I shook my head.

“Dad?”

“Couldn’t say. Just a silhouette.”

“Which window?”

“Closest to the street.”

He nodded and ran his fingers through his hair before he stuffed his free hand into the back pocket of his jeans. “Diane went to Las Vegas to talk with someone and then yesterday she vanished? Now you have a client you’re worried about that you think may have just vanished, too? You and I are standing in the backyard of a house on Twelfth Street where said client garages his old car. Right next door a young girl happened to disappear on Christmas Day. I got it all right, so far?”

“You’re doing pretty well.” The car part is a little off, I was thinking. The Camaro may be old, but it’s cherry.

“Great, glad to hear it. Let me add a couple of things to the list, things I’ve already been a little concerned about. You know something about Mallory Miller’s mother that in my book you don’t have any reason to know. You probably even know she lives in Vegas. You’re way too curious about Reese’s aggressive tendencies for my taste. And it was not too long ago that you kind of predicted that you and I were going to knock heads about this house next door to the Millers.”

“That’s three things, Sam, at least.”

“Do me a favor, ignore the arithmetic.”

“I can’t confirm some of what you’re saying. But I can’t argue with what you’re saying, either.”

“From you that’s a ringing endorsement.”

I shrugged.

With gorgeous understatement, Sam said, “Well, too many missing pieces. It all sounds too goofy for words to me.” He began walking. “Come on. I want to hear more about Diane and what’s going on with her in Las Vegas.”

He led me back out through the dormant water features of Doyle’s yard. Just before we got to Sam’s car at the curb I said, employing a voice that was much more measured than I was feeling at that moment, “Diane and I were both there the day that Hannah Grant died.”

Without even a glance in my direction, he said, “I know that. Don’t you think I fucking know that?”

My car was across downtown outside the house where Bob rented rooms from the Donalds. After pressing me for some more details about Diane’s disappearance in Las Vegas, Sam headed toward Pine Street to drop me off.

“So what do you know about the owner of the house with the water park?” I asked.

He killed the volume on the radio, squelching some country lament that I didn’t really want to hear. While I waited-rating the odds at three out of ten that he’d actually answer my question about Doyle-I was thinking, and not for the first time, that most of Sam’s favorite country artists could use a few sessions of psychotherapy.

“Owner’s been out of the house for a while; it’s vacant now, was vacant over Christmas, too, if that’s what you’re wondering. And yes, we’ve talked to him-the owner-got in touch with him right away through the real estate lady who’s listing the house.”

Sam paused poignantly. Okay, provocatively. I thought he was waiting to see if my sense of self-preservation was so impaired that I would choose that moment to remind him of something he had once confessed to me about the last time-the Christmas when the little blond beauty queen was murdered three blocks away. That time, Sam admitted one night over beers, eleven long months passed before any cop, any DA’s investigator, any FBI agent-anyone in law enforcement-got around to interviewing one of the dead girl’s family’s nearest neighbors.

For eleven months after a child was viciously murdered, the cops had failed to interview the residents of a house with a perfect view of the crime scene.

To me, unbelievable.

But I didn’t remind him. He didn’t need reminding.

He went on. “The owner gave us permission to search. No hesitation, no bullshit, totally cooperative. Agent unlocked the place and we searched it. Nothing. And all this happened in the first few hours after Mallory’s father reported her missing.”

“Is the owner in town?”

Doyle. I wanted to use his name out loud, but I couldn’t. I wanted to know if Doyle was in town.

“No.”

“You guys thought Mallory might have been in there after she disappeared?”

“Vacant house right next door? It’s one of the first places we look.”

“But nothing?”

“Just a vacant house. Kitchen’s hardly bigger than mine. Terrific yard, sure, but no place to toss a football. Definitely overpriced. Hey, what isn’t in this town?”

Sam pondered the inflation of Boulder’s housing stock more than I did, but taking that detour didn’t seem productive to me. I asked, “Was the Camaro in the garage when you searched the house at Christmas?”

“Now there’s a good question. I don’t recall that it was. If it had been, somebody would’ve run the tags and talked to your guy. I’m sure of that. And I don’t think we’ve ever talked to your guy.”

I could tell that I had only about half of Sam’s attention. He was considering some angle I couldn’t see. His answer to my last question was probably in the vicinity of honest but he wasn’t telling me all that he could. But then I wasn’t telling him all that I could, either. “Something else is spinning in that big head of yours. What is it?”

He startled a bit at my question as he pulled from Ninth onto Pine. “I’m connecting dots, looking for a damn crime. I need a rationalization I can use.”

“What do you mean?”

He didn’t answer right away, not until we were almost on the Donalds’ block. My car was just ahead. The lights were still off in Bob’s rooms; I would have been truly surprised if they weren’t.

Sam flashed the Cherokee’s headlights at a van coming at us from the other direction. The driver of the van responded by flashing to his low beams for half a second before he went right back to his brights. He beeped his horn to underline his aggravation that another motorist would deign to question his choice of headlamp settings. I couldn’t see the van driver through the high-intensity glare but I would have bet he was flipping Sam off, too.

I said, “Asshole’s tugging on Superman’s cape.”

“He’s lucky I’m in a good mood.”

I smiled out loud.

“There’s nothing here for me, Alan. Your guy’s been gone, what? A day or two maybe? There’s half a thimble’s worth of blood near his door-and some clothes on the floor. No sign of forced entry. No witnesses. Guy’s gone. His car’s gone. Ergo: He split. People do it all the time without warning anybody, without telling anybody. Even their therapists. I have nothing I can give my bosses that they’ll find the least bit interesting. I take this in, I know what I’m going to hear: So far this isn’t a police matter. So that’s what I tell you: So far this isn’t a police matter.”