As for orchards? Long gone. Assuming they had ever been there.

“Isn’t that convenient?” he said aloud to himself, using the intonation from the old Saturday Night Live bit. She had been pretty persuasive in her panic about returning here, but now he wondered if she simply didn’t want to go to the trouble of acting out her dismay all over again. He wrote down the name of the company that had developed the property. He would check with local police to see if there’d been any bones discovered during the excavation, get Nancy to cross-check it on a Nexis search. Baltimore County and York County might lie next to each other, but it was all too plausible that bones found here wouldn’t be matched to any Maryland case, much less a thirty-year-old one involving two missing girls. Again, it wasn’t like there was a national database, Bones-R-Us, where you typed in some info and all the missing-persons cases popped up, yours for the asking.

He dialed Nancy ’s cell.

“Anything?” she asked. “Because I’ve got-”

“The property’s been developed. But I had an idea. Could you check York County for-I don’t know how you would phrase it-something like ‘ York County ’ and ‘bones,’ plug in the street name. If there was a grave, it should have been disturbed when they prepared the lots, right?”

“Oh, you mean a Boolean search.”

“Boo-yah what?”

“Never mind. I know what you want. Now, here’s what I got, sitting comfy at my desk.”

Infante thought it would be ungallant to mention what else Nancy was getting, sitting comfy at her desk. Her ass was a lot wider these days. “Yeah?”

“I managed to find the property records. The deed was transferred to Mercer Inc. in 1978, but the previous resident was Stan Dunham. And Dunham was in fact a county police, a sergeant in robbery. Retired in 1974.”

A former cop at the time of the girls’ disappearance, then, but that distinction wouldn’t have been meaningful to a child. Still, it would be slightly easier for the department to stomach. Slightly.

“Is he still alive?”

“In a manner of speaking. His pension checks go to an address out in Carroll County, around Sykesville. It’s an assisted-living community. Based on what the people out there told me, he’s more assisted than living.”

“What’s that mean?”

“He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s three years ago. He barely knows who he is, day in and day out. No living relatives, according to the hospital, no one to contact when he goes, but he’s got a power of attorney on record.”

“Name?”

“Raymond Hertzbach. And he’s up in York, so you might as well try him out before you head back. Sorry.”

“Hey, I like getting out of the office. I didn’t become a police so I could sit at a desk all day.”

“Neither did I. But things change.”

She sounded just a little bit smug, which wasn’t Nancy ’s way at all. Maybe she had picked up the unvoiced observation about what her work habits were doing to her butt. Fair enough, then.

THE HIGHWAY ACTUALLY got worse around York, and Kevin was glad that he wasn’t subjecting his personal vehicle to the ruts and potholes of Pennsylvania. The lawyer, Hertzbach, appeared very much the big fish in a small pond, the kind of attorney who had a billboard on the interstate and a converted Victorian for his office. Puffy and shiny, he wore a pink shirt and a flowery pink tie, which went nicely with his pink face.

“Stan Dunham came to me about the time he sold the property.”

“When was that?”

“Five years ago, I think.”

The new owner must have flipped the property fast, probably gotten even more money for it.

“It was a windfall for him, but he had the foresight to realize that he needed to be prepared for the long term. His wife had died-I was under the impression that he wouldn’t have sold the land while she was alive-and he told me that he had no children, no heirs. He purchased several insurance products that I recommended-long-term care, a couple of annuities. Those were handled through someone else here in town, Donald Leonard, friend of mine through Rotary.”

And you got a nice kickback, Infante thought.

“Did Dunham ask for any advice on criminal matters?”

Hertzbach found this amusing. “If he did, you know I couldn’t comment on it. Confidentiality.”

“But it’s my understanding that he’s now not competent-”

“Yes, he’s deteriorated badly.”

“And if he dies, there’s no one to notify? No next of kin, no friends?”

“Not to my knowledge. But a woman did call me recently, curious about his finances.”

Infante’s brain almost sang like a teakettle at that detail-a woman, interested in money. “Did she give you a name?”

“I’m sure she did, but I’d have to get my secretary to go over the log, pinpoint the date and the name. She was…rather coarse. She wanted to know who was named in his will, if anyone, and how much money he had. Of course, I couldn’t have told her that. I asked her what her relationship was to Mr. Dunham, and she hung up on me. I wondered if it was someone from the nursing home itself, who might have tried to inveigle her way into his good graces, back when he was still alert. Given the timing.”

“The timing?”

“Mr. Dunham was moved to hospice care in February, which means the facility doesn’t expect him to live more than six months.”

“He’s dying from the dementia? Is that possible?”

“Lung cancer, and he quit smoking when he was forty. I have to say, he’s one of the more spectacularly unlucky men I’ve ever met. Sells his land for a tidy sum, then his health fails him. There’s a lesson in that.”

“What would that be, exactly?”

Kevin wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass, but Hertzbach appeared to be struck dumb by the question. “Why, to…I don’t know, take advantage of every day,” he said at last. “Live life to the fullest.”

Thanks for the insight, pal.

He left the office, bumping and bouncing back to the Maryland line, wondering at the coincidence of that telephone call from a woman who, according to the secretary’s logs, had identified herself as the ohso-creative Jane Jones. That call had come in on March 1, not even three weeks earlier. A strange woman, asking questions about an old cop’s money. Did she know he was dying? How? Had she been thinking of bringing a civil action against the man? She had to know there was no statute of limitations for her sister’s murder.

But also no money in a criminal case.

Again he was struck by how convenient it all was-the old farm, gone, and who knows what had happened to the alleged gravesite? The old man, as good as gone.

As he crossed into Maryland, he fumbled for his cell phone and dialed Willoughby, to ask him if he had ever heard of Dunham, although Lenhardt had been out in the country less than a decade. No answer. He decided to hit Nancy again, see what she had learned.

“Infante,” she said. He was still getting used to the fact that phone calls no longer involved any mystery, that his name popped up on Nancy ’s screen, identifying him instantly.

“The lawyer had some interesting nuggets, but Dunham’s pretty much a dead end at this point. Are you now the leading expert on all things Bethany?”

“Getting there. Managed to find the mom-her old real-estate firm, in Austin, knew how to get in touch with her. No answer and no machine, but Lenhardt’s going to keep trying her. Here’s the big find, though-”

“We should keep her away, until we know for sure.”

“Yeah, but, Infante-”

“I mean, she’s going to want to believe, so we have to control for that. And we don’t want to waste her time if we can discredit her.”

“Infante-”

“At the very least, she has to understand that this is not guaranteed, that-”

“Infante, shut up and listen for a second. I took a flier, plugged Penelope Jackson’s name into the Nexis newspaper database on a hunch. You didn’t do that, right?”