He wanted to tell the truth, he wanted to do anything he could that would help bring his Angie home safely. What he wanted to say and what he finally said had nothing in common; Brian lied through his teeth. "The meanest thing I've done to a perp lately was write a ticket for jaywalking, Rich."

"Why don't you sit down for a few more minutes, Brian, and we'll look everything over?"

Brian nodded his thanks and watched the man as he went onto the porch to talk to his partner. They were supposed to be very good detectives. He'd never worked with them, only run across them at the station. He didn't often run across cases where people were missing. Well, he didn't normally get assigned to them, being as he was a traffic cop and not a detective.

The two detectives very carefully looked over the area where he'd found Angie's clothes, not touching anything for several minutes, until finally going back to their car to get cameras and other supplies for their investigation.

The sun finally rose around the time they were bagging her clothes and putting them into an evidence box. The detectives were good guys when he was around them and they were all kidding each other at the office. Hell, half of the practical jokes that were pulled around the department could be traced back to Boyd and Holdstedter.

They weren't clowning around now, and he doubted they would be comfortable pulling any jokes in the near future.

And that scared him a bit. The detectives were looking into the disappearance of his wife. Everyone knew that in a case like his, he would be one of the prime suspects. And if they started looking too closely at the details of Brian Freemont's daily activities, he had little doubt that they could come up with a few unusual discrepancies.

The only thing he had going for him was that he'd been on duty for ten hours. Unfortunately, that wasn't much of an alibi these days.

II.

Kelli spent a lot of time going to her classes with a renewed passion for education. Well, perhaps that wasn't completely accurate: what she had a passion for was not sitting around an empty house.

There was always something she could work on, and she found new and interesting diversions. There were several reports and essays she could lose herself in, and she did, earning extra credits toward a better final grade. Her GPA was always good, but seldom excellent. She intended to rectify that.

Because, really, as long as she was busy, she didn't focus on the dreams. For the last two nights she'd dreamt of Teddy standing outside her window in the Lister house and asking her to come keep him warm. He was barely even a shape in the darkness, a shadow against the night. But he sounded so cold and so miserable that she almost got out of bed and went to him. There was something frightening about him in the dreams. He wasn't the little boy she'd helped raise for the last few years, but only something that seemed to look like him.

The first night the dream had been unsettling. The second night it had made her sleepwalk. She didn't want to know what the third night would bring if she weren't careful.

So, college work. She was going to study herself into exhaustion and hope that would be enough to keep her from dreaming anything else that disturbing.

Poor Teddy was missing and maybe dead. She knew that. She didn't need dreams to remind her of the fact. The Listers had become strangers in a lot of ways. Since Teddy's body had disappeared from the hospital, they'd given up all pretense of civility and gone on the warpath.

Kelli was in mourning. The Listers were on a revenge kick and the target of their collective wrath was the hospital. She could understand their anger, but wanted nothing to do with the couple when they were going into a self-destructive rampage.

Kelli wandered the stacks of the library, her eyes roaming from bookshelf to bookshelf in an effort to find anything that would keep her properly distracted. It was getting harder to focus, but she kept trying.

She found Ben Kirby sitting at the end of Sociology, his head in his hands. Ben was a good guy, even if he was so shy he made her look like a socialite. At the moment, he looked like he was ready to have a heart attack: his face was pale, his eyes were wide and he was staring off into outer space.

"Ben? You okay?"

He jumped when she spoke and looked around for a second before he focused on her. "Hi, Kelli." He stared at her for several seconds without answering, and finally he shook his head. "No. I don't think I am. I think I'm in big trouble."

"Anything I can do to help?" Ben was never going to be the sort of guy she found attractive: he wasn't nearly muscular enough for her tastes. He was, however, the sort of guy that made her want to mother him. If ever there had been a damaged person who was more likeable than Ben, she'd failed to run across him.

"No," he frowned and stood up. "No, but thanks a lot for asking." He moved past her before she could answer him and headed toward the library's exit. Much as she wanted to see if he really did need her help, she couldn't bring herself to follow him. His eyes were too haunted, and she'd seen enough of that sort of expression in the last few days; she saw it on the Listers and when she caught her face in the occasional reflection.

III.

Avery Tripp was staying home for a few more days. His mother had already decided that. She was around constantly, and he didn't mind at all.

Alan Tripp went back to work, dodging as many questions as he could and focusing instead on getting his job done. It was the sort of work he could do in his sleep, but he needed to get the hell out of the house before he lost his temper.

Avery was home, and that was a blessing, but his son was acting a little too strangely for his comfort. Something had happened to him while he was gone, but for the life of him, Alan couldn't guess what it might have been. He'd been afraid of sexual molestation or the like, but there were no signs that he'd been misused that wretchedly.

But he wasn't himself. And Meghan was exhausted from hanging around with him constantly. His wife was acting as strangely as her son, as if the idea of being separated from her only child for even a minute should be considered a sin. It wasn't healthy and he didn't like it. He needed her to calm down and he needed Avery to grow up. The problem was that he couldn't articulate those facts without coming across like a monster without any feelings, and for that reason he was doing his best to avoid being home with them.

If that made him an insensitive bastard, he'd have to deal with it, because the notion of being around the two most important people in his life was making his skin crawl.

"I need to see a fucking shrink." He stepped outside of the offices and moved to the smoke hole at the back of the building. There were times when his boss rode his ass hard for taking too many smoke breaks. At least for the present time, he was being allowed to come and go as he pleased.

Martin Sullivan was already outside when he got there. Martin was in the shipping and receiving department. He was a nice guy who was ten years younger than Alan and loved to go on and on about his sexual exploits. Alan would have taken offense, but Martin was just weird enough to make up stories that were humorous instead of just vulgar. Alan still got a chuckle whenever Martin went off about the female clown he'd scored with at the circus. Something about getting stuck in a clown car in a compromising position with a woman who wore more makeup than Tammy Faye Bakker. It was funny, but after the first few stories from Martin, everything sort of blurred together.

Today the man wasn't smiling. His expression was anything but happy.

"How's things, Martin?"

"Hi, Alan. Not so good."

"What's up?"

Martin looked at him and shook his head. "I think there's something wrong with me."

"Wrong how?"

"I'm having trouble keeping food down." He looked more closely at Martin and wondered if the man might have caught a bad bug. He couldn't have managed to look less energetic without being in a coffin.

"Maybe you need to take the rest of the day off."

Martin nodded and, without another word, started walking toward the parking lot. It wasn't Alan's place to stop him, but he figured he could make the guy's life a little easier and let his manager know he'd gone home.

Four more people went home early that day. In an office of only twenty workers, it was a noticeable difference.

Alan stayed until it was almost dark out before finally deciding that he, too, should get home at some point.

The house roads were relatively calm-they were almost always calm, except in the summer and on weekends when they had tall ship events in the bay-and he made good time.

But the house was dark when he got home, and for a moment he was filled with a deep, abiding dread. There should have been some lights on, somewhere in the place. Even if all the lamps were shut off, the TV screen should have been putting off a glow.

"Quit being an asshole," he told himself as he climbed out of his Subaru. "So the lights are off. Maybe they're taking a nap, or they went to see someone."

He stood outside the door for almost five minutes, his fingers cold and thick, before he finally opened the front door. There was nothing but darkness to see until he finally fumbled for the light switch in the hallway and flipped it to the on position. The room came into view and he sighed with relief. There was a part of him that had expected the bulb to have been removed or shattered.

What the hell had him so paranoid? He couldn't begin to imagine. All he knew was that the last time he'd felt this nervous without a reason was when he'd been standing at the altar and waiting for Meghan to walk down the aisle.

"Anybody home?" His voice seemed to echo through the hallway.

There was no answer at first, and the fine hairs on his neck rose. Then there was a noise from upstairs and he cocked his head to listen more carefully.

There it was again: a moan, soft and feathery faint.

He moved across the hardwood floors and up the long run of stairs as quickly and quietly as he could, barely even allowing himself the luxury of a breath as his mind was filled with images of what might have gone wrong. He saw phantasmal pictures of Meghan dead or held at the mercy of a rapist while Avery was forced to watch. He imagined Avery, dead and bled out across the floor of his bedroom, with Meghan's cold body over his, her body used to shield her dead boy. As he moved up the stairs quietly, his mind painted a thousand scenarios in which he found his family murdered or simply missing amid signs of a struggle. He had no strength at all and was so afraid of what he might find; his legs felt like someone had carefully removed the bones and replaced them with fiberfill.

Avery met him in the darkened hallway, his body seeming little more than a stain against the shadows.

"Avery? Where's your mom, son?"

Avery moved a little closer and looked up at him, his eyes glittering in the near darkness. "Hi, Daddy." He pointed to the master bedroom. "Mommy's asleep. She's tired."

Alan frowned. "Tired? What did she do all day?"

"I don't think she feels so good. She looks a little green."

Meghan was normally the last person to get a cold or even a case of the sniffles. She had a constitution like iron. "Well, I guess I better see how she's doing, sport."

"She's tired." He sounded like he was talking to a little kid.

"I got that, Avery. I just want to check on her myself."

He moved past his son, unconsciously skirting any contact with his own flesh and blood. Something wasn't right here and it was driving him crazy.

He entered the master bedroom and flicked on the light, his eyes aching in the sudden illumination. Meghan was on the bed, dressed in the same nightgown she'd worn to sleep the previous night. She didn't look like she'd moved much at all since he'd left for work almost ten hours earlier.

"Meghan?" He moved closer, feeling that cold spot in the pit of his stomach grow a few degrees colder still as he looked down on his wife's prone body.

She opened her eyes and took a few seconds to focus on him. "Hey." Her voice was raspy and dry.

"Hi, angel." He leaned down and ran a hand over her forehead. Her skin was cool to the touch, but felt a little sweaty. "Are you feeling all right? Avery said you looked a little green, and I have to agree, honey."

"Jus' tired." She smiled, her eyes focusing on him with the same clarity that she always seemed to have, and he felt relief thaw the ice in his stomach. "Feel like I haven't slept all week."

Alan leaned over and kissed her forehead, the taste of her running over his lips. "That's because you haven't slept all week." He leaned back away and pushed a few errant hairs from her brow. "You've been worrying too much about Avery and other things."

She nodded and closed her eyes. "I'm gonna sleep now, baby, okay?"

"Of course it is. Don't worry. I'll get something set up for dinner. Do you want anything?"

"No. Just sleep." Seconds after the words were out of her mouth she closed her eyes and drifted into slumber. He sat with her for a while and watched her, amazed by her as he always was.

Downstairs, in the darkness, his son was waiting for him. Alan stood and stretched and then got into more comfortable clothes. His little boy would want company, and he'd already promised Meghan that Avery wouldn't be left alone.

IV.

There was a tension in the air that none of them would willingly acknowledge. There had been for several days and it wasn't likely that the tension was going away anytime soon.

They were all independent men, the priests of the Sacred Hearts congregation. As a rule they worked together and then went their separate ways. But every Saturday night they got together and had a proper dinner. It was tradition and they never even discussed the matter anymore. It was simply a part of their regular routine and there was no reason for it to suddenly change.

Patrick was doing the cooking that particular Saturday and, as was often the case, he decided on pasta. The man should have been Italian with the way he went for pasta. Tonight it was lasagna and it very likely tasted as wonderful as it smelled. But all three men sat in silence as they ate, lost in their own thoughts.

And each and every one of them was remembering the girl they had seen in the church every Sunday for over a decade now, the girl who would be in the pews tomorrow and likely praying as fervently as she always did.

Each of them dreaded seeing Margaret Preston, the sweet-faced youth who had come to them and brought them pleasures of the flesh the likes of which they had never experienced before. She did so, as far as they knew, without provocation. She had surely never given any indication in the past that she found them attractive, and most assuredly she had never made advances before the week that had just come around. That she had been knowledgeable was a given. Maggie was talented and eager to teach things they had never willingly admitted to dreaming about, let alone ever expected to experience in their lives.

She had brought each of the men pleasure, deep abiding pleasure, and memories that would linger and haunt them for a long time to come. She had also brought each of them doubt. They doubted their own strengths and the strength of their faith in the Lord, if they were weak enough to give themselves over to a beautiful woman.

Each of the priests had thought of little else in their free time. The guilt was powerful and burned at them, as surely as her kisses had seared their flesh, as surely as their bodies burned for her, to be with her again, to experience the sensual gratification she had given to them once before.

They would see her at Mass and each of the men would remember what had happened. They would feel the guilt they shared more profoundly than ever and the desires as well. Each of the priests knew that this would happen but only knew it would happen for one individual. The men had often shared tales of their pasts during their Saturday night meals, and Donald Wilson had heard the confessions of his subordinates on many occasions.

There had been no confessions of their secret shared sins. Not a one of them ever seriously considered confessing. It was a secret, and it was a sin, but in each case, it was a sin that was still being savored.

And each of them had one more secret that they did not desire to share: despite the guilt involved, each and every one of them wanted to be with her again.

It was a silent meal that Saturday night. It was the last meal that all three men would share together. One of them would be dead before the week was over.

They ate in silence, lost in their sins and their urges. None of them even noticed. They were far too distracted to pay any attention to the men they ate with.

And that, of course, was exactly what Jason Soulis had been counting on when he hired Maggie: a secret shared is no longer a secret, and a sin held close to the heart is more often treasured than reviled.

Can you say Amen?

V.

The night was starting to get long in the tooth and Boyd was beginning to feel married to Holdstedter, which wouldn't have been that bad if the man looked as good as his sister did. Sadly, his partner was the wrong gender for him to even consider looking to get lucky.

"Are you thinking about my sister again?" Danny looked at him as he raised his mug of Sam Adams and smiled.

"Why would I be thinking about your sister?"

"You've got that look on your face that says you're thinking about getting into the sack with a well-built blonde."

"Only in your dreams, you loser." That was another thing that annoyed him about his partner: the bastard could read him like a book and he didn't like to be read.

"I can give you her number. She'll probably chew you up and spit out the bones, but you'd have a good time."

"Do you have any idea how wrong it is to hear you talk about your own sister that way?"

"Do you have any idea how wrong it is to know your partner is checking you out while you're trying to drink yourself into a stupor?"

"You're a sick man, Danny."

"Yes, yes I am. Remind me never to change."

"So how many are we up to for the day?"

"Seven. Seven more people who didn't show up where they were supposed to or anywhere else. That's seventeen to date, but who's counting?"

"That prick we have to call sir."

"O'Neill can eat my shorts."

"He probably would. I hear he swings both ways."