“Do you happen to know the license number?”

David shook his head. “Not off the top of my head, but I’m sure the registration and title are in my file. Would you like me to get them?”

Joanna shook her head. “That’s not necessary. We’ll get it from the D.M.V.” She looked at Ernie. “Have you checked the house to make sure nothing’s missing, Detective Carpenter?”

“Not yet,” he replied. “I was about to do that when-”

“Missing?” David O’Brien interrupted. “What do you mean, missing? Are you implying that Brianna would steal from her own parents?”

“I’m implying nothing of the kind,” Joanna returned coolly, choosing to ignore David O’Brien’s continuing bluster. “Your daughter left home yesterday, correct?”

“Yes.”

“I’m merely trying to ascertain what, if anything, she took with her. Something she might have taken along may give us a clue as to her actual destination.”

“I see,” David agreed reluctantly.

Joanna turned to Katherine. “Would it be possible for you to show us Brianna’s room?”

The woman stood at once. “Of course,” she said. “I’ll be happy to. Right this way.”

With Katherine leading, Ernie and Joanna walked back into the welcome coolness of the house. Morosely smoking his cigarette, David O’Brien remained where he was.

“Please excuse David,” Katherine O’Brien was saying. “He’s not usually so on edge. You have to understand, this has all been a terrible strain on him. A shock. And the idea that some-thing awful may have happened…” Pausing, she shook her head. “After what went on before, it’s just… just unthinkable,” she finished at last.

They had entered a part of the sprawling house that appeared to be a bedroom wing.

“After what happened before?” Joanna asked.

“You know,” Katherine said. “If he lost Bree, too. Just like he lost his other two kids. I don’t think he’d survive it.” Joanna frowned. “He had other children?”

Katherine had stopped in front of a closed door. With one hand on the knob, she hesitated before opening it. “I’ve always respected Bree’s privacy,” she said. ‘I’ve never gone into her room without permission.”

“Do it just this once,” Ernie urged. “I think she’ll forgive you.” Nodding, Katherine opened the door and let him inside, but without entering the room herself. Since the woman was Moving in the hallway, so did Joanna, mulling over what Katherine had just told them.

“I thought Brianna was an only child,” Joanna said a moment later.

“There were two others,” Katherine said. “A boy and a girl. From his first wife.”

“What happened to them?”

Katherine looked surprised. “I thought everyone knew about that.”

“I don’t.”

Katherine sighed. “They both died,” she said simply. “David and Suzanne, his first wife, were driving back to Phoenix after being down in Tucson over Fourth of July. David was at the wheel. The two kids were asleep in the backseat. David Junior was eight, and Monica five. On the road between Phoenix and Casa Grande, they got caught in one of those terrible Interstate 10 dust storms.

“David told me that he saw the dust cloud coming and was trying to make it to the next exit, but the storm got to them first. He drove over on the shoulder of the road, hoping to get out of the way of traffic. He got out of the car and was opening the passenger door to lead Suzanne and the kids to safety when a semi slammed into them from behind. The impact threw him clear of the wreckage. Suzanne and the kids were trapped in the car. The coroner said they all died on impact. I hope so, because there was a terrible fire after that-one of those awful chain reaction things. Nine people died in all, most of them burned beyond recognition.

“It was more than an hour later when someone finally found David. He was unconscious and had been thrown so far from the other wreckage that no one saw him at first. They airlifted him to Good Samaritan in Phoenix. That’s where I met him. I was an intensive care nurse. I was on duty in the ICU when they brought him in. I was there when he regained consciousness.”

Remembering, Katherine paused and bit her lip. “I’ll never forget it. ‘Where’s my wife?’ he asked. ‘Where are my kids? Please tell me.’ The doctor had left orders that he was to be told nothing, but that didn’t seem right. The funerals were scheduled for the next day, and he didn’t even know they were dead. So I told him.

“Later, when his doctor found out I was the one who had given David the information, the doctor tried to have the nursing supervisor fire me. It didn’t work, but I quit anyway. When David left the hospital, he needed a full-time nurse, and he hired me to take care of him. Those first three or four years were awful for him. He was devastated. He felt like he had lost everything. He was suicidal much of the time. There were guns in his house. If I hadn’t hidden them, I think he would have taken his own life a dozen times over.”

“When did you get married, then?” Joanna asked.

“Five years later,” Katherine answered. “When David finally realized that his life wasn’t finished. That he wanted to live again. That he could possibly father another child.”

Katherine stopped. “People say that, you know,” she added. “At funerals. To the parents of dead children. They say, ‘You can have another child.’ Except it doesn’t work out. You can never replace one child with another.”

Up to that very moment, Katherine O’Brien had given every indication that she was a pillar of strength. Leaning against the doorjamb of her daughter’s room, she began to cry.

“She’s gone,” she sobbed hopelessly. “I know it. My poor little Bree is gone, and she’s never coming back.”

For a time there was nothing Joanna could do but wait. She knew that words would do nothing to relieve the kind of distress Katherine O’Brien was suffering. “I’m sorry,” the weeping woman mumbled at last, blowing her nose into a tissue. “I’ve been trying not to fall apart in front of David, but opening the door to Bree’s room was more than I could bear.”

“I understand,” Joanna said kindly. “Believe me, I do.”

Ernie reappeared in the doorway. “Would you mind coming in here now, Mrs. O’Brien? I’d like you to look through your daughter’s clothing and toiletries and try to see if anything in particular isn’t here. That way, if it becomes necessary to broadcast a report to other jurisdictions, we’ll be able to include a description of exactly what she might be wearing.”

Joanna gave Ernie a grateful nod. Officially, Bree O’Brien’s possible disappearance was not yet a missing persons case. Still, Ernie’s diplomatic handling of the situation seemed to filler Katherine some comfort and give her courage.

Sighing and pulling herself together, Katherine stepped into her daughter’s room. Joining her, Joanna was surprised by what she saw. The room was immaculately clean; the bed carefully made. Books on the loaded bookshelves stood with their whines aligned in almost military precision. The desktop held a formidable computer setup, but no stray pieces of paper lingered around it. In fact, the place was so unbendingly neat that, had it not been for the posters and pictures pinned to the walls and for the mound of teddy bears piled at the head of the bed, it would have been hand to tell that a teenager lived there at all.

Jenny’s room stayed neat because she liked it that way, but Joanna remembered all too well the chaotic condition of her own room back when she had been Brianna’s age. The place had been a pit. Once a week or so, and always uninvited, Eleanor Lathrop had stepped over the threshold into Joanna’s sanctum sanctorum. Once inside, she never failed to raise hell. Eleanor, needing to exert control, had wanted the place kept spotless, while a rebellious Joanna had craved and reveled in the very disorder that drove her mother wild.

Based on that scale of value, Joanna’s initial reaction was to see Brianna O’Brien’s room as an indicator of a good relationship between mother and child-one of mutual respect. As always, when faced with evidence that some mothers and teen-age daughters actually got along, Joanna allowed herself to indulge in the smallest flicker of envy. After all, her relation-ship with her own mother was still far from perfect.