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shaking fingers and nodded. “And you’ll let me know what’s happening with the investigation?”
    “We’ll keep you up to date,” Marjorie assured him.
    “Like hell we will,” Jackson said a few moments later when they were back in his car. “Right now John Merriweather is at the very top of my suspect list.”
    Marjorie shot him a look of surprise.
    “Think about it, Maggie. Who has the most to gain from Amberly and Cole disappearing? Max’s father, that’s who. He has a great motive for wanting them gone.”
    She didn’t want to even think about the fact that he’d just called her Maggie, something nobody else in her entire life had ever done. She didn’t intend to reprimand him now, as right now she was considering what he’d said about John Merriweather.
    “He might have a good motive to get rid of them in a sick sort of way, but he doesn’t have opportunity. He had his son with him all weekend long,” she replied.
    She pulled out of the Merriweather driveway and headed in the direction of the Kansas City field office where they would next be interviewing Amberly’s closest coworkers.
    “I saw a picture of Max and his dad on the bookcase. What is he...about six?” Jackson asked.
    “Seven,” Marjorie replied. “I think he’s going to be eight in a couple months.”
    “I don’t know about you but when I was seven my father could have tucked me into bed and then left the house, gone to a movie, slept with a woman and been back home again before I woke up the next morning.”
    She slid him a curious glance. “And where would your mother have been while your father was out through the night hours?”
    “Dead. She died when I was five, of cancer. But that really doesn’t matter now—my point is that John could have easily slipped outside the house while Max slept, driven to Mystic Lake and done something to Amberly and Cole and been back before Max awoke the next morning.”
    “So, supposing he made that midnight run to Mystic Lake, then where are Amberly and Cole? If he killed them, why not just leave the bodies in the house?”
    “Nobody said I had all the answers, darlin’. I just have theories.”
    “I think this one is kind of lame,” she replied.
    “Maybe,” he agreed, the laid-back agent once again present. “John mentioned something about the last time a man tried to kill Amberly. What was that all about?”
    “It’s actually the case that brought Amberly and Cole together. Somebody was killing young women in Mystic Lake and leaving dream catchers hanging over their bodies. The mayor of Mystic Lake asked for FBI help, and since Director Forbes thought Amberly was the perfect agent to assist, because of the Native American overtones, she was sent to Mystic Lake to work with Cole.”
    She paused to make the turn into the parking area of the field office, a three-story brick building in the downtown area. “The perp eventually went after Amberly and trapped her in a rented storage unit. It was John’s best friend and neighbor who had taken her.”
    She frowned in thought as she pulled into a parking place. “Ed...Ed Gershner was his name. He had some crazy notion that the only way John would be happy again was if Amberly was dead and John could finally forget her. Thankfully, Cole found Amberly, killed Ed and the rest, as they say, is history.”
    She turned off the engine and they both got out of the car. “Hopefully these interviews will go fairly quickly. It’s got to be getting close to lunchtime by now,” he said.
    Marjorie hurried after his long strides, successfully stifling the impulse to knock him upside his head.

Chapter Three
    Amberly Nightsong Caldwell’s coworkers at the FBI field office had little to disclose about anyone who might want to harm her. She wasn’t currently assigned to any active case. Her director knew she was in the middle of a transitional time in moving Cole into her home, and so he’d given her desk duty pushing paperwork, and regular