“The DOE guy told me it wasn’t a break-in,” Streeter said. “It was a staged robbery.”

“Staged?”

“Yeah. By the CIA.”

The DOE investigator told Streeter that workers at Santa Susana a year earlier had begun secretly constructing America’s first operating nuclear power plant, which they euphemistically referred to as a “sodium reactor” to deflect any attention from the press. Five years later, some kind of catastrophic meltdown occurred, Streeter said, and all of Los Angeles came close to being vaporized. Washington was largely successful in covering it all up, and the lab was eventually shut down.

The year the staged robbery occurred, Streeter said, coincided with Pakistan leasing a base to the United States so that American military forces could keep closer tabs on Soviet ballistic missile testing. What Islamabad wanted in return was a small amount of fissile material to build a working atomic bomb that Pakistan could then wave in the face of India, its sworn enemy, who was building its own nuclear weapons at the time.

“Washington couldn’t just hand over the stuff without the Indian government going nuts,” Streeter said, “so they got the bright idea of planning a heist and making it look like the Russians were responsible. They found some Russian ex-pat, a former military pilot, to do the job. Everybody at the Santa Susana lab was briefed ahead of time. Then, one of the guards got sick. They brought in a temp, some moron, and nobody bothered to tell him what was up. There was a gunfight. He got shot. They think the guy who was working for the CIA got shot, too. Afterward, everybody at the lab had to sign sworn statements saying they’d go to prison if they ever talked publicly about what happened.”

The bloodshed didn’t end at the lab, according to the DOE investigator.

“That newspaper story you came across, the one about the security guard getting shot at the airport in Santa Paula? They think the guy drove to the nearest airport to Santa Susana, which was Santa Paula, shot that guard to cover his tracks and protect the agency, then flew the uranium out,” Streeter said. “The guard, before he died, said it was a Twin Beech. The DOE confirmed that.”

Whoever killed Chad Lovejoy and made off with uranium, Streeter speculated, had probably been exposed to a lethal dose of radioactivity. He was worried I might’ve suffered a similar fate.

“Uranium isotopes are unstable,” I said, “which makes the uranium itself barely radioactive. You don’t even really need special packaging to protect yourself.”

Streeter didn’t ask me how I knew such things, and I didn’t elaborate. He said his supervisors had formed a task force, assigning three more detectives to investigate the murder of Chad Lovejoy and Savannah’s disappearance, which they now considered linked. He said he wanted to make arrangements to have my phone examined forensically in hopes of backtracking Dundee’s calls. I suggested he’d probably be wasting his time. If Savannah’s kidnapper had any smarts, he would’ve paid cash for a disposable cell phone and bought calling minutes from one of hundreds of offshore service providers, rendering his communications with me or anyone all but untraceable.

“Never thought of that,” Streeter said.

I asked him if his newly formed task force had developed any viable leads that might, in the near term, lead them to Savannah.

He paused. Then, reluctantly, he said, “Unfortunately, not at this time.”

I had to hang up. I had to sit down.

Blue-uniformed Santa Maria police were flitting in and out of the lobby, talking urgently on their hand-held radios, questioning hotel employees and guests who’d been allowed back inside after the suitcase had been driven away for closer inspection and the scene declared safe. I watched them go about their work from the comfort of an armchair, like some bit player in a cop movie. Large scale models of World War II aircraft hung from the ceiling over the dining area adjacent to the lobby. I focused on them and tried hard not to think of the choice I’d made.

I honestly didn’t know what else to do, Savannah. Please forgive me.

“Mr. Logan?”

Standing over me was a burly Latino police officer in his fifties. He wore silver captain’s bars on his collar and a salt-and-pepper crumb catcher on his upper lip. With him was a compact, clean-shaven man of about thirty-five with dark, movie-star features and perfect hair. But for the pistol bulge under the right armpit of his well-tailored gray business suit, he could’ve passed for a bank executive.

“This is FBI Special Agent Pellegrini from the Santa Maria field office,” the captain said. “We’ve asked the justice department to come aboard for obvious reasons.”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” Pellegrini said.

“Whatever you need.”

“I’ll leave you two to it,” the captain said, shaking the fed’s hand and walking off.

Pellegrini sat down in the chair beside mine, removing a small digital voice recorder from his breast pocket and clicking it on.

“You realize,” he said, resting the recorder on the arm of my chair, “that you violated any number of federal statutes, flying the contents of that suitcase in here, without proper notice or authorization.”

“So nice to meet you, too, Agent. So glad we could establish a warm and trusting rapport before you tried to bend me over.”

“I just want to let you know where I’m coming from, that’s all.”

I wasn’t in the mood to be bullied. Especially for no apparent reason.

“Look,” I said, “maybe the news hasn’t filtered down to the hinterlands, where Quantico typically parks its underachievers: J. Edgar Hoover’s dead. They buried him in a pleated skirt. So why don’t you knock off the old school, cooperation-through-intimidation G-man routine. Because right now, truthfully, I could give a rip about your ‘proper notice and authorization.’ ”

“I understand she’s your former wife,” Pellegrini said, “the party who’s missing?”

“We’re divorced. We were getting remarried.”

“I’m told she comes from money.”

“Meaning what? That I had some kind of financial motive to do her harm?”

Pellegrini looked at me evenly and said nothing, a standard interrogation tactic: wait for the interviewee to compulsively fill the silence with some inadvertent revelation.

“If I were going to hurt her,” I said, “wouldn’t logic dictate that I wait until the ink dried on our marriage certificate? California’s a community property state. That way, I could legally claim half her assets, no?”

“I don’t know,” Pellegrini said, “you tell me.”

“I just did.”

“How did you come to acquire the uranium, Mr. Logan?”

I’d had enough of the guy and his pointless questions. I stood, ‘accidentally’ brushing his tape recorder on the floor. The back cover fell off and two batteries flew out like victims ejected from a car crash.

“I’m not the bad guy here, Agent Pellegrini. Either read me my rights and hook me up, or this conversation’s over.”

He stooped to gather the pieces of his recorder and glared at me.

“I’m just doing my job, Mr. Logan.”

“If you were doing your job, Agent Pellegrini, you’d go find her.”

I refueled and flew back to South Lake Tahoe that afternoon to assist Streeter in the search for Savannah. Gordon Priest, the manager at Summit Aviation Services, was gone for the day. Marlene, Priest’s receptionist, welcomed my return with a heartfelt hug and fresh oatmeal cookies. They were all out of four-wheel-drive vehicles, she said, but I probably wouldn’t be needing one; there was no snow in the extended forecast. She rented me a white Ford Focus at 60 percent off the normal daily rate because, she said, she felt bad for me. The car had an infant seat in the back. I put it in the trunk.

Savannah’s disappearance made the local paper that morning, along with a hangdog photo of me holding up my photo of her. Every network affiliate in nearby Reno picked up the story. No mention was made of the stolen uranium. The FBI decided that the information was a matter of national security and squelched any public disclosure about it. When reporters in Santa Maria asked what the hubbub had been about at the airport, they were told that a multiagency training exercise had taken place there. Hotel employees and other civilian witnesses were made to sign nondisclosure agreements and threatened with arrest if they talked.