“I’d like to put you with a sketch artist – see what you come up with. I’ll set it up.”

The light changes and we turn onto Connecticut. “I’ve got a press conference at five,” Shoffler says. “You want to join me? You and Liz? I mean it’s your vindication. You maybe ought to be there to take questions.”

There’s no maybe about it. I know what Claire Carosella would tell me. If it will maximize airtime, Liz and I will stand in front of the crowd of reporters all night.

I know from experience what it will be like. They’ll shout each other down for the right to lob questions at us. The questions will be either rhetorical (“Are you relieved that suspicion has been lifted from your shoulders?”) or impossible to answer (“Do you feel the police are getting closer to finding your boys?”).

“We’ll be there,” I tell him.

In the next two days, energetic friends and neighbors rally around. Now that I’m no longer a suspect, the floodgates are open again. The household is inundated with food – casseroles, cookies, salads, enormous baskets stuffed with every imaginable edible.

Ordway Street is aglow with yellow ribbons. Connecticut Avenue is decorated, too, for blocks in both directions.

A courier brings handmade cards from the boys’ fellow campers at St. Albans: Magic-Marker flowers, carefully printed words of support, cramped and juvenile signatures.

The accumulation of teddy bears and flowers left at the curb gets to me. They remind me of roadside displays at crash sites, the posthumous tributes in Oklahoma City, the heaps of flowers and stuffed animals that followed Princess Di’s accident, the mounds of commemorative tribute outside Ground Zero. Funerary offerings.

The police established a hotline and although they discourage the idea of a second one, a tag team of neighbors can’t be stopped. Jack organizes the volunteers who run this “totline,” coordinating their shifts. Unlike the official hotline, this one promises a reward plus confidentiality.

My old friend Ezra Sidran, a computer genius, sponsors the construction of a website: findkevinandsean.com. Liz’s friend Molly launches a drive to enroll volunteers to monitor the site. Within two days it’s pulling in almost four hundred hits an hour.

Since I’ve been exonerated, the station revives the reward fund, with Krista herself doing stand-ups to make appeals. Fox tops up its original seed money with another five grand. The station’s accounting firm contributes time to receive and tally contributed funds. Within a few days, the fund holds more than $90,000.

A trio of Liz’s old running buddies organizes the printing and distribution of thousands of flyers. For the most part, we’re captives in the house, but we’re told that the boys’ faces are on every conceivable storefront, bus shelter, telephone pole, each flyer with its little fringe of tear-offs imprinted with the hotline number and Web address.

I have a conference with Mary McCafferty, the private eye I hired to help search for the boys. She explains to me what she’s done, which is mostly to “troll for clues” by interviewing dozens of our friends and acquaintances – and new friends and acquaintances of Liz and the boys up in Maine. This has produced “nothing so far.” Recently, she’s been concentrating her efforts on household help: plumbers, babysitters, plaster repair guys, dishwasher installers, painters (I gave her the entire file of home-repair receipts). “It’s amazing how many times it turns out to be someone like that.”

“But not in this case.”

“Not so far.”

I work with a police artist named Marijke Wilcke, trying to dredge up the image of the man with the dog. Since I just caught a glimpse of the guy, I’m not optimistic. Shoffler insists “Dutchie,” as he calls Marijke, is “real good at coaxing details outta eyewitnesses. She’s just about a genius.”

We have trouble right away, trying to establish the shape of the man’s face. The fact that he was wearing a ruff, too, creates problems, not only because it makes it hard for me to determine the length of his face, but also because it obscures the conjunction of neck and shoulder, his jawline, even his ears. The neatly trimmed goatee and mustache don’t help, either. Despite Marijke’s skill at translating my vague impressions onto the page, the result is vague and generic. The man stares blankly back from the final image, neatly groomed hair and trimmed goatee and mustache, just as I remember it, but the rest is just a guess.

Shoffler stops by to take a look.

“What do you think?” Marijke asks.

“Looks like they’re all on the same bus.”

“What?”

“Marijke and Larry – he’s another sketch artist – they been through this with three other eyewitnesses who saw this guy with your kids.” To Marijke he says: “Go on. Give him the tour.”

She brings up in sequence five versions of the man with the dog, all of which prominently feature the goatee and sharply trimmed mustache. Apart from that, the sketches vary in head shape and other features. “Facial hair,” Marijke sighs, “especially when it is trimmed into geometric shapes and clean lines – it’s just so dramatic it makes the other features fade. What you remember is the facial hair. Maybe,” she says in her slightly accented English, “it’s even pasted on.”

Shoffler shakes his head.

“And that ruff around his neck – that’s another problem.”

Marijke flicks back to my sketch. “You are happy with this one?” she asks me.

I shrug. “I guess.”

When she taps her mouse a few times, the hair and the beard and mustache disappear. Clean-shaven, the man could be anybody.

“I make a composite from all of them,” Marijke says, “then I do one with the facial hair, one clean-shaven, okay?”

The official position shifts. With the boys stipulated as the victims of a kidnapping, an FBI agent is assigned to the case. Shoffler tells me ahead of time that Judy Jones is very young but very smart. “A rookie, but a real firecracker.”

We gather in the family room. Shoffler introduces her and she explains to us that the Bureau’s involvement in kidnapping cases has been routine since the Lindbergh case.

Liz sits next to me and holds my hand, although there’s nothing intimate about this. We’re like two strangers at the site of a disaster, our touch the instinctual clutch for human contact. Liz and I present a united front in public – and that includes sessions like this one. But except for moments when she breaks down and needs – literally – a shoulder to cry on, she’s formal and distant, clearly uncomfortable with our forced reunion. I’ve yet to catch sight of her, for instance, in her bathrobe.

“The depth of the Bureau’s involvement varies,” Judy Jones says, carefully making eye contact with each of us. “Since we are satisfied with police conduct in the investigation, our role will be limited to support.”

Jack immediately protests. “What – the FBI’s so hung up on terrorists a couple of kids don’t matter? Don’t my grandsons deserve your full attention?”

I think the limited role for the Bureau is a plus, but Jack doesn’t see it that way. From the way he goes on about how the boys deserve the best, it’s clear that despite the memorable series of FBI screwups over the past decade (Ruby Ridge, Waco, the spy Robert Hanssen, the embarrassing repression of leads in the 9/11 attack, the shocking errors at Bureau labs), Jack harbors fantasies of Bureau efficiency and excellence that go back to Eliot Ness.

Jones assures us that the Bureau’s limited role is not because the FBI is “preoccupied with homeland security. We’re prepared to lend whatever support Detective Shoffler requires and requests.”

“How can you be satisfied with the police conduct?” Jack persists. “They thought Alex was the guy and while they’re putting him through the wringer, the real guy’s making tracks.” He throws up his hands.