“Sandling wouldn’t talk.”

“Right. Sandling won’t talk, the cops won’t talk, the lawyers won’t talk. We asked.”

“Did she know about Kevin and Sean?”

Shoffler swings his big head in my direction and just looks at me. “What do you think? You think she coulda missed that story? Maybe if she lived on Mars. No, the thing is your boys’ kidnapping brought the whole thing back. It terrified her.”

“How do you know?”

“We had a conference call: me, Jones, Sandling, and her lawyers. The lawyers are a big help, as you can imagine – keep telling her she doesn’t have to talk to us, doesn’t have to answer this question or that. But we really whacked away at this woman; I mean, we laid on the guilt as thick as we could. Here were two boys in peril, her boys might have information helpful in the investigation, how could she as a mother… blah, blah, blah.”

“And?”

“Nothing. We did not get to first base. Wherever she’s living now, no one knows who she is. And she wants to keep it that way… which is understandable. She’s worried about some kind of leak, that her boys’ case will end up all over the news again, they’ll be outed in their new place. Maybe the perp will come back for another round – to which Jones says, ‘not if we catch him.’ But Sandling is not interested; she won’t say boo. The lawyer follows up by warning us not to mention the Sandling case to the media.”

“You’re kidding.”

“He called Jones’s supervisor at the Bureau and my chief in Arundel… just to reinforce the warning.”

I just sit there, in a funk of anger and impotence. I’m pissed at Sandling, her lawyers, the cops, everybody. And what’s worse, I’m sick at heart. I take a few deep breaths, fighting off a sort of interior collapse.

“You okay?” Shoffler says.

I shrug.

“I can do two things for you,” Shoffler says. “First – and I doubt this will do you a hell of a lot of good – I can get you a copy of the sketch. The one they did working with the Sandling kids. Jones got that out of them. I wasn’t supposed to make a copy, but I did. Anyway, it was published in the papers at the time. Anyone asks, that’s where you got it.”

“Does it look like The Piper?”

He shrugs, holds up one hand. “Who knows? Not really. More facial hair than our guy. Kind of fogs up the features.” He sighs. “Second thing – and you could get this on your own, so I’m just saving you some time here – Sandling’s maiden name is Whalen.”

“You think that’s the name she’s using?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Shoffler says, flashing me a grin. “I was constrained from pursuing the matter.”

He drops me off near the White House. “Take the MARC Train from Union Station,” he advises. “New Carrollton stop. A cab’ll take you the rest of the way. Cost you ten bucks, max.”

When I open the door the next morning to go out for the paper, there’s a manilla interoffice envelope inside the screen door. I’m not expecting much, but I’m still disappointed when I see the sketch.

The face is expressionless, as real faces never are. The lack of expression somehow robs the features of coherence and makes the image ambiguous. Even mug shots have some animation – that supplied by life itself, I guess. I take the sketch to my study and line it up with the sketches Marijke made, one from my glimpse of The Piper, the others produced by sessions with other eyewitnesses. There’s something about the eyes, maybe, that looks the same from sketch to sketch. Apart from that, it’s different men with facial hair. The faces gaze down on me, inscrutable, almost mocking: you don’t know who I am.

Mary McCafferty taps one pink fingernail on her desk and looks at me with her large brown eyes. “Finding her shouldn’t be a problem,” she says. “She may not have had an address, living in a park – but she had a car, which means a driver’s license, insurance. She apparently had a library card, and I’ll bet she had a doctor for those kids. There will be school records, maybe traffic and parking tickets, grocery shopper cards. Believe me, unless you really work at it, you’re in a thousand databases these days. And what are the chances she severed every connection to her past?” McCafferty shakes her head.

“Really.”

“She may be using a different name – but you say it’s her maiden name, so chances are she kept her social, and then… well, then it’s a piece of cake. I might have something by tomorrow. E-mail okay? Or should I fax you?”

“E-mail’s fine.”

“We’re all set,” she says, getting to her feet. She hesitates, shakes her head. “But mine’s the easy part. You still have to get her to talk to you.”

“I know.”

“My guess is this woman’s pretty quick to call the cavalry,” she says. “Don’t get arrested.”

McCafferty comes through. Emma Sandling, neé Whalen, lives in Florida. The next morning, at seven A.M., I’m on a Delta flight to Daytona Beach.

The drive into town from the airport takes me past the enormous Daytona International Speedway. Then I’m coasting along Highway A-1-A, a sun-bleached strip flanked on both sides by an unending succession of fast-food outlets, motels, miniature golf courses, and bowling alleys. Everything’s paved. The only flora, apart from the landscaped oases in the elaborate mini-golf parks, is the occasional wind-lashed palm. Every once in a while, between the giant hotels and condos on the oceanside, I catch a glimpse of why all this exists: white sand and the hard glitter of the Atlantic.

After several miles, I spot the landmark I’ve been looking for, the huge sprawl of the Adam’s Mark Hotel. My room at the Drop Anchor Inn is a block away on the other, less desirable, side of the road. Its giant anchor-shaped sign advertises VACANCY SPECIAL WKLY RATES AARP AAA STUDENTS SENIORS.

According to the Weather Channel, the difference in temperature and humidity between Washington and Daytona Beach is incremental, but that’s not the way it feels when I step out of my rented Hyundai Sonata. Heat radiates from the pavement, so dense and humid and hot, it’s like an assault. A stiff offshore breeze is no cooling zephyr, either. It’s like a blast from a giant hair dryer.

The room is what you’d expect for thirty-two bucks a day: the dark stripes of cigarette burns mar several surfaces, television and lamps are bolted to their tables, and I had to put down a twenty-dollar deposit for the remote. Stale cigarette smoke suffuses every fabric behind an olfactory haze of air freshener. But the room is big, with an air-conditioning unit that seems to be up to the task. And it has a telephone, so I can plug in my laptop.

Emma Sandling, now Susie Whalen, works near here, right on the famous beach itself. She operates a concession stand called the Beach Bunny, a couple hundred yards from the Adam’s Mark. She’s also a part-time student at the Daytona Beach Community College, halfway through a program in “respiratory therapy.” Her boys currently attend the fifth in a string of free vacation Bible schools, this one sponsored by the Word of God church in Ormond Beach. Whalen drives a red ’84 Subaru wagon with Save-the-Manatee plates. She and the boys live in a tiny rental apartment in Port Orange, where she gets a break on the rent in return for janitorial work, which includes mopping down the halls and stairs and keeping the laundry room and storage area clean. All per an e-mail from McCafferty, who billed me for just two hours. “Glories of the information age,” she noted.

I sit on the bed and after a minute, stretch out and stare up at the textured ceiling. Ever since I received McCafferty’s e-mail, I’ve been trying to figure out how I’m going to get close to Emma Sandling.

My plan is to go to the Beach Bunny, rent a chair and umbrella, buy a tube of sunscreen, and chat her up. I’m good at this kind of thing; most reporters are.