I started my engine and followed the moon to Stella Blues, a cheerful café in Kihei. It has high, peaked ceilings and a wraparound bar, now buzzing with a weekend crowd of locals and cruise ship tourists enjoying their first night in port. I ordered a Jack Daniel's and mahimahi from the bar, took my drink outside to a table for two on the patio.

As the votive candle guttered in its glass, I called Amanda.

Amanda Diaz and I had been together for almost two years. She's five years younger than me, a pastry chef and a self-described biker chick, which means she takes her antique Harley for a run on the Pacific Coast Highway some weekends to blow off the steam she can't vent in the kitchen. Mandy is not only smart and gorgeous, but when I look at her, all those rock-and-roll songs about booming hearts and loving her till the day I die make total sense.

Right then I was aching to hear my sweetie's voice, and she didn't disappoint, answering the phone on the third ring. After some verbal high fives, and at my request, she told me about her day at Intermezzo.

“It was Groundhog Day, Benjy. Rémy fired Rocco, again,” Amanda said, going into a French accent now. 'What I have to say to you to make you think like chef? This confit. It looks like pigeon poop.' He put about twelve ooohs in poop.”

She laughed, said, “Hired him back ten minutes later. As usual. And then I scorched the crcme brulée. 'Merde, Ahmandah, mon Dieu. You are making me craaaaa-zy.' ” She laughed again. “And you, Benjy? Are you getting your story?”

“I met with the missing girl's folks. They're talking to me.”

“Oh, boy. How grim was that?”

I caught Mandy up on the interview with Barbara, told her how much I liked the McDanielses and that they had two other kids, both boys adopted from Russian orphanages.

“Their oldest son was almost catatonic from neglect when the police in Saint Petersburg found him. The younger boy has fetal alcohol syndrome. Kim decided to become a pediatrician because of her brothers.”

“Ben, honey?”

“ Uh-huh. Am I breaking up?”

“No, I can hear you. Can you hear me?”

“Totally.”

“Then listen. Be careful, will you?”

I felt a slight burr of irritation. Amanda was uncommonly intuitive, but I was in no danger.

“Careful of what?”

“Remember when you left your briefcase with all of your notes on the Donato story in a diner?”

“You're going to bring up the bus again, aren't you?”

“Since you mention it.”

“I was under your spell, goofball. I was looking at you when I stepped off the curb. If you were here now, it could happen again -”

“What I'm saying is, you sound the same way now as you did then.”

“I do, huh?”

“Yeah, you kinda do. So watch out, okay? Pay attention. Look both ways.”

Ten feet away, a couple clinked glasses, held hands across a small table. Honeymooners, I thought.

“I miss you,” I said.

“I miss you, too. I'm keeping the bed warm for you, so come home soon.”

I sent a wireless kiss to my girl in L.A. and said good night.

At seven fifteen Monday morning, Levon watched the driver pull the black sedan up to the entrance of the Wailea Princess. Levon got into the front passenger seat as Hawkins and Barb got into the back, and when all the doors had slammed shut, Levon told Marco to please take them to the police station in Kihei.

During the ride, Levon half listened as Hawkins talked, telling him how to handle the police, saying to be helpful, to make the cops your friends and not to be belligerent because that would work against them.

Levon had nodded, grunted “uh-huh” a few times, but he was inside his head, wouldn't have been able to describe the route between the hotel and the police station, his mind fully focused on the upcoming meeting with Lieutenant James Jackson.

Levon came back to the present as Marco was parking at the mini-strip mall, and he jumped out before the car had fully stopped. He walked straight up to the shoebox-sized substation, a storefront wedged between a tattoo parlor and a pizzeria.

The glass door was locked, and so Levon jabbed the intercom button and spoke his name, saying to the female voice that he had an appointment at eight with Lieutenant Jackson. There was a buzz and the door opened and they were in.

The station looked to Levon like a small-town DMV. The walls were bureaucrat green; the floor, a buffed linoleum; the long hallway-width room lined with facing rows of plastic chairs.

At the end of the narrow room was a reception window, its metal shutter rolled down, and beside it was a closed door. Levon sat down next to Barbara, and Hawkins sat across from them with his notebook sticking out of his breast pocket, and they waited.

At a few minutes past eight, the shuttered window opened and people trickled in to pay parking tickets, register their cars, God knows what else. Guys with Rasta hair; girls with complicated tattoos; young moms with small, bawling kids.

Levon felt a stabbing pain behind his eyes, and he thought about Kim, wanting to know where she could be right now and if she was in any pain and why this had happened.

After a while, he stood up and paced along the gallery of Wanted posters, looked into the staring eyes of murderers and armed robbers, and then there were the missing-children posters, some of them digitally altered to age the kids to how they might look now, having disappeared so many years ago.

Behind him, Barbara said to Hawkins, “Can you believe it? We've been here two hours. Don't you just want to scream?”

And Levon did want to scream. Where was his daughter? He leaned down and spoke to the female officer behind the window. “Does Lieutenant Jackson know we're here?”

“Yes, sir, he sure does.”

Levon sat down next to Barb, pinched the place between his eyes, wondered why Jackson was taking so long. And he thought about Hawkins, how he'd gotten in very tight with Barb. Levon trusted Barb's judgment, but, like a lot of women, she made friends fast. Sometimes too fast.

Levon watched Hawkins writing in his notebook and then some teenage girls joined the line at the front desk, talking in high-pitched chatter that just about took off the top of his head.

By ten fifteen, Levon's agitation was like the rumbling of the volcanoes that had raised this island out of the prehistoric sea. He felt ready to explode.

I was sitting in a hard plastic chair next to Barbara McDaniels when I heard the door open at the end of the long, narrow room. Levon leapt up from his seat and was practically in the cop's face before the door swung closed.

The cop was big, midthirties, with thick black hair and mocha-toned skin. He looked part Jimmy Smits, part Ben Affleck, and part island surfer god. Wore a jacket and tie, had a shield hooked into the waistband of his chinos, a gold one, which meant he was a detective.

Barbara and I joined Levon, who introduced us to Lieutenant Jackson. Jackson asked me, “What's your relationship to the McDanielses?”

“Friend of the family,” Barbara said at the same time that I said, “I'm with the L.A. Times.”

Jackson snorted a laugh, scrutinized me, then asked, “Do you know Kim?”

No.

“Have any information as to her whereabouts?”

No.

“Do you know these people? Or did you meet them, say, yesterday?”

“We just met.”

“Interesting,” Jackson said, smirking now. He said to the McDanielses. “You understand this man's job is to sell newspapers?”

“We know that,” Levon said.

“Good. Just so you're clear, anything you say to Mr. Hawkins is going directly from your mouths to the front page of the L.A. Times. Speaking for myself,” Jackson went on, “I don't want him here. Mr. Hawkins, have a seat, and if I need you, I'll call you.”