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“What for?” she asked, looking at me like I was an idiot. It didn’t seem like she was afraid of me snooping around on it. She didn’t see the use for it.

“To see if we can figure this out,” I began to clarify.

“Why don’t you just go see…” she broke herself off and looked at Evans. She might have meant to say Rob’s name or someone else with similar abilities. At least that was my guess.

“Why spend time on that if we can figure this out ourselves?” I said.

Evans waved her hand in a gesture of concession. “He likes the internet,” she said and continued eating her food. She must have been starving. I hadn’t even noticed her begin on a new slice.

Shortly after that, Ms. Byers found me a laptop so I could begin my search. If I was right, there were ways of eliminating possible places they could be keeping Andrea.

“What are you looking for?” Evans asked, a mild interest in her tone, but I knew better by now. Finding Andrea was all that mattered to her at this point. It wasn’t only guilt riding her. She might have been the intended target, but even if that had not been the case, it was her job to get Andrea back. Twisted as that was, seen from my side of things, it was how it was.

“There are sites for anything now,” I said, finding the website I was looking for. People rented homes for shorter stays, didn’t they? And this was a nice little tourist town during the summer. Several people in Ashport had joined such sites, but I had never heard of any trouble with them.

“So how do you find the one house we’re looking for?” Evans asked as she came around the table to look at the screen.

“By searching for a place outside Ashport that’s available later in the fall. That way I can see the calendars for the places that are taken now. Then we can see the homes available on the map. See?”

“Okay,” she said and pointed at the large area northeast of Ashport. “Thomás was headed this way,” she said. “How many homes for rent there?”

I narrowed in on the area, finding five houses for rent. No point in checking out apartments and rented rooms in people’s homes. The kidnappers needed space to hide both themselves and Andrea. It was actually not a bad idea. Staying at the Kreutz farm had left them open to being noticed easily. There weren’t supposed to be people there. But a rented home? The landlord would know, the neighbors as well. And so, they would likely not bat an eyelid at there being people in the house.

Evans listened carefully as I relayed this theory. She nodded, for once a bit more cooperative. It had been useful looking at the map after Rob indicated Andrea’s whereabouts at the farm as well. Evans was more patient this time around.

“So, we have five places that are rented out,” she said. “We need to eliminate the right ones somehow.”

“We need to look at them,” I said and clicked on each one. Three of them where small one-story, one bedroom cabins by the coast. Excellent for vacationing couples. Hardly suitable for four kidnappers and their prisoner.

Evans was standing so close I could smell her perfume. Seemed she had not only clothes but that stashed around town as well. I had begun to see why. Just today she’d been in a fight, drowned a man, and been in a car crash. Her life wasn’t ordinary in the least. Yet, she seemed to do her best to enjoy it between all the shit that happened around her. That was perhaps not fair. It didn’t happen solely around her, but round all the people like her. And she was the one dealing with it. It dawned on me that it had to have been a blow to lose Freddy Miller, the only other person like her.

“I think we can eliminate that one as well,” she said as we looked at a sizeable house on the laptop.

“Why?”

“It’s too far from the water. The owner might claim it’s a two-minute walk to the beach, but my guess is ten minutes.”

“Ah, the seagulls.”

“Yeah, not impossible to hear the little flying bastards, but I would bet on the other house. It was right on the water.”

I clicked back to the page we’d looked at before the last one. A large two-story house. A mix of brick and wooden walls. Plenty of rooms for the kidnappers, and likely a crappy basement for Andrea.

“It’s rented out for another week,” I said as I nodded my agreement. “They didn’t know how long they would be here after they botched their attempt at kidnapping you.”

“Lucky me,” Evans said, her voice almost a whisper.

“Anyway,” I continued, not wanting to talk about the day of the shooting of my partner. “We have to go check this out.”

“We?” she asked as she looked down at me.

“Sure,” I said, not really managing a comforting smile. “Bill’s in the hospital, and no one at work is going to help me with this, or believe any of it.”

She pressed her lips together a moment at that but then nodded. “Okay,” she said.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Ms. Byers blurted on the other side of the table. “Seriously, Maggie? You’re sleeping with this guy?”

I noticed a pressure leaving my shoulder as Evans let go and moved aside one step. I hadn’t even realized she had been that close.

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