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all just as worried as Pete is about Frank. Pete may be his partner, but the rest of us are sick about this, too. I figure there’s only one person on the earth who’s more worried than we are right now, and that’s you. Help us. Don’t let Vince and his attitude get in the way.”
    So I told him, in a nutshell, about the argument — not all of it, I admit. But I told him about two out of three bones of contention. If he already knew about the third, a Harriman family secret, he would have to give me some hint of that knowledge before I talked about it. My own connection to that family might be only by marriage, my opinion about such secrets contrary to the Harrimans’ own — none of that mattered. I owed it to Frank to keep my mouth shut.
    Reed kept his face completely impassive. If he agreed with Frank about asking Mark Baker for his sources, Reed never let any judgment show. If he thought Frank was crazy to let his wife know the former fiancée was beckoning, he kept it to himself. If he knew the family secret, he wasn’t letting on.
    Vince came back in with the coffee. Cody put his ears back and hissed at him.
    Reed tried, but for all his former composure, now he couldn’t hide a smile. Vince told him to shut up, and he laughed aloud. He took a sip of coffee, thanked Vince, and got back to business. He repeated some of what I had said about the fight, asked me if that was correct. I nodded. Vince went back to leaning on the door.
    “Did Frank tell you anything about what he’d be working on today?”
    “No.”
    “Did he call or communicate with you at any time today?”
    “No.”
    “Did you try to contact him?”
    “Yes.” I told them about the attempts at paging him.
    “He didn’t call back?”
    “No.”
    “Did he
try
to reach you?”
    I looked away. “Not that I know of.”
    “Didn’t page you?”
    “I don’t carry a pager.”
    “Nothing on your answering machine or voice mail?” Vince asked.
    “No.”
    “Is that typical?” Reed asked.
    “No. But we had been fighting.”
    “Is this what typically happens when you fight?”
    “Look, I don’t see what this has to do with anything. I’m not sure Frank would want me to talk about our marriage in this way. In fact, I’m sure he wouldn’t.”
    Vince acted as if he would argue, but Reed made the slightest of gestures to him, a small movement of his fingers, and Vince subsided. Catching this interaction awakened me to the fact that I had been seeing teamwork all along. Reed was playing a role, so was Vince.
    “Did you know that Frank planned to go to Riverside today?” Reed asked.
    Still smarting from kicking myself, I said, “I’m not saying another word.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “What the hell are you two imagining? That I let someone who might harm my husband know where he would be? That I — that I arranged for this to happen?”
    “Of course not….”
    “Oh, no,” I mocked. “Of course not!”
    Reed shifted in his chair. Vince’s mouth became a hard line.
    “Just trying to help Frank, right, Reed? Who sent the two of you out here? Lieutenant Carlson? What about you, Vince? You come into this house and ask me if I had made my own husband’s disappearance a news story?” I was shouting by then.
    “Look, we’re just trying to learn what we can about the situation,” Reed coaxed.
    “Get out.”
    “Listen, Irene—”
    “Get out of here. Both of you!”
    The dogs were barking, I realized, and wondered if it was because they had heard me shouting. Rachel knocked on the door. “Are you okay, Irene?”
    Before I could answer, the doorbell rang again.
    I heard Rachel answer it, heard the low sound of men’s voices. Vince and Reed exchanged puzzled looks.
    A moment later there was a knock on the guest room door. Vince moved away from it, opened it slightly.
    “Step back,
Vincente,”
she said with a grin. “You boys are in for a surprise.”
    He stepped back, and Rachel pushed past him. A short, skinny kid in a suit