I couldn’t bear to watch anymore. How come I can’t do that? I have charisma! I decided I hated Freddie. Decided I should have shot the surly sonuvabitch when I’d had the chance.

I quickly settled my tab and left, considerably drunker yet no more cheerful than when I’d arrived. I was in no shape to drive. But I drove anyway. If I was busted for DWI on the way home, maybe Cynthia would defend me.

The morning broke cold and gray and didn’t hold much promise for improvement. The woman on the radio said eighty percent chance of showers. It was a good day to stay in bed, I decided, and drew the blankets close to my chin. What with my pounding head and unsteady stomach, I could use the extra shut-eye, anyway.

Besides, I was tired. So tired, it was difficult to even roll over and find a more comfortable position. Yet deep sleep did not come. Nor had it last night, despite the numerous beers. Nor the night before. Nor the night before that. I kept waking after only a few hours, from dreams that were all too vivid, filled with the shadows of ninety-six murder investigations, with the ghosts of men whose lives I’ve taken in anger.

Whenever a case disturbs me, it seems like all my past troubles resurface and crowd around it. And this case disturbed me. In the beginning my desire to find Alison, to find her alive, tingled throughout my body like lust, making me aware of everything: the way my fingers caressed the keyboard of my personal computer, the way my chest heaved up and down with my breath—Cynthia had been right about that. Only now, twenty-four days after convincing Truman that Alison was alive, my passion was spent. I found I had no enthusiasm for the day, no energy. The search for Alison had stopped being fun, stopped being a game. It had become work, hard work at that, and I had begun to challenge the logic of it. Alison had not broken any laws, unless some overzealous prosecutor wanted to hang an abandonment rap on her—Cynthia had been right about that, too. And if her abrupt disappearance had made life difficult for Raymond Fleck and Irene Brown and Stephen Emerton and the rest, well, golly gee, that just broke my heart.

Still, I was taking money for it, wasn’t I? Four hundred dollars a day. And expenses. What was the meter at now? Ninety-six hundred? Something like that. I found myself wishing I was broke, that I needed the job, needed the money. At least that would have given me an excuse for dragging my sorry ass to the office to resume the chase. It would let me pretend that I wasn’t looking for Alison for personal reasons.

I stayed in bed until my headache shrieked for relief and the nausea in my stomach forced me into the bathroom.

The yellow Post-it note said that two packages were waiting for me at the office next door; the receptionist who worked there had promised the UPS man she’d mind them. She was young and attractive and wanted to have her way with me. I could tell by the way she called me “mister” and interrupted her typing only long enough to point to the packages.

One box contained the subscription list of Dog Universe magazine printed on mailing labels twenty to a page. The other held a floppy programmed with the complete mailing list for X-Country. X-Country had 447,000 readers, which seemed like a lot to me and I wondered if they padded their list for advertising purposes. Dog Universe had only ninety-three thousand. I checked both for Alison’s name, hoping she had been careless, hoping she had forwarded the publications to her new address. No such luck.

I started with Dog Universe, X-ing out every label with a man’s name, every label with an address located outside North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin—the states where she had traveled in the course of her business. It took me fifteen minutes to get through the As and another five before I paused at Michael Bettich, 4001 Capitol Street, #314, Deer Lake, Wisconsin.

It wasn’t the name that stopped me, it was the address. Deer Lake, Wisconsin. The same as Alison’s best friend, Deputy Gretchen Rovick. Then I assured myself, “Michael could be a woman’s name. What was the name of that actress who starred in The Waltons on TV? Michael Learned?”

I fired up my PC, loaded the X-Country disk, reminding myself that fifteen hundred and fifty-seven people live in Deer Lake, and it shouldn’t be surprising if one of them liked dogs. I quickly discovered that Michael Bettich, 4001 Capitol Street, #314, Deer Lake, Wisconsin, also liked to cross-country ski.

If you have a credit card, a mortgage, a car loan; if you’ve borrowed money from any business for any reason, you are listed with one of the major credit bureaus, probably all of them. Most of the information they’ve gathered on you, including your complete credit history, is restricted by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Which means not a helluva lot. The government claims it is cracking down on people who abuse the privacy laws, but there’s not much they can do about it. Still, conscientious fellow that I am, I try not to violate federal regulations unless I really, really need to. And this time I didn’t. The Federal Trade Commission ruled not too long ago that noncredit information such as name, address updates, DOB, social security number, etcetera, didn’t fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and it went online for people like me to access, for a price. And when I accessed Michael Bettich’s header information, I discovered:

Name:

Michael Bettich

SS#:

398-91-0038

DOB:

3/6/70

Sex:

Female

MS:

Single

Address:

4001 Capitol Street, #314 Deer Lake, WI

Employer:

Rosalind Colletti Investments 2035 Broadway Avenue Deer Lake, WI

“You couldn’t resist it, could you, Alison?” I said aloud, rereading the name of Michael Bettich’s current employer for the fifth time. “You just couldn’t let it go.”

I got up and removed Alison’s photograph from the wall, careful not to leave adhesive when I peeled the tape from the corners. I examined it carefully. The eyes had lost their pain long ago. For some time now they had held a different expression for me—she looked like Bill Clinton had when he claimed he did not have sex with that woman.

“Gotcha!” I said, more in relief than in triumph.

Cynthia seemed surprised by the rain. After parking her car she glanced skyward, shook her head, turned up her collar, and trudged to my front door. I held it open it for her, and she came into the house. There was no warm hug, no inviting smile.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, slipping off her coat and folding it over the back of a chair.

“I’m going to Deer Lake tomorrow morning to make sure it’s her.”

“Then what?”

“That’s it. Like I said on the telephone, it puts a period to the investigation.”

“Is that so important?”

“It is to me. I like things to be just so. What motivates me, besides my four hundred dollars a day and expenses, is a sense of order. Things ought to happen in a certain way. Like in baseball. Every batter gets three strikes. Every team gets three outs. The team with the most runs after nine innings gets the W. There are no ties, and you go from first to third at your own risk. When things don’t happen like that, when a player alters the rules to take advantage of another player, I feel compelled to do something about it.”

Cynthia didn’t believe me. She said my answer sounded like I had rehearsed it, and she was right.

“There is more,” I admitted.

Her expression asked, What?

“The other night, you said I wanted revenge because I had felt that somehow Alison had cheated on me. That’s not exactly true.”