“Nikki, the TV or the DS, but not both,” he said.

“Mom lets me.”

“You want me to call her? If she says otherwise, it’ll cost you the DS for the week.”

She flipped the machine shut, stuck her lower lip out as she did so, and huffed as she pushed it aside.

“This show is boring,” Nikki said.

“No it isn’t,” Emily complained. “I like it.”

“Why don’t you read, Nikki? After this show, we’re going to read together. The three of us.”

“Oh, Dad . . .” Emily complained. To her sister she said, “See what you did?”

“Did not.”

“Did too!”

“Girls!” Walt said, raising his voice. “This show, then reading.” He looked over at them thinking that these two children defined him more than his job, more than any of his accomplishments. At school events he introduced himself with “I’m Nikki and Emily’s father.” He thought that summed it up.

His computer chirped from the living room.

“Skype,” the girls both said, nearly in unison.

“I’ll get it,” Walt announced. “But when this show’s over,” he said, already moving toward the dining table, “don’t start another one.”

“Yeah, yeah . . .” Nikki said, sounding entirely insincere.

He was going to have to work on that attitude of hers as well. “Have you got a pen?” Boldt asked once Walt had logged on.

“I do.”

“There can’t be a paper trail right now, although that’s being worked on.”

“Did you get my e-mail with Wynn’s shoe information?”

“I did. Thanks for that. More to come. Stay tuned.”

“Ready when you are.”

“These are the e-mail addresses on the list server: all people who requested to be notified of Gale’s parole. Some, I’m told, had restraining orders in place. Others were his victims. He had a pile of assault charges by the time they put him away. There are twenty-two on here. I’ll read them slowly. Here goes.”

Boldt, head down in the video, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, out of scale on his huge head and looking toylike, read the e-mail addresses carefully, calling out capitalization, underscores, and “dots,” working patiently through the list.

Walt read each back. Some were easy to identify the sender by the name, others wouldn’t be difficult to follow up on because of the host server—the name of a football team or a recognizable company. Five were generic and therefore obscure.

“They’re going to be tricky,” Walt said.

“I could ask Buddy Cornell to chase down the real names. There’s probably an e-mail trail in their system from these people, and I imagine at least some sign their names when sending a message. All he’s got to do is chase down those e-mails and read them. As long as we keep this by phone, and off any kind of paper trail, I think Buddy will help us.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Let me check it out for you.”

“I can Google the e-mail addresses as well. Sometimes that works. And I can cold-call the hosts. We’ve had to do that before and some of them are pretty cooperative.”

“And we have CIs here,” Boldt said, meaning criminal informants, “that are magicians when it comes to this stuff.”

“Anagrams,” Nikki’s girlish voice said from over Walt’s shoulder.

“Hello, young lady,” Boldt said from the screen.

Walt didn’t have to look over his shoulder because the camera view that showed his face in a small window also showed Nikki standing to his left.

“My friends’ parents . . .” she said, “they make anagrams out of my friends’ names so you can’t tell who they are. ’Cause of all the creepy stuff you talk about at school, Dad. Maybe they’re anagrams.”

Boldt bit back a smile on the screen.

“Worth a try,” he said.

“Looks like my daughters are going to help me,” Walt said.

“Can’t argue with that. I’ll give Buddy a call as backup.”

“Much appreciated.”

“And thanks again for the shoe stats. I think we may be able to pull this off by tomorrow sometime, if you’re available.”

“I’m here,” Walt confirmed.

They ended the call. Walt wrapped his arm around Nikki. “Okay, girl . . . looks like you just earned yourself a job. Double your allowance if you unscramble these names.”

“What about me?” Emily complained.

“You take half the names. Nikki takes half. Nikki goes first. You both get the extra allowance, and reading time is delayed by half an hour.”

“Hooray!” Nikki shouted, too close to her father’s ear.

The girls took to the work enthusiastically, thrilled to be needed, he realized. It alerted him to a glaring omission in his fathering: he took care of his girls, but he rarely asked them to take care of him. As the computer printer whined from the other room, Walt realized it wasn’t just the girls. He felt uncomfortable when others offered him their help—he looked at generosity as a debt, rather than as a gift. Even in the workplace, he had trouble delegating, pleased to have a deputy sheriff to handle that for him. He was sitting there contemplating the mistakes he’d made with Gail and was still making with the girls when Nikki delivered several pages of printout to him.

“We crossed out the ones that didn’t make any sense,” Emily explained.

“And we put arrows by the ones that sounded like names,” Nikki said.

He looked at his watch: they’d been at it for just over an hour, content to eat up reading time. He’d been occupied with Larry King and stewing over his personality shortcomings.

He praised their effort, placed the pages down onto the coffee table, and headed into their room; the three of them spent forty-five minutes reading about five kids inside Disney World after dark. The girls went to bed reluctantly, which was typical for any night, especially in summer when the sun didn’t set until nine-thirty and the sky glowed faintly well past ten p.m.

He got a kick out of their effort, pushing the pages aside and reviewing some paperwork from his briefcase until well past eleven. Letterman was tearing into the administration’s health care proposals as Walt packed it up for the night. He killed the TV and subsequently knocked the girls’ hard work onto the floor, scattering the pages.

There was no explaining what the eye could see or the ear could hear. No explaining why Walt could look across a forest floor and effortlessly spot game tracks where others could not. No explaining how a musician could hear a flurry of notes within the confines of utter silence. Walt was bent over and scooping up the fallen pages as his eye picked first one word singled out with a hand-drawn arrow, then a second.

His eye darted around the page as his fingers found the sheet and brought it up to a reading distance, Walt still bent over the coffee table. Both entries had been crossed out, distinguished as nonsense words by either Nikki or Em:

The cross-out was such that he could read the word as Fine or Fino.

The top of the page carried an extraordinarily long URL that combined the website and the search string. Walt hurried to the computer and carefully typed the address into the browser bar, his throat tight, his mouth dry, his heart pounding. He knew the answer but the investigator in him would not allow any jumping to conclusions, demanding precise evidence. He double-checked each letter in the long address, not wanting to input it a second time and, confirming its accuracy, hit Enter.

The screen went blank. Walt found himself holding his breath as the web page loaded. He scrolled down the results, the page lying alongside the keyboard.

“No . . .” he muttered aloud.

The e-mail address “Anon.Weakfish@gmail.com” unscrambled to Fino A Shaw Ken. Fiona Kenshaw.

He looked back and forth between the page and screen in disbelief, trying hard to convince himself there had to be a mistake. Obviously, the girls had input the address incorrectly. But that reliable eye of his picked out the truth: all the double-checking wasn’t going to change the results. Nikki and Emily had done a fine job of it.

He pushed away from the table. The chair legs caught and he nearly went over backward, throwing his legs out and recovering his balance. But he was unsteady on his feet as he stood and roamed the room, his eyes unable to leave the screen and the piece of paper carrying his daughters’ handiwork. He paced. Hurried into the kitchen and popped a beer and drank from the can greedily as he continued to contemplate what it all meant. He knew what it meant, of course, but he couldn’t allow it to mean that, so his effort was to reframe the evidence into something that made sense, offered an alternate universe.

He pried his eyes away long enough to glance at his watch: 11:28. He pulled the BlackBerry off his hip and held it in his palm, then sneaked a glimpse over his shoulder toward the girls’ room. This was the collision of work and family, this moment and moments like it. The after-hours demands of the job and his allowing it to interfere.

He scrolled through the BlackBerry’s address book to Myra’s entry. His sister-in-law or Kevin would willingly come over and be in the house for the sake of his daughters if asked. Kevin was probably awake anyway.

He worked the device and his thumb hovered over the green key, now with Fiona’s cell number highlighted. Then, not.

The list server evidence was not yet evidence—it would have to arrive in written form from either Boldt or Buddy Cornell to be of use to Walt’s prosecuting attorney. Walt had mistakenly—stupidly, he thought—requested that Boldt pressure his people to authenticate the evidence, to deliver it formally. Could he now undo that request without sending up a red flag? Was he willing to do so for her? Did he dare jump to such conclusions without giving her a chance to explain things?

But he told himself he wasn’t jumping to any conclusions. First had been Gale’s NA sponsor telling him Gale was atoning to women, and Walt’s recollection of the photo of the wide-eyed black kid on Fiona’s wall, photos taken of Katrina victims: New Orleans, Gale’s home city. Now the list server e-mail address providing a direct link between Gale and Fiona. Combined with Fiona’s recent erratic behavior, Walt began to see his suspicion of Kira—and Fiona’s reaction to it—in a new light. He thought back to his interview of Vince Wynn on the night of the backyard shooting, and Wynn’s mention of having received an e-mail from the list server announcing Gale’s parole, nearly two weeks late; he connected this, rightly or wrongly, to Fiona’s going pale at the Advocates dinner as she got a look at her phone. Had she, too, received a list server e-mail that night? Had the man at the back of the conference room, the man Kira had mistaken for her abductor, Roy Coats, actually been Martel Gale? If Kira knew about Fiona’s past it was conceivable she’d experienced a transference, making Fiona’s anxiety her own, and not realizing the difference. The two kids working valet parking had described the man as a hulk of almost comic book proportions: that fit with Gale’s steroid-induced enormity.

If he drove up to see her, what excuse would there be later for his not having used a ruling of probable cause to conduct a search of the property? He no longer needed the Engletons’ permission for such a search. He had to shed his emotional response and think this through more carefully. Where did the evidence lead? What was hard evidence, and what amounted to speculation? What would his record show or suggest? Detailed records were kept of his e-mails, phone calls, radio calls, informal meetings, proper interrogations. Could he untangle that to keep charges off of Fiona? Was that what he wanted to do? Was that something he was willing to do?

He had prided himself over a career of public service at having never corrupted a case or allowed himself to be corrupted. The office had accepted donations of Hummers, RVs, boats, trailers, and cash—He had never once taken so much as a gas can or a dime for himself. He’d had ample opportunity to screen friends from drunk driving charges or excuse parking tickets. Never had done it. But Fiona was different. Not only could he forgive a woman from defending herself against the likes of a Martel Gale, but after nearly two years of avoiding women in the wake of his marriage’s collapse, he’d now found the one woman he was willing to risk himself with—and here was his repayment. It seemed quite possible she’d bludgeoned a man to death.

His thumb cleared the phone’s search field and typed an “F” into the blank bar. Hovered there.

But his cell phone calls were a matter of public record. He looked toward the kitchen phone. His home calls could easily be subpoenaed. His work calls. His e-mail. He cursed into the room: his life was a matter of public record.

He caught sight of the computer. Nikki had a Hotmail account she used for instant messaging. He’d set it up for her. He knew the password. He stepped toward the dinner table, recalling that Skype allowed the user to place phone calls anywhere in the world.

Including six miles up the highway.