“You’d do that?”

Shane shrugs his big shoulders. “Whatever a given situation requires. As a rule I try to avoid torture.”

I’m pretty sure he’s kidding about torture. He’s not kidding about scrambled eggs. Shane heads for this all-night diner in Wantagh, gets us there with a minimum of fuss. Says you’re never more than ten miles from a diner in Long Island and he knows them all. The place in Wantagh is the real thing, the shiny metal kind, with a gum-chewing waitress in a starched uniform, a tattooed short-order cook in a white undershirt, overhead lights bright enough to dissolve your eyelids, the whole bit.

When we’re seated with thick white china mugs of steaming coffee, Shane explains, “I can’t start making calls until seven a.m. Call in the middle of the night, you need a situation.”

“My daughter missing, that’s not a situation?”

“Not without further information, no. Nothing we can give them tonight requires an immediate response. If for instance we knew she was being held against her will in a certain location, that’s a call can be made at any time.”

“But we tell the FBI, right? Once they’re up and showered, had their coffee, whatever.”

He ignores my sarcasm, sips his coffee. “Yes,” he says. “We’ll tell them what we know, what we suspect.”

“And they’ll take over? Get Manning to talk?”

He shakes his head, smiling faintly. “That’s not how it works. Agents can only be assigned to a specific case upon request of the local authorities. Mr. Manning would have to call in the police, the police would in turn notify the FBI, and then the wheels would start to turn.”

“So we tell your old friends what we know and they do nothing?”

There are about six people in the diner, including the waitress, and they’re all staring at me. Apparently I raised my voice.

“Order something,” Shane suggests quietly. “You need fuel, Mrs. Garner. Keep running on empty and you’ll crash.”

“Can’t handle eggs. Not hungry. Answer my question, please.”

“I’ll have the Wake-up Special with whole wheat,” he says to the waitress, who has ambled over to take the order and also, from her eagle eyes, to check me out. Shane points his thumb at me and says, “She’ll have the same thing, hold the eggs.”

The gum-snapper likes his style. “Coming right up.” She smiles at him, flutters her false eyelashes and marches away on sturdy legs.

When she’s gone, Shane quietly continues where he left off. “I’m sure my, um, old friends in the agency will be as helpful as the law allows.”

“Helpful? Great. And we just wait until I get a ransom note?”

Shane leans across the table, more or less forces the cup of coffee into my hands. “Mrs. Garner? There may never be a ransom note. Ransom notes are actually quite rare. At this point, we don’t know what happened, or why your daughter hasn’t contacted you again. All of our efforts must be directed toward locating her. We concentrate on that. Finding her. The law can sort out the rest.”

The only reason I’m not crying is because I’m too exhausted for tears.

“What do we do?” I ask, feeling faint.

The tray arrives, loaded.

“Eat,” he says.

Home fries, sausage, cinnamon toast, applesauce, I’m gorging like a lumberjack. Instinct taking over, making me eat. And as Shane promised, the calories start to have a calming effect. When I’ve become more or less human, he explains that his next move—and our best shot—involves Kelly’s cell phone.

“She’s a minor, so the account will be in your name, correct?”

I nod.

“As the account holder, you have a right to know where and when the phone has been used. If you know the approximate time when you received her last call, we can find out where she was when the call originated, roughly.”

“Roughly?”

“What cell tower was accessed to route the call. Narrows it down to about twenty square miles or so. Again, not like on TV. But it could be very helpful.”

“But we have to wait until morning?”

He nods. “Afraid so. And even then it usually requires several hours to get through channels. We’ll be lucky to have the location by noon.”

“Noon?” Seems like a century away, a future hard to fathom.

“Here’s what I suggest,” he says, as if ticking off a list. “We get you home. You shower, put your head on a pillow, get some rest. Meanwhile I’ll be riding my laptop, see what I can find out about Edwin Manning. I’ll bring the Nassau County Police Department up to speed. At the appropriate hour I’ll contact my friend in the FBI, report what we suspect, and initiate the cell phone search.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Take a pill,” he suggests. “Later in the day I need you fully cognizant, Mrs. Garner. Firing on all cylinders.”

“What about you?”

He squints, genuinely puzzled by the question. “What about me?”

“Don’t you need to sleep, too?”

“No,” he says, as if taken aback. “Oddly enough, I don’t. Not when a case is active.”

I stare at the guy, forcing him to look at me with his pale blue eyes. And notice, for the first time, evidence of something he’s hiding. Something he keeps dark and deep and does not want to share.

“It’s a form of stress-induced insomnia,” he explains, studying the saltshaker. “I’ve been the subject of at least two papers on sleep disorder.”

“You’re serious,” I say, astonished.

He shrugs his big shoulders, trying to make light of it. “I’ve learned to live with it. To use it to my advantage.”

By way of ending the conversation, obviously very uncomfortable for him, he waves the waitress over. She’s been hovering at a polite range, waiting for him to beckon.

“Yes?” she asks brightly, basking in his presence. “Anything else? More coffee?”

“Ice cream,” he says. “Vanilla, one scoop.”

“Apple pie under that? It’s good here.”

“I’ll try it next time,” he promises. “Dessert for you, miss?”

I shake my head, staring at him. “At this hour? Ice cream?” “We all scream for ice cream,” Shane says without a trace of irony.

22. Her Own Personal Black Hole

A liter water bottle, a bucket, a lamp. These items have become the center of her universe. The bottle for hoarding and drinking. The bucket for bathroom business. And most precious, a small, battery-operated lamp that she also hoards, not wanting to run it down. That’s the only power she has now, the ability to click the little switch, push the darkness back for a few moments. Not that there’s much to see. Four walls, floor, ceiling, all made of thick sheet metal. She’s being held in some sort of walk-in cooler, she surmises, although the cooler part is clearly not functioning. The air is hot as hell, syrupy thick, getting staler with every breath.

Using the lamp, Kelly has located an air vent. Unlike in the movies, this particular vent can’t be utilized as an escape hatch. It measures no more than four inches by twelve inches—too small for a human, although there are signs of a rodent infestation. She’s hoping squirrel or chipmunk, but it’s not like mice or even rats would really freak her out. Kelly’s personal gross factor is more attuned to slimy creatures like worms or snakes. Her friends think Snakes on a Plane is a laugh riot, especially the scrotum-chomping vipers, but Kelly has to avert her eyes whenever they crank up the DVD.

Funny how fear works. Until what, yesterday—has it been that long?—she’d thought of herself as basically fearless. Death defying. She’d faced down the black monster when she was a little girl, so aside from shrieky-fun things like wiggly worms or stupid movies, there was nothing in real life that truly frightened her.

Until now. The hot steel box changed everything. Now she’s really and truly terrified. Having to deal with the adrenaline shakes, an unfamiliar weakness that seems to spread from her knees into her guts, making it hard to hold her pee. Hard to hold the lamp without her hands shaking. Hard to resist screaming. Hard to think coherently.