“He didn’t blow me a kiss.”

“It’s the equivalent. That cute little move with the finger gun? I see it in pick-up bars all the time.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Not that I’m in pick-up bars all the time,” she adds hastily. “You know what I mean.”

My attorney is an expert driver. Keeps both hands on the wheel, ten and two o’clock, just like they taught us in drivers’ ed back in the day. Must be different now that so few people use or even recognize analog clocks. I recall Fred Corso talking to the team about how ball players run the bases counterclockwise because most batters hit right-handed. The kids looked at him like he had two heads—counterclockwise? What was the old dude talking about?

Poor Fred. His death weighs on me. For whatever reason my son was taken, one thing seems certain: if Fred Corso didn’t know us he’d be alive right now.

“They must be checking out this Teresa Alonzo person, right?” I ask Savalo. “She claims to be his birth mother, so she’d have as much reason to kidnap Tommy as me.”

Ms. Savalo keeps her eyes focused on the road. “Who’s ‘they’? The locals, the state police, the FBI?”

“Any of them,” I say, feeling indignant. “All of them.”

“Maybe the FBI. Somebody might actually push a button there, and pull up a file on Rico Vargas and his clients. But unless they’re actively involved, meaning that they believe your son’s abduction was by a third party, it’s doubtful.”

“That seems crazy.”

“No argument from me,” Savalo responds cheerfully. “The ways of the bureau remain mysterious to us mere mortals. I assumed they’d be all over it, but they’re not. As for the local cops, they don’t have the resources for a wide-ranging investigation. So they concentrate on the target of opportunity—that’s you. As for the state cops, they work with the prosecutor’s office and they’ve got some very experienced investigators. So if Jared Nichols decides to check out this mysterious birth mother, he has the personnel to do it.”

“Has he? Checked it out?”

“No idea. Sorry. He’s a friend, but he’s also a prosecutor and I’m a defense attorney. So there’s a lot he can’t tell me without putting himself in legal jeopardy. And Jared never puts himself in legal jeopardy. He wants to run for Senate.”

“Great. Just my luck.”

Savalo shoots me a look. “Not entirely a bad thing, Jared’s political ambitions. It means he’s very careful about who he charges. Suburban moms aren’t high on his list for targets of opportunity. He prefers mobsters, corrupt union bosses, kiddy-porn rings—basically what your average suburban mom finds offensive.”

The casual reference to kiddy porn makes me squirm in my seat. It’s one possibility that I haven’t allowed myself to consider: that my handsome boy has been taken by sexual predators. Even though I know it’s the most common motivation for abduction by strangers. Sexual predators don’t ask for ransom. Or do they?

I can’t summon up the courage to raise the subject with Ms. Savalo. Not now. If the subject must be discussed, I’d rather do so with Randall Shane. He’s the expert. And he made a point of telling me that it was a child molester abduction that got him into the business of looking for lost children. As if to warn me that the possibility was out there.

It’s well past the commuter rush, and the station itself isn’t busy at the moment. Of the half-dozen passengers who disembark the northbound train, only one is tall enough to be Shane.

As he comes loping down the stairs from the platform, I start to weep convulsively. Great heaving sobs.

“What’s wrong?” asks Savalo with real concern.

“I d-don’t know.” And it’s true, I don’t. Certainly I didn’t expect to start sobbing. It just suddenly came over me and couldn’t be resisted, like the impulse to sneeze. And once I’ve started, it’s hard to stop.

It’s difficult to hug a passenger when you’re the driver of a bucket-seated Beemer, but Ms. Savalo finds a way to lean across the console and embrace me, patting my back. “Tension,” she says, her breath warm on my neck. “You’re under incredible tension, Kate. Go on and cry, maybe it will help.”

My nose is running and neither of us can find a tissue, despite rummaging through our purses. I’m a blubbering fool, but it’s like a case of the hiccups, I can’t seem to stop. Try holding my breath, but I’m still sobbing when Shane gently opens the rear door and slips into the seat behind me.

“What have we here?” he asks softly. “Mrs. Bickford? What’s wrong?”

Silly questions. Everything is wrong, and that makes me bawl even harder. Crying so convulsively I can’t draw a breath. Why did seeing Shane trigger uncontrollable tears? Was it because the last time I saw him he was keeping company with a dead man? Because my whole world, Planet Kate, had tipped on its axis and started spinning out of control?

Randall Shane produces a pocket-size packet of Kleenex, begins to unfurl the tissue. “It’s about time,” he says. “I was beginning to think you were built out of titanium. Let it go, Mrs. Bickford. Cry till you run out of tears.”

I nod, take a handful of tissues, and gradually, very gradually, manage to slow my heaving chest. By the time my breathing returns to something like normal, and my eyes no longer blur, Shane has begun to recount what happened since I left him in Queens.

“There was some minor unpleasantness,” he admits, leaning back in the seat. The lawyer’s Beemer is a sizable sedan, but Shane’s long legs take up all the available room. “Homicide in the borough, the default assumption is drug related. Plus, they know Vargas specialized in defending dealers. So the assumption is, the hit came from a disgruntled client. And I must be the hit man.”

“That’s your idea of ‘minor unpleasantness’?” asks Savalo with obvious affection, if not admiration.

“The officers persuaded themselves otherwise, eventually. Couldn’t establish any previous link between me and the deceased. Plus, I don’t have a sheet and these boys in Queens, they rarely get a chance to converse with a suspect who doesn’t have a criminal record.”

“You were with the FBI for years. Did that impress them?” Savalo asks. Her impish expression means she knows the answer.

“Oh, yeah,” says Shane. “They were awed. Probably why they failed to beat me with rubber hoses.”

“I assume you told them the truth?”

Shane shrugs. “I didn’t lie.”

“So they know you’re working the Bickford case?”

That gives me a little shock. For some reason I hadn’t thought of myself as a case, or if I was a case, that it would be attached to my name.

“They know. And they know Vargas had plenty of folks who’d like to see him dead. Quite a few of them in law enforcement. I guess he defended some real scumbags.”

Savalo studies him, as if trying to peel back a layer and see what’s underneath, what he’s really thinking. Shane, meanwhile, strokes his beard and doesn’t bother to hide the twinkle of triumph in his eyes.

Suddenly I get it, that expression of his: the man has good news. Something happened. I’m almost afraid to ask him what, exactly, just in case I’m reading him wrong. Another disappointment might set me off, and I’ve used up all the tissues.

“They let you walk,” Savalo says, homing in on him. “Why? Come on, Randall. What did you get?”

Shane folds his hands on his knees, which puts them about chin high. “They pulled the security tapes from the garage. My first thought, they’ll find images of me and Mrs. Bickford, tie her to the Vargas killing. Wrong. Because the tapes are blurred.”

“And that’s good?” Savalo wants to know.

“Yes and no. Maybe.”

“Randall! Stop being coy.”

That amuses him. “Me? Coy?”

“Come on, we’re dying here. What have you got?”

Shane grins, reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a videotape. “A blur called Bruce,” he says. “Once you’ve seen the tape you’ll know why it’s so important.”