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completely empty. I started to leave, when Colleen’s voice caught me. It was just as cold, but there was more steel in it. “Can you hear that, Michael? There’s nothing left.”
    She closed the door. I stood there for a moment without a rational thought in my mind. I walked to my car in a state of numbing shock. The end of the visit had been even more bizarre than the beginning. The person I had just left was as complete a stranger as if I’d knocked on the wrong door.
    The drive back to Boston was on instinct while I tried to make sense of that whole conversation. I don’t even remember the first ten miles. Nothing about the previous twenty minutes rang true to the Colleen who was like the closest family to me.
    I think I was passing through Lynn when ideas started dropping into my consciousness like pieces of the sky falling, and each connection multiplied the panic brewing in the pit of my stomach. I reached into my pocket for my cell phone to call Colleen. I found the handkerchief she had been using. There was something hard and round rolled in it. I pulled over and unraveled it slowly to postpone what I sensed was coming, but there was no preparing for it. My chest seized and I could barely breathe when I saw in the foldsof the handkerchief a tiny gold ring with a ruby birthstone. I had given it to Erin for her second birthday. Danny had told me she loved wearing it.
    I wanted to run back into the house to ask Colleen directly, but I knew she couldn’t talk. She had made that plain to anyone who wasn’t so shocked by rejection that he couldn’t read the signs.
    I took a minute to put together the barest bones of a plan and drove at nearly twice the speed limit to the Walmart in Lynn and then a florist friend in Winthrop. That done, I took the Sumner Tunnel back to Boston and the office.
    Before entering the tunnel, I used my cell phone to reach Mr. Devlin. Thank God he had not left the office.
    â€œMichael, you sound breathless. What happened?”
    â€œI just saw Colleen, Danny’s wife.”
    â€œHow’s she doing?”
    â€œAbout as badly as possible. She’s in pieces. I don’t think it’s completely Danny’s death. She seemed almost afraid to talk to me. But she gave me a message. She slipped a little ring I gave Erin into my pocket so I’d find it after I left. She said she’s lost everything, emphasis on everything. She said it twice. I think she’s saying Erin’s been taken.”
    â€œDamn it, Michael!” I could feel the pain in his voice.
    â€œShe’s also saying she can’t talk in the house. I think she’s afraid it’s bugged.”
    â€œHow can I help? I have contacts with the Boston office of the FBI.”
    â€œThat’s good, but not yet. We need to get more information. I have an idea. If it works, Colleen will be leaving her house in Beverly. We need to know if anyone follows her, and whom they report to. Will you call Tom Burns and have him put his best man on it? That would be Tom himself.”
    I gave Mr. D. the address in Beverly to pass on to Tom Burns. Tom had been our dependable go-to detective agency for as long as we’d been a firm. He charged rates that would make a neurosurgeonblush, but expensive though he was, I’d never consider him overpriced.
    I was in the office in fifteen minutes flat. When I passed my secretary, Julie, on the way to Mr. Devlin’s office, I told her to hold any call that wasn’t a notice of fire in the building or a call from Colleen Ryan. She put that bit of dramatics together with what must have been the look on my face, and her natural empathy went into overdrive. That meant a flow of questions that I put off with a promise of full disclosure before the sun set.
    I had just time to explain to Mr. D. that when I left Colleen, I had picked up a prepaid disposable cell phone at Walmart that couldn’t be tapped or traced. I programmed our