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moments better spent looking for the boy. Others realized this as well. Spurred into action by Calvano’s increasingly impatient voice, a woman who was holding on firmly to the hand of her daughter tapped Calvano on the shoulder and beckoned him to follow her. They stood away from the bench where they would not be overheard by the sobbing mother.
    “She lost her husband in Iraq a year ago,” the woman told Calvano. “She was hospitalized for a month when she found out. I don’t think she’ll be of much help at all. If you don’t find Tyler, she’ll have nothing left and she knows it. I think you better call her doctor.”
    Now it was Calvano’s turn to panic. The mother’s help was essential. If the cases were related, they needed to know. If not, if someone had just taken advantage of the distraction and snatched the boy, it could be the worst kind of case. Without the mother’s help, they had nothing.
    It was about to get even worse. Calvano left the sobbing woman with her friends and went to consult with Maggie just as dozens of well-meaning neighbors and strangers alike organized into search teams. They scattered across the park and began calling the young boy’s name, pulling bushes apart, searching the branches of trees, trampling the ground with their feet. Within minutes, before Calvano or Maggie could stop them, any evidence had likely been destroyed by well-meaning strangers. They would have nothing to go on at all.
    Which meant it was all up to me. If I hurried, I might be able to pick up a trace of where he had gone.
    Maggie had reached the edge of the playground, angry at being called away from her crime scene. But when told of the boy’s disappearance, she looked every bit as disbelieving as Calvano had. She began arguing with Calvano in a tight circle formed by patrolmen to keep civilians out. It looked oddly like a football huddle, and it did little to conceal the heated argument they were having. Calvano had about three theories, all of them confusing. Maggie had one: the two crimes were not related. Both she and Peggy Calhoun had estimated the nurse’s time of death at least twenty-four hours before, and there was no reason to suspect the boy being taken was anything but a crime of opportunity.
    Calvano was of the opinion that they should take the missing boy’s mother over to view the nurse’s body just in case it turned out that she knew the woman—proving there might be a connection between the two cases. The silence that met this suggestion did not faze him. “It’s fast and efficient,” he insisted.
    “Let me get this straight,” Maggie asked, trying to keep her voice neutral. “This poor woman loses her husband to war, and now her only connection to him, their son, is missing, and you want to ask her to go look at the dead body of a woman with a bullet through her head?” Maggie’s voice broke with frustration. “I’ve called in Gonzales. Let’s let him make the call about how to approach this.”
    “There’s not going to be anything left in the park to go on,” one of the beat cops said. “People are trampling any evidence there might have been.”
    “All we can do right now is try to talk to the mother and pray that someone she knows did this,” Maggie said. “If it’s a stranger abduction, we’re done.”
    “It was that weirdo,” Calvano told the others. “This fat guy with flour in his hair. I questioned him earlier. I got a weird vibe off him. And he lives around here. He’d know how to get out of the park fast.”
    Some of the gathered officers looked hopeful at this, but Maggie knew Calvano too well to believe his hunches were worth a damn. “We’ll let Gonzales make the call,” she repeated. “In the meantime, I need the door of the cottage under guard at all times, no one gets in or out, and, for God’s sake, keep the search for the missing boy from spilling over into my crime scene. No one goes near that yard. The rest of you need to search the