THREE

Rasbach waits for their answer.

She answers first. “It’s on the street.”

“You park on the street when you’ve got a garage in back?” Rasbach asks.

“Everybody does that,” Anne answers. “It’s easier than going through the lane, especially in the winter. Most people get a parking permit and just park on the street.”

“I see,” Rasbach says.

“Why?” the wife asks. “What does it matter?”

Rasbach explains. “It probably made it easier for the kidnapper. If the garage was empty and the garage door was left open, it would be relatively easy for someone to back a car in and put the baby in the car while the car was in the garage, out of sight. It would obviously be more difficult—certainly riskier—if the garage already had a car in it. The kidnapper would run the risk of being seen in the lane with the baby.”

Rasbach notices that the husband has turned another shade paler, if that is even possible. His pallor is quite striking.

“We’re hoping we will get some shoe prints or tire tracks from the garage,” Rasbach adds.

“You make it sound like this was planned,” the mother says.

“Do you think it wasn’t?” Rasbach asks her.

“I . . . I don’t know. I guess I thought Cora was taken because we left her alone in the house, that it was a crime of opportunity. Like if someone had snatched her from the park when I wasn’t looking.”

Rasbach nods, as if trying to understand it from her point of view. “I see what you mean,” he says. “For example, a mother leaves her child playing in the park while she fetches an ice cream from the ice-cream truck. The child is snatched while her back is turned. It happens.” He pauses. “But surely you realize the difference here.”

She looks back at him blankly. He has to remember that she is probably in shock. But he sees this sort of thing all the time; it is his job. He is analytical, not at all sentimental. He must be, if he is to be effective. He will find this child, dead or alive, and he will find whoever took her.

He tells the mother, his voice matter-of-fact, “The difference is, whoever took your baby probably knew she was alone in the house.”

The parents look at each other.

“But nobody knew,” the mother whispers.

“Of course,” Rasbach adds, “it is possible that she might have been taken even if you were sound asleep in your own bedroom. We don’t know for sure.”

The parents would like to believe that it isn’t their fault after all, for leaving their baby alone. That this might have happened anyway.

Rasbach asks, “Do you always leave the garage door open like that?”

The husband answers. “Sometimes.”

“Wouldn’t you close the garage door at night? To prevent theft?”

“We don’t keep anything valuable in the garage,” the husband says. “If the car’s in there, we generally lock the door, but we don’t keep much in there otherwise. All my tools are in the basement. This is a nice neighborhood, but people break into garages here all the time, so what’s the point of locking it?”

Rasbach nods. Then he asks, “What kind of car do you have?”

“It’s an Audi,” Marco says. “Why?”

“I’d like to have a look. May I have the keys?” Rasbach asks.

Marco and Anne regard each other in confusion. Then Marco gets up and goes to a side table near the front door and grabs a set of keys from a bowl. He hands them over to the detective silently and sits back down.

“Thank you,” Rasbach says. Then he leans forward and says deliberately, “We will find out who did this.”

They stare back at him, meeting his eyes, the mother’s entire face swollen from crying, the father’s eyes puffy and bloodshot with distress and drink, his face pasty.

Rasbach nods to Jennings, and together they leave the house to check the car. The couple sit on the sofa silently and watch them go.

 • • • 

Anne doesn’t know what to make of the detective. All this about their car—he seems to be insinuating something. She knows that when a wife goes missing, the husband is usually the prime suspect, and probably vice versa. But when a child goes missing, are the parents usually the prime suspects? Surely not. Who could harm their own child? Besides, they both have solid alibis. They can be accounted for, by Cynthia and Graham. There is obviously no way they could have taken and hidden their own daughter. And why would they?

She is aware that the neighborhood is being searched, that there are police officers going up and down the streets knocking on doors, interviewing people roused from their beds. Marco has provided the police with a recent photo of Cora, taken just a few days ago. The photo shows a happy blond baby girl with big blue eyes smiling up at the camera.

Anne is angry at Marco—she wants to scream at him, pummel him with her fists—but their house is full of police officers, so she doesn’t dare. And when she looks at his pale, bleak face, she sees that he is already blaming himself. She knows she can’t survive this on her own. She turns to him and collapses into his chest, sobbing. His arms come up around her, and he hugs her tightly. She can feel him shaking, can feel the painful thumping of his heart. She tells herself that together they will get through this. The police will find Cora. They will get their daughter back.

And if they don’t, she will never forgive him.

 • • • 

Detective Rasbach, in his lightweight summer suit, steps out the front door of the Contis’ house and down the steps into the hot summer night, closely followed by Detective Jennings. They have worked together before. They have each seen some things that they would like to be able to forget.

Together they walk toward the opposite side of the street, lined with cars parked bumper-to-bumper. Rasbach presses a button, and the headlights of the Audi flash briefly. Already the neighbors are out on their front steps, in their pajamas and summer bathrobes. Now they watch as Rasbach and Jennings walk toward the Contis’ car.

Rasbach hopes that someone on this street might know something, might have seen something, and will come forward.

Jennings says, his voice low, “What’s your take?”

Rasbach answers quietly, “I’m not optimistic.”

Rasbach pulls on a pair of latex gloves that Jennings hands him and opens the door on the driver’s side. He looks briefly inside and then silently walks to the back of the car. Jennings follows.

Rasbach pops open the trunk. The two detectives look inside. It’s empty. And very clean. The car is just over a year old. It still looks new.

“Love that new-car smell,” Jennings says.

Clearly the child isn’t there. That doesn’t mean she hadn’t been there, however briefly. Perhaps forensic investigation will reveal fibers from a pink onesie, DNA from the baby—a hair, a trace of drool, or maybe blood. Without a body they will have a tough case to make. But no parents ever put their baby in the trunk with good intentions. If they find any trace of the missing child in the trunk, he will see that the parents rot in hell. Because if there’s anything Rasbach has learned in his years on the job, it is that people are capable of almost anything.

Rasbach is aware that the baby could have gone missing at any time before the dinner party. He has yet to question the parents in detail about the previous day, has yet to determine who, other than the parents, last saw the child alive. But he will find out. Perhaps there is a mother’s helper who comes in, or a cleaning lady, or a neighbor—someone who saw the baby, alive and well, earlier that day. He will establish when the baby was last known to be alive and work forward from there. This leaving the monitor on, checking every half hour while they dined next door, the disabled motion detector, the open front door, it could all simply be an elaborate fiction, a carefully constructed fabrication of the parents, to provide them with an alibi, to throw the authorities off the scent. They might have killed the baby at any time earlier that day—either deliberately or by accident—and put her in the trunk and disposed of the body before going to the party next door. Or, if they were still thinking clearly, they might not have put her in the trunk at all but in the car seat. A dead baby might not look that different from a sleeping baby. Depending on how they killed her.

Rasbach knows that he’s a cynic. He hadn’t started out that way.

He says to Jennings, “Bring in the cadaver dogs.”