“She drops a lot of money on Saturdays?”

“I don’t know how she affords it. We’re kind of on a limited budget,” Lyall said. “What I don’t get is if all the malls have exactly the same stores, what’s the point in going to one after another?”

“I don’t know,” Duckworth said, thinking it was the first thing Lyall Kowalski had said that bordered on insightful.

“So after she’s done with the malls, she makes the grocery her last stop, because she doesn’t want all her Lean Cuisines melting while she’s wandering around JCPenney.”

“But you don’t actually know where, exactly, she would have gone.”

“No.”

“Where does she buy groceries?”

Lyall shrugged. “Grocery store?”

The dog, built like a three-foot cross section of a punching bag with legs, walked through the room, nails clicking on the uncarpeted wood floor. He collapsed on a square of area rug in front of an empty chair.

“If this were like other Saturdays, what time would you be expecting her back?”

“Three or four? Five at the latest.”

“When did you get up?”

“Around one,” Lyall said.

“And did you try calling your wife at all?”

“I tried her cell but it goes straight to message. And she hasn’t called here to say she was going to be late or anything.”

Duckworth nodded slowly. He asked, “When was the last time you actually saw or spoke to your wife, Mr. Kowalski?”

He thought a moment. “I guess, middle of yesterday? She called me from work to check what time we were going out for dinner.” He winced, as if someone had stuck a pin in his arm.

“So you didn’t speak to her later yesterday or last night, not at all?”

Lyall shook his head.

“And you didn’t actually talk to her this morning?”

Another shake.

“When Mick dropped you off here last night, did you notice whether Leanne’s car was here?”

“I wasn’t all that observant at the time.”

“For all you know,” Duckworth said, “she wasn’t even here last night.”

“Where would she be if she wasn’t here?”

“I don’t know. What I’m asking is whether you can actually say, with any certainty, that your wife was here when you got home in the middle of the night, or was here this morning.”

He looked slightly dumbstruck. “I’m just assuming she was here. Wouldn’t make sense for her not to be here.”

“Do you have a list of the bank and credit cards your wife uses?”

“What for?” he asked.

“We could check, see where she used them, it would tell us where she’s been.”

Lyall scratched his head. “When Leanne buys anything, she tends to use cash.”

“Why’s that?”

“We kinda had our cards canceled.”

Duckworth sighed. “Has Leanne ever done this before? Gone out and not come back until late, or maybe stayed over with a friend for the night? Is it possible-and I’m sorry to have to ask this-that she might have a boyfriend?”

Lyall shook his head, clenched his fists, and pressed his meaty lips together. “Shit no, I mean, no, she wouldn’t do that.”

Duckworth sensed something. “Mr. Kowalski?”

“She’s my girl. She’s not going to mess around on me. No way.”

“Has she ever done anything like that before?”

He waited a beat too long before answering. “No.”

“I need you to be straight with me here,” Duckworth said. “This kinda stuff, it happens to the best of us.”

Lyall’s lips moved in and out. Finally, he said, “It was years ago. We were going through a rough patch. Not like now. Things are pretty good now. She had a thing with some guy she met in a bar. Just a one-nighter, that was all there was to it. Some guy passing through.”

“Who was the man?”

“I never knew. But she told me. Not to confess, but to stick it to me, you know? Saying things like if I wasn’t going to show her a good time, there was plenty of guys who would. I cleaned up my act after that.”

Duckworth looked around the room, then let his eyes settle back on Lyall.

The man was on the verge of tears. “I’m real scared something’s happened to her. Like maybe she had a car accident or something. Have you checked on that? She drives a Ford Explorer. It’s blue and it’s, like, a 1990, so it’s kind of eaten up with rust.”

“I don’t have any report of an accident involving that make of vehicle,” Duckworth said. “Mr. Kowalski, how close are your wife and Jan Harwood?”

He blinked. “They work together.”

“Are they friends? Do they get together after work? Have they ever, I don’t know, gone on a girls’ weekend away?”

“Shit no,” he said. “Just between you and me, Leanne thinks Jan’s a bit stuck-up, you know? Think she’s better than everybody.”

Last thing, Duckworth asked Lyall Kowalski some basic questions, wrote down the answers in his notebook.

“What’s your wife’s date of birth?”

“Uh, February ninth. She was born in 1973.”

“Her full name?”

Lyall sniffed, then said, “Leanne Katherine Kowalski. Well, her name before she met me was Bothwick.”

Duckworth kept scribbling. “Weight?”

“Whoa. One-forty? No, one-twenty? She’s kind of skinny. And she’s around five-six or -seven.”

“Hair?”

“Black. It’s kinda short, with some streaks in it.”

Duckworth asked for a picture. The best Lyall could come up with was a wedding photo of the two of them, a ten-year-old shot of them jamming wedding cake into each other’s mouths.

Before he pulled away from the curb out front of the Kowalski house, Duckworth got out his phone, waited for someone to answer, and said, “Gunner.”

“Yeah, hey, Detective.”

“You still at Five Mountains?”

“I’ve been here all day,” he said. “Just finishing up now.”

“How’d it go?”

“Okay, so, the first thing we did was check a couple more times to see if we could track down that third ticket bought online.”

“Right.”

“We thought maybe there was a glitch in the system, but we’ve pretty much ruled that out. If she came into the park, she didn’t do it with a ticket purchased over the Internet.”

“Okay,” Duckworth said.

“Then, with the pictures the husband provided, we spent the rest of the day looking at all the people coming in and going out through the gates, trying to spot the wife. We narrowed it down to the time frame basically established from when the husband and the kid got there, and when he called the police.”

“I’m with ya.”

“It’s not easy. There’s so many people, sometimes you can’t make them out, sometimes they’re wearing hats that cover half their face, so the thing is, she might have been there and we didn’t see her. But we looked for a woman matching her description, dressed the way the husband described her.”

“And nothing.”

“Nothing. If she’s there, we can’t find her.”

“Okay, look, thanks, I appreciate it. Go home.”

“You don’t have to ask me twice,” he said.

“Is Campion still around?”

“Yeah, she’s been here all day. I can see her outside the door.”

“You wanna put her on?”

Duckworth heard Gunner put down the phone and call out to Officer Didi Campion. Twenty seconds later, the phone was picked up.

“Campion here.”

“It’s Barry, Didi. Long day, huh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want to ask you again about the time you spent with the kid this morning.”

“Sure.”

“Did he actually say the mother was there with them at the park?”

“What do you mean?”

“Had the boy seen Mrs. Harwood that morning?”

“He was asking about her. He was asking what had happened to her. I certainly got the sense he’d seen her at the park.”

“Do you think-how do I put this-he could have been convinced his mother had been there even if she hadn’t?”

“You mean like, the dad says we’re just going to meet your mom now, your mom just went into the bathroom, something like that?”

“That’s kind of how I was thinking,” Duckworth said.

Campion said, “Hmmm.”

“I mean, the kid’s only what, four years old? Tell a four-year-old enough times that he’s invisible and he’ll start believing it. Maybe the dad made him think his mother was there even if she wasn’t.”