“Have You Seen This Woman?” notices and pictures of Savannah went up in store windows and on telephone poles throughout the Lake Tahoe area. Platoons of volunteers scoured the surrounding forests, while I knocked on doors and law enforcement personnel interviewed dozens of prospective witnesses. But after putting in twenty-hour days for more than a week, and sleeping four restless hours a night at the Econo Lodge, I realized that faint progress, if that, had been made. Streeter conceded that he and his fellow detectives could find no trace of Savannah and were no closer to identifying the killer who’d called himself Crocodile Dundee than they’d been at the outset of their investigation.

In the interim, I’d become a celebrity of sorts. Residents recognized me on the street. They weren’t shy about approaching, offering me encouragement.

“Keep the faith.”

“Don’t stop believing.”

“We’re all praying for you.”

I tried to respond appreciatively, but I felt undeserving of their moral support. Savannah had vanished because of me. I was entitled to no one’s sympathy.

“You doing OK, doll?”

Reeking of tobacco, Ruby, the ancient waitress at Steve’s Coffee Shop, patted my shoulder as she refilled my coffee mug.

“Hanging in there,” I said.

“If you need anything else, you lemme know.”

“Thanks, Ruby.”

I stared down at the half-eaten plate of bacon and eggs sitting on the pine table in front of me. My eyes felt heavy from exhaustion. My shoulders ached down deep. I checked my watch for lack of anything better to do: 0649. Another futile day loomed ahead.

“I know you. You’re that guy.”

I looked up slowly.

Standing beside my table, headed for the register, was a tall man with his breakfast check and a ten dollar bill in his hand. He was wearing a battered straw cowboy hat.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t.”

“You were looking for your lady. I was just finishing up a sewer cleanout over on Skyview. It was snowing to beat the band.”

“The Roto-Rooter guy.”

He extended his hand and said, “Dwayne.”

“Logan.”

We shook.

“Tell ya what,” he said, “it’s just a cryin’ shame they haven’t found her yet. I know everybody around here is pulling for you, putting out the positive brainwaves. Everybody.”

I thanked him for his concern and he stood there awkwardly with his hat in his hands, shifting his weight from one boot to another, the way people do when they feel the urge to say more but aren’t sure what to say, or how to say it.

“You mind me sitting down for a second?”

I gestured to the other side of the table. He took off his hat and lowered himself into the chair.

“Listen,” he said, leaning forward, closer, “I don’t mean to speak bad of nobody or anything, but if I was the cops, I’d be looking at all these registered sex offenders they got living around here. There’s hundreds of ’em. They’re everywhere. You can get their address on line.”

“Good to know.”

“It’s a real problem, and most people, they don’t even know about it. I got me one living two doors down. They let him out last year. Six little girls he molested and he gets what, three years? If it was me, I would’ve hung his ass.”

I nodded, in no mood to talk.

“Well, anyway,” Dwayne said, “good luck. I hope they find her and the scumbag who took her gets what’s coming to him.”

“Thanks.”

He walked to the cash register where Ruby was happy to take his money.

When I was in the air force, not long out of the academy, a squadron commander who’d earned a Silver Star flying A-1 Skyraiders in Vietnam told me that he could always find enemy ground forces by listening for them from the air. How, I asked him, can you hear the enemy from a Plexiglass-enclosed cockpit, with a big radial engine roaring in front of you and other pilots or air traffic controllers chattering loudly inside your helmet?

“You open your ears,” he said, “close your eyes, and just… listen.”

Years later, on tank-busting missions over Iraq, I did the same thing. I can’t explain why, but the tactic often worked.

Talk to me, Savannah. Where are you? Help me find you.

I closed my eyes and opened my ears, listening for her, hoping to feel her, but all I heard was the metallic scraping of forks and knives on breakfast plates, and the low murmur of conversations, punctuated by occasional laughter among my fellow diners.

My appetite was gone. I gulped a last sip of black coffee, deposited enough cash on the table to cover my meal and cigarette money for Ruby, and left.

Inn keepers Johnny and Gwen Kavitch, accompanied by their panty-sniffing son, Preston, were walking into the restaurant as I exited. We crossed paths without exchanging words. The elder Kavitches kept their eyes to the ground, pretending not to recognize me. But as Johnny held the door for his wife, Preston turned toward me and leered.

True Buddhists believe in the cultivation of forgiveness and kindness through love. Cultivate enough goodwill, they assert, and you can insulate yourself from the coldest of insults. I’d like to believe that someday I’ll get there. On that frigid morning, I restrained myself from wiping the grin off Preston Kavitch’s face and turning him into a human pretzel. Call it progress.

There was little left for me to do in South Lake Tahoe but drive around, dowsing as if for water, hoping divine intervention might somehow lead me to Savannah. It all felt so futile.

I headed to the airport to retrieve Savannah’s luggage and the duffel that I’d left behind with Marlene, and to head home.

“You’re not listening to me,” she kept saying into the phone, bent forward in her chair, rubbing her forehead. She glanced up as I walked in and raised one finger as if to say she’d only be a minute. “We can sell the house. It’s not about the bills, honey, it’s about making our marriage work. Look, I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you back.”

I waited until she signed off.

“Problems on the home front?”

“Money issues.” Marlene forced a smile. “What else is new, right?”

She fetched our bags from a closet and offered me some cookies for my flight back to Rancho Bonita, which I declined. Sweets were the last thing on my mind.

Piloting a small airplane is not unlike sex. If done well, both can be ecstatic, mind-blowing experiences. Done poorly, embarrassing disaster bodes. Do either long enough, and you learn to perform without consciously thinking about performing, satisfying the needs of the moment while your mind focuses elsewhere.

As I flew the Ruptured Duck home that morning, my thoughts remained focused on the man who’d taken Savannah from me. Who was he? Why did he do what he had?

I knew that he had to have been acquainted with Chad Lovejoy, and that he lived in proximity to Lake Tahoe. After all, the two of them on relatively short notice had hiked up to the crash site together. They’d found uranium, realized its potential value, and Lovejoy had lost his life for it. Streeter surmised that Lovejoy had told Dundee all about me, how I was a pilot, how I’d spotted the downed airplane, and how Savannah and I were staying at a local B&B, where Dundee subsequently abducted her to strong-arm me into airlifting his ill-gained treasure out of Lake Tahoe.

The problem was that Lovejoy had done time in state prison. He’d interacted with innumerable other inmates, many of whom, like him, had since been released from custody. Dozens lived in and around Lake Tahoe. Any one of them, Streeter believed, could have been Dundee.

“It’s going to take time,” Streeter admitted before I took off for Rancho Bonita. “I’d advise you not to get your hopes up.”

“What hopes?”

He didn’t have to tell me that the more time passed, the more likely it was that Savannah was dead.