Barry Duckworth walked down the hall and turned into a room gridded with cubicles. The Promise Falls police detective guessed that on a weekday, these desks would be filled with people conducting the business end of things for Five Mountains park, but unlike the workers who actually ran the rides and sold the tickets and emptied the trash, they got Saturday and Sunday off.

The park manager didn’t have to be called in. Five Mountains was still a new attraction in the upper New York State area, and Saturdays were always the busiest. Fenwick had called in her publicist the moment she suspected this could turn into a public relations nightmare for the park. If Jan Harwood had somehow wandered into the mechanism of a roller coaster, or drowned in one of the shallow waterways that ran through the grounds, or choked on a Five Mountains hot dog, they needed to be on top of that.

As if that weren’t enough, there was this business of a kid in a stroller being wheeled away from his parents. Once that news started getting out there, hold on to your hat, buster. Before you knew it, parents would be hearing that some tot had been carved up for body parts at the face-painting booth.

There were only two people in this other office. Didi Campion, a uniformed officer in her mid-thirties, and Ethan Harwood. They were sitting across from each other on office chairs, Campion leaning over, her arms on her knees, Ethan sitting on the edge of his chair, legs dangling.

“Hey,” Duckworth said.

All that remained of an ice-cream treat Ethan had been eating was an inch of cone. His tired eyes found Duckworth. The child looked bewildered and very small. He said nothing.

“Ethan and I were just talking about trains,” Didi Campion said.

“You like trains, Ethan?” Duckworth asked.

Ethan nodded. He drew his lips in, like he was doing everything he could not to say anything.

“We’re going to get you back with your dad in just a minute,” Duckworth said. “That okay with you?”

Another nod.

“Would you mind if I talked with Officer Campion over here for just a second? We’re not going anyplace.”

Ethan looked from Duckworth to Campion and his eyes flashed with worry. Duckworth could see that the boy had already formed an attachment to the policewoman.

“I’ll be right back,” Campion assured him and touched his knee.

She got out of the chair and joined Duckworth a few feet away.

“Well?” he asked her.

“He wants to see his parents. Both of them. He’s asking where they are.”

“What else did he tell you? What about the person who took him away in his stroller?”

“He doesn’t know anything about it. I think he slept through the whole thing. And he said he and his father were waiting and waiting for his mother to come but she didn’t.”

Duckworth leaned in. “Did he say when he last saw her?”

Campion sighed. “I don’t know if he quite got what I was trying to ask him. He just keeps saying he wants to go home, that he doesn’t want to go on any of the roller coasters, not even the small rides. And he wants his mom and dad.”

Duckworth nodded. “Okay, I’ll take the kid back to his father in just a second.” Campion took that as a sign that they were done, and she went back to sit with Ethan.

The door edged open. It was Fenwick. “Detective?”

“Yes.”

“I know you have your own people out combing the grounds, but Five Mountains personnel have searched every square inch of the grounds and they’re reporting back that they haven’t found any sign of this woman. I mean, in any kind of distress. No woman passed out in any restrooms, not in any of the areas that are off-limits to guests, no indication that she fell or came to any kind of harm anywhere at all. I really think, at this point, it would be best if the police presence in the park were scaled back. It’s making people nervous.”

“Which people?” Duckworth asked.

“Our guests,” Fenwick said defensively. “They can’t help but think something’s wrong, with all these police around. They’ll start thinking terrorists have put bombs on the roller coasters or something like that.”

“How about the parking lot?” Duckworth asked.

“It’s been searched,” Fenwick said confidently.

Duckworth held up a finger and got out his cell, punched in a number. “Yeah, Smithy, how ya doin’. I want someone at the exit scoping out every car as it leaves. See if there’s anyone in any of them matches the description of this missing woman. You see someone like that, if she’s acting funny, you hang on to that car till I get there.”

Fenwick looked like she’d bitten into a lemon. “Tell me you’re not going to search every car that leaves here.”

“No,” he said, but he wished he could. He wished he had the authority to make everyone pop their trunk as they left for home. Duckworth had a feeling that anything he did about cars in the lot amounted to doing too little too late. If Jan Harwood had run into trouble, if someone had stuffed her into a trunk, they could have left the lot a couple of hours ago. But you did what you could.

“This is terrible, just terrible,” Fenwick said. “We don’t need this kind of publicity. If this woman wandered off because she has mental problems or something, that’s hardly our fault. Is that man planning to sue us? Is this some setup to get money out of us?”

“Would you like me to convey your concerns to Mr. Harwood?” Duckworth asked. “I’m sure, as a writer for the Standard, he’d love to do a piece on your outpouring of sympathy for his situation.”

She blanched. “He works for the paper?”

Duckworth nodded.

Fenwick moved around the detective and dropped to her knees in front of Ethan. “How are you doing there? I bet you’d love another ice cream cone.”

Duckworth’s cell, which was still in his hand, rang. He put it to his ear. “Yeah.”

“It’s Gunner here, Detective. I’m down in the security area. We patched that video of the guy and his kid going through the gates a few minutes ago up to the main office.”

“I just saw it.”

“They couldn’t pick out the wife in those, right?”

“That’s right. Mr. Harwood says his wife had gone back to the car to get something and told him to go on ahead.”

“Yeah, okay, so she would have come into the park a few minutes later then, right?”

“Yeah,” Duckworth said.

“So what we did before was, because the Harwoods ordered their tickets online, and printed them out, we were able to pinpoint at what time those tickets got scanned and processed at the gate.”

“I got that.”

“So then we thought, we’ll look for when the third ticket, the wife’s, got processed at the gate, and then when we had that we could find the closed-circuit image for that time.”

“What’s the problem?” Duckworth asked.

“Nothing’s coming up.”

“What do you mean? You saying she never came into the park?”

“I don’t know. Here’s the thing. I’ve got them checking their ticket sales records, all the stuff that gets bought in advance online, and they only show two tickets being purchased on the Harwoods’ Visa. One adult and one kid.”