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shamefaced reaction. Noni had his number.
    “Are people in this neighborhood tight?” Calvano asked, trying to regain his authority. “Can you point out other people who might have known her?”
    “I can’t help you,” Noni said. “I didn’t know her well enough to say.”
    That was when the screaming began. We all heard it: uncontrolled, feral panic, so intense it made you want to flee first and ask questions later.
    The crowd turned, searching the park, trying to put it all together. A woman in her late twenties stood on the edge of the playground, face flushed, her hands held over her mouth, her eyes searching the park as she screamed and screamed and screamed.
    Noni was the first to realize what it meant: a playground, a panicked mother, the strange man in the park. She pointed to the woman and yelled at a stunned Calvano, “Go. A child is missing. Go .”

Chapter 5

    The crowd of onlookers outside the cottage came as close to stampeding as I have ever seen people do. Calvano was helpless to stop the flood. They surged across the road in a pack, terrifying the already frightened children who had been left alone on the playground while their parents rubbernecked at the crime scene a few yards away.
    While some in the crowd ran to the screaming woman, others found their children and scooped them up, holding them tight, circling the wagons of their hearts while they waited to hear who and how tragedy had struck. A few knew the screaming woman and guided her toward a bench, getting her to sit long enough to elicit the story: her son was missing. He was a four-year-old boy with curly brown hair, small for his age, wearing blue shorts and a T-shirt with dinosaurs on it. His name was Tyler.
    She had only left him alone for a couple minutes. Drawn by the sirens and the gathering crowd, she had drifted toward the cottage, leaving her son on a swing. When she returned a few moments later, he was gone. No one had seen a thing. They had all been focused on the small, white house rimmed by crime scene tape. The mother had immediately started pushing through the crowd, expecting to find her son. The little boy loved policemen; he wanted to be one when he grew up. Surely he had wandered across the street, searching out his heroes?
    He was nowhere to be found.
    Unnoticed by the distracted crime scene crowd, the mother had searched the open lawn with a rising sense of panic before, in full-blown terror, she had begun to run blindly through the park, calling out her son’s name, each step without an answer sending her further over the edge of reason. The scratches on her face and hands told of how frantic and alone she had been during her search. Not finding him anywhere and too overwhelmed to continue, she had returned to the playground. There, she’d overheard two women repeating a rumor: the dead nurse in the cottage across the street had been shot to death.
    The mother was sure the killer had taken her son. No one could tell her otherwise.
    She was a heavyset woman with curly red hair and freckles sprinkled up and down her arms and legs. Her face was splotchy, and she could not stop shaking as she sobbed out her fears. She carried an immense sorrow with her, as if her whole world had been lost. But it was not a new emotion; I could sense she had grown as used to it as a beetle to its shell. Her fear was fueled by past tragedy as much as by the present circumstances.
    A small crowd had surrounded the sobbing woman, wanting to lend support. Other playground mothers, grim-faced, tried to calm her as their children, ashen-faced, tried to understand what was happening.
    Calvano pushed away those trying to comfort her and sat beside the mother, assuring her that he was a detective and that they would find her son.
    It was as if the woman were deaf. She continued to sob uncontrollably, unable to assist at all.
    After a few minutes of cajoling, Calvano started to lose patience. I could not say I blamed him. They were losing precious