“She gave us the tickets,” I told Cynthia.

“Shhhh!” Cynthia hissed.

She shushed me several more times during the performance, punctuating her entreaties for quiet with sharp jabs from her elbow. Yet try as I might, I could not stop fidgeting. I couldn’t stop shuffling through the notes in my head—apparently making quite a racket of it—searching for the one clue that would determine who actually had killed Alison Donnerbauer Emerton.

I had liked Irene Brown. But that was yesterday. Today, Dr. Bob, the jilted lover, looked good, except there was nothing to tie him to the scene. And both Raymond Fleck and Stephen Emerton still rated high in my estimation.

“Nuts,” I muttered under my breath.

“Shhhhh!” Cynthia hissed at me.

I tried hard not to believe Dr. Bob’s theory. I didn’t want to believe it. Alison wasn’t the kind to run away from her problems. No way. She would have stared them in the eye and taken them on. Yes, that’s what my Alison would have done. My Alison. But was my Alison the same Alison as the woman in the photograph? I had seen things in her face, emotions that touched me. Yet were they real? Was that the face of a woman who committed adultery? Twice? Apparently it was.

I shook my head, tried to clear it. Instead, my mind’s eye superimposed Alison’s photograph over the stage; I was looking at it and through it even as I watched Marie Audette going about her business. And I knew. Of course the emotions weren’t real; the photograph had been taken to promote a play, to reflect a character Alison was playing. What was the line Jon Lovitz used to say on Saturday Night Live? Oh, yeah.

“It’s acting!”

“Sheeesh,” a voice behind me answered.

Stop it, Taylor, my inner voice told me. Get a grip. Start thinking like a detective. Be objective, dammit. “Be objective,” I muttered.

Cynthia’s elbow almost cracked my rib. I didn’t blame her for being miffed. We were at a critical juncture in the play, the scene where Shylock the Jew is demanding his pound of flesh, and Portia, disguised as a hot-shot arbitrator from Padua, says he can have it, just so long as he does not “shed one drop of Christian blood.” Shylock is a louse, of course. Yet I always figured he got the shaft. I mean, no one put a gun to Antonio’s head, made him take the loan, and if he couldn’t pay the vig, well … Still, I enjoyed watching Marie, standing center stage like a gunfighter waiting for the bad guy to slap leather, beseeching Shylock “to cut off the flesh” if he dared. But my concentration wouldn’t hold, and soon I was reflecting on my list of suspects again.

Irene Brown. Raymond Fleck. Stephen Emerton. Dr. Bob. Hell, all things considered, even Mrs. Donnerbauer could be considered a suspect.

I squirmed in my seat some more, asking myself, Who put the note on my windshield telling me to quit the investigation? Not Irene. Not Raymond. Both were guests of the Dakota County Sheriff’s Department at the time.

Stephen Emerton? Had to be. Who else was there?

I sighed noisily, drawing more frosty stares.

Motive and opportunity. Motive and opportunity. I kept repeating the words in my head like a mantra.

Meanwhile, Portia, still disguised as a male lawyer, was now dancing around her befuddled husband, messing with his mind, diddling him out of the ring she had given him on the day they were married, the ring he vowed never to be without.

“I see, sir, you are liberal in offers: You taught me first to beg, and now, methinks, you teach me how a beggar should be answer’d.”

Marie Audette was a good actress. Wait a minute! my inner voice shouted. So was Alison! My mind spun back to the first act of the play. What was it that Portia told Jessica when she took up her disguise?

“I’ll hold thee any wager.… I’ll prove the prettier fellow … and wear my dagger with the braver grace; and speak, between the change of man and boy, with a reed voice and turn two mincing steps into a manly stride; and speak of frays, like a fine bragging youth: and tell quaint lies, how honourable ladies sought my love, which I denying, they fell sick and died.… And twenty of these puny lies I’ll tell, that men shall swear I have discontinued school above a twelvemonth. I have within my mind a thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks which I will practice.”

Motive and opportunity.

“Alison really is a genius,” I muttered loud enough to earn another punch in the ribs.

Remember when you first came to my office?” I asked Truman the next morning. “Remember I said Alison might have gone out for a pack of cigarettes and kept on going? That it’s been done before? Well, maybe she did.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Truman answered, pacing my office floor like a caged cat.

“Hey, man, this is America,” I reminded him. “It’s always been easy for Americans to go somewhere else and start over. That’s what our ancestors did. That’s why America exists today. Remember the executive director of the Minneapolis City Council? She packed her bags, arranged for her attorney to pay off her debts, and—poof!—she was gone. Nobody knew where she went. Everybody thought she had run away with a lover or had been abducted or ripped off the city. Turned out she simply went to San Francisco to become a different person.”

Truman was unimpressed. He pointed out that the police had had the same theory but rejected it because none of Alison’s belongings were missing. She hadn’t packed, as the executive director had; she hadn’t closed her banking accounts and settled her affairs; she hadn’t contacted an attorney—hadn’t contacted him.

“All that means is that what she left behind didn’t concern her,” I told him.

“This is insane. You’re saying Alison staged her own disappearance, the tape recording, the blood, everything?”

“Yes.”

“Bullshit. There’s no evidence of that; you haven’t got any evidence. All you have is a self-serving theory from some bum-fuck doctor who might have been the one who killed her in the first place. I can’t believe you’re buying this shit.”

“Dr. Bob doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Oh, no? Then where the fuck did this amazing theory come from?”

“Two things. One, the note on my windshield. Whoever put it there didn’t want us looking into Alison’s disappearance. I think it was Alison. That was a mistake because instead of quitting, it made us look harder.”

Truman snorted at that.

“Yeah?” he asked. “What’s number two?”

“The Merchant of Venice.”

Truman stopped his pacing and stared long enough to measure me for a white jacket that fastens in the back.

“You’re shitting me,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” I assured him.

“I can’t believe I’m paying for this,” he groused.

“Think about it,” I told Truman. “Raymond Fleck, Irene Brown, Stephen Emerton, Dr. Holyfield, her parents: They all wronged Alison one way or another. Now each of their lives has been turned upside down; each one is paying a price. Why? Because no one knows for sure exactly what happened to her. She got ’em. She got ’em all at the same time; a brilliant girl is our Alison.”

“You’re saying she staged her own murder just to get even?”

“‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’”

“That’s ridiculous,” Truman replied to the line I had memorized the evening before.

“Oh, and you would never do anything like that. You would never go out of your way to stick it to someone.”

Truman didn’t want to hear any more. “Find her, goddammit!” he demanded, throwing his hands in the air. “You think she’s fucking alive, find her.”

I made an effort to explain just how long, tedious, and expensive a missing-person’s search could become, especially if the missing person was working hard at not being found. I don’t know if I was trying to talk him out of it or not.