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the ambiguity of his last answer. “I mean, I don’t know how he got through the door so fast. I was the last one home. I locked the door, I know it. I always lock the door. But it seemed like as soon as he got to the house, he was inside.”

“You have a key hidden somewhere? Underneath a fake rock? Something like that?”

Connor shrugged. “Sure. But how would he know where it is?”

“Can you show me?”

Connor pushed himself up—it seemed to take everything he had to get to his feet—and led the detective out the front door. He searched the bushes along the right side of the house and closest to the stoop. Then he pulled up an artificial stone, turned it over, and slid a panel open. He dropped a key into his other hand. “Like I said.”

Olivia had put her notepad back in her coat pocket and was standing with her hands on her hips. She shook her head, just a little, as if at some private thought. “What about the van? You said it was a blue panel van.”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“It was a panel van, for sure. And it was old. Kind of rusty. But I’m not sure if it was blue or black.”

“Did you catch the license plate?”

Connor tried to remember. “No.”

“Did you happen to notice what state it was from?”

“No.” Connor put the key back in the fake rock and put the rock back in the bushes.

A uniformed officer stepped out of the door. “Detective?”

Olivia turned her attention to him. “Yes?”

He held up a cellphone, and the movement lit up the screen. There was a picture of a cat playing poker on it. “Found this under the sofa.”

She looked at Connor. “You recognize that?”

“It’s my dad’s,” Connor said. So the intruder hadn’t come back for his father’s cellphone. That meant it had to have been his. Dammit. If he had bothered to look toward the front door when he exited the stairwell, he would have seen it. Even if he had thought it was his dad’s at the time, went for it only to call 911, he would have realized what he had as soon as he picked it up. It would have been all the evidence the police needed to find the intruder. He could have slipped out the back door, run to a neighbor’s. If he had just paid attention to his surroundings, everything would have been different.

“Okay,” the officer said, and walked back into the house.

“Wait. What’s he doing?” Connor asked.

“The tech guys are going to install some monitoring software on it that will let us listen in, in case the kidnapper calls. You’ll just have to activate it. Privacy concerns, and all that. Speaking of which . . .” Olivia held out her hand.

Connor gave her his phone, and Olivia gave it to another officer who was on his way into the house.

“Set this one up, too,” she told him.

The officer nodded but didn’t stop.

“Do you know anybody who would have had a bone to pick with your parents? Either one of them?”

He considered that. “Not that I can think of.”

“Both parents work?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“My dad works for Leewood Construction, and my mom’s a surgeon in the William Marks ER.”

Olivia nodded, made a note. Then she paused, as if deciding where she wanted to go next with her questions, before simply asking, “Can you think of anything else that might be important?”

Well, there’s the money, Connor thought. But he wasn’t going to mention that.

CHAPTER 4

The money Connor was thinking about was a stack of loose bills in a plain white envelope. He had found it on the dining room table after the intruder had left and before the cops had arrived. He hadn’t mentioned it because he didn’t know for sure whether the intruder had left it. That money might have belonged to his parents. (Although it wasn’t like them to carry around stacks of cash. Especially not stacks of hundred-dollar bills.) And if the intruder had left it, then that would only lead to questions he couldn’t answer. It might look to the police like he was involved.

No, thank you. That was not a complication he needed to introduce into the investigation. Best to keep that information to himself. At least for now.

Olivia stayed until the crime scene investigators had finished their work and, on her way out the door, told Connor to keep both his and his father’s phone on him. (They hadn’t found his mother’s.) “Sooner or later, somebody’s going to call,” she said confidently.

Connor, though, had his doubts. Why would you leave an envelope of cash and then call with demands? “What if they don’t?” he asked.

“They will, and when they do, we’ll be listening.” Olivia held out a hand to shake Connor’s and he obliged. “I’ll be in touch.”

He watched her trek across the front yard, straight over the tread marks left behind by the intruder’s vehicle. When she was halfway to her car, she turned around and said, “You got anybody you can stay with?”

Perhaps because he hadn’t been alone for more than a few minutes since the abduction, Connor hadn’t given any thought to what it would be like once the police left. Now facing a night by himself in a house that, as familiar as it was, seemed foreign to him, he wished he had. Then again, what difference would it have made? He had a few friends at Stanford he could stay with if this had happened on the West Coast. But here he had no one he was close to. He had grown apart from his high school friends, and good riddance, as far as he’d been concerned at the time. “I’ll be fine.”

Olivia shrugged and continued on her way.

Connor went inside, closed the door. Locked it twice, just to be sure, and latched the chain. He walked from room to room surveying the mess. In the living room, whole shelves of stuff—books, knickknacks, photos—had been knocked off the built-in bookshelves that