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turned on the shower. He’d have to hustle if he was going to make it into the office before rush hour traffic clogged the highways. He wished John had given him a choice about whether or not Dorsey Collins should be permitted to tag along through his investigation—silent partner or no—but as John had pointed out, he was the boss. In general, John was a damn good judge of character, which is how he’d managed to put together the best and most specialized unit within the Bureau. Well, except for Brendan, but if his own family hadn’t seen his flaws, John couldn’t be expected to.
    Then again, John admitted he hadn’t even met this woman yet. So why, Andrew asked himself, would John go out on a limb to let her become part of an investigation when all the facts seemed to indicate she shouldn’t be permitted within miles of Shelter Island?
    Good question.
Andrew turned on the water and set it for hot. Just one more to be answered before the investigation was over.
    Just one more to be added to a long list of questions: What really happened that night twenty-four years ago? Where had Shannon Randall been all that time? How did she get there? And why? Had anyone known she was still alive? If so, why didn’t that person speak up? And who killed her now, and why?
    And why was John Mancini so insistent that Dorsey Collins—the daughter of the man who pushed the case to a faulty conclusion all those years ago—be permitted to work with Andrew behind the scenes in search of the answers?

2
    Dorsey parked her rental car on the shady side of the street across from her father’s house. Matt Ranieri lived in a tidy half-brick split-level in a sprawling 1960s-era Philadelphia suburb. Back then, the neighborhood had been mostly upwardly mobile middle-class and totally Catholic. St. Patrick’s Church was two blocks to the right on this same street, and St. Francis of Assisi three blocks to the left, cleanly dividing the neighborhood into the Irish parish and the Italian parish. Over the years, members of other faiths had moved in, and the parishes had shrunk. Several years ago, the doors of the elementary school serving St. Francis had closed and the students were directed to St. Patrick’s, which had the larger building. These days, as many kids from the neighborhood attended public school as they did St. Pat’s. When the diocese consolidated the two parishes, enrollment at St. Francis had declined further. Dorsey had been in her old parish church exactly three times since she graduated from college. One wedding—hers—and two funerals, her former mother-in-law’s and her grandfather’s.
    She crossed the street, toying with the house key on the chain inside her right pocket as she glanced down the empty driveway. Walking around to the back porch, she paused at the bottom of the steps to note the condition of the yard. The grass was neatly cut, the roses had been pruned, some of the shrubs cut back, and the flower gardens weeded and freshly mulched. Her dad must have been here for at least a week, she reasoned; it would have taken him that long to prune and weed and mow. She climbed the steps and unlocked the door, stepped into the stillness.
    “Dad?” Even knowing he wasn’t at home, habit found her calling as she walked through the kitchen into the hall that led to the front door. “Dad?”
    The downstairs windows were all tightly shut and the shades pulled down. She scooped up what appeared to be several days’ mail from the floor and skimmed through it while she carried it into the kitchen and placed it on the table. She opened the refrigerator and took out a diet soda, popped the tab, and took a few sips before closing the door. She exhaled loudly, looked around, and headed into the living room. The message light was blinking red and silent on the answering machine. Without hesitating, she hit the play button. If someone had already called her father to tell him about Shannon Randall, Dorsey wanted to