"…not been seen since midafternoon yesterday. Further cause for concern among authorities is the fact that Ms. Parisi's legal work brought her into regular contact with Judge George Palmer, who was shot to death at his home last Monday evening. Anyone having any knowledge of Ms. Parisi or her whereabouts is urged to call the police or this station at…"

Hunt muted the sound. Wu still held the phone but now was standing, staring at the screen. Farrell, too, had turned, and his face had clouded over. "Well, now it's official at least," he said. "Maybe Missing Persons will move on it after all."

"Don't count on it," Hunt said. "The TV saying somebody's missing doesn't necessarily mean that they're missing."

"But she is missing," Wu insisted. "I know something's happened. We all know that. She'd never go this long without telling somebody."

Hunt pointed at the phone in her hand. "Who are you talking to?"

"Oh." With an I'm-stupid expression, she spoke back into the phone. "Jason. Did you hear that?"

Farrell sat on the arm of the easy chair, his jaw tight. "Devin doesn't really consider her a suspect in Palmer, does he, Wyatt?"

Hunt lowered himself down onto the wall unit next to the television. "I'd say close to as good as the wife."

"What do you think?"

"You really want to know? You don't want to know."

"You think she's dead, don't you?" Wu had hung up and now sat, her hands nervous little birds in her lap. "I'm afraid of that, too."

Farrell's expression showed he wasn't far from that thought himself, but he said, "What about kidnapped?"

Hunt shook his head. "Why? And no ransom demand. It makes no sense."

"Neither does her disappearing," Farrell said, "unless she just split up the coast or somewhere to get her head straight. Between this thing with Palmer and her fight with Spencer, I could see her just laying low for a few days."

But Wu was shaking her head. "She would have told Carla, at least. And probably Gary Piersall."

"Maybe she did, Amy," Hunt said.

"No, not Carla, anyway. I talked to her enough times today. Nobody's that good an actress."

Farrell said, "Maybe she just wasn't thinking straight and forgot to tell anybody."

Wu shook her head. "That's just not her."

Hunt said, "She was fine when I left her. She wasn't freaking out. She was going in to work. Besides, if she's taking a mental health day or two, the story breaking on TV is going to bring her back in. If that or some ransom demand doesn't happen in the next few hours, and I don't think they will…" He let the sentence hang unfinished.

"So what do we do?" Wu asked. "Just sit and wait?"

"I don't know what else we can do," Farrell said. "She turns up or she doesn't."

"Well, maybe not." Hunt lifted himself up from the credenza, the nebulous idea of why he'd felt he needed to come back up here beginning to form into something more cohesive. "If she's dead, nothing we do makes any difference. But if she's not…if she's hurt or trapped or crashed and skidded off the road someplace or anything besides dead, there's still a chance we can do something."

"All right, maybe," Farrell said, "if we could get the police…"

But Hunt was shaking his head. "Think about it, Wes. We've already got the police. Juhle wants her. He'll pull out all those stops." He took in both of them. "I'm talking about us."

"Us? You mean you and me and Amy?"

Hunt nodded. "And Jason. And my troops, Tamara and Craig and Mickey."

Wes cracked a thin smile. "And do what?"

But Wu said, "I'm in. Whatever it takes."

"Here's what I see," Hunt said. "Wes, hear me out. We've got three options. One, Andrea's already dead. Two, for some reason she went away on her own. On that, she'll either come home on her own, too, or she plans to stay away indefinitely, in which case she's left the country and we'll never see her again."

"I don't think that's it," Wu said.

Hunt nodded. "I don't, either. But she also might have had a bona fide accident going where she was going, and then the cops will probably find her or her car. So forget one and two. Those are just out of our control."

"Okay," Farrell said. "What's three?"

"Three, somebody took her." Hunt held up his hands, forestalling the response he saw in both of their faces. "I'm not saying that's what happened, but it's the only thing we can look at, and possibly affect, rather than just sit and wait. If somebody took her, they did it for a reason-something she did, someone she knew, something she was involved in. That's what's left."

"So what do we do?" Farrell asked.

"How about if you go talk to Fairchild and Tombo. Between the two of them, they're going to know more than any of us but may not know what they know."

"What do you want me to do?" Wu asked.

"You and Jason, maybe you could get with Carla Shapiro. Find out who Andrea hung with at work, what her caseload was, her personal life outside of Trial TV. Meanwhile, I'll put Tamara and my stringers on the phones and try to pick up any other lead I can."

"Where?" Wu asked.

"I don't know exactly. I'll start digging. Maybe, as you say, Wes, talk to Devin some more."

"He's a good guy, Wyatt, but he's a cop on a big case. He's not going to be inclined to share." Farrell came forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of him. "Don't get me wrong. I'm on the team here. But this is a helluva long shot, the whole idea."

"I realize that," Hunt said. "But what's the alternative?"

Hunt got lucky with Mickey Dade.

Besides the occasional work he did for Hunt, Tamara's twenty-three-year-old younger brother also drove a cab in the evenings while he sporadically attended chef's school during the day at the California Culinary Academy when he could afford classes. Hunt thought the interest in food might have had something to do with Mickey getting down to his last spoonful of peanut butter when he'd been ten, but they'd never discussed it.

Tonight, though, Mickey was circling Union Square, not four blocks from Farrell's office, when Hunt got him on his cell phone. Picking him up out front, Mickey left the meter off and started to drive. Hunt, sitting in the passenger seat next to him, wasted no time. "How's it look for work over the next day or two, Mick?"

"Clear enough. I could probably find a few hours. What do you want?"

"I don't know yet. You hear about Andrea Parisi?"

"Who?"

"I guess not, then. She's on TV about the Donolan trial almost every day."

"I don't watch TV. Waste of time."

"I know. It's one of the things I've always liked about you most."

"Except for the Iron Chef. I love that show."

"Mick."

"Yeah."

"Andrea Parisi."

"Okay."

"She's missing. We're going to try to find her."

"Who's we?"

"You, me, Tamara, Craig, some of my pals from the legal world."

"Where'd she go?"

"Was that a smart or dumb question?"

Mickey took a beat. "Dumb. I get it. If she's missing, though, don't the cops automatically look for her?"

Hunt explained about Missing Persons, as well as where they stood with Parisi in a general way, while Mickey managed to run three reds and hit fifty miles per hour between every other stoplight on the way down to Brannan. He got Hunt home in a little under ten minutes, but before he sped out in a hail of gravel for a dispatch fare at Lulu's, he promised Hunt he'd keep his cell phone on and await instructions.

"You got your camera on you, right?" Hunt asked him. "Just in case."

Mickey patted the small leather case on the car seat next to him. "Always, dude, always."

Back home, Hunt changed out of his business suit into jeans, hiking boots, an old flannel Pendleton. By the time he'd changed, his computer was up, and he sat at his desk, where he Googled the names Ward and Carol Manion. Andrea Parisi had not made it to her final appointment with Carol Manion, true, but if the two women had talked after Hunt had left Parisi, that made Mrs. Manion perhaps the last contact Andrea had had before she disappeared. She might have said something, left some hint.