while she was testifying, I asked her what her plans with the baby were. I just wanted to make sure she was a fit mother, and she said she was going to give it up for adoption.”

“What happened?” Gil asked.

“I had her stay after court was over, and I told her I knew someone who was hoping to adopt. I gave her a phone number of a friend of a friend.”

“You mean Donna Henshaw,” Gil said.

“Yes. I simply introduced them,” the judge said as he shook the hand of a young man and murmured, “So good to see you.”

“That’s the only involvement you had with Ashley?” Joe asked.

“That is all,” he said.

“Why didn’t you come forward when you saw Brianna was missing? It must have occurred to you that the adoption hadn’t worked out.”

“Of course, if I had been a normal citizen I would have come to you right away,” Judge Otero said, “but I’m not. I take my oath of office very seriously. It would not have been within the law for me to tell you about it. I even checked with my attorney to see if there was a way around it.” Gil had to admit that he had no idea of the legalities of the oath for municipal judge. It could be there was a clause that forbade him from discussing court proceedings.

“Plus,” Judge Otero added, “I simply passed a phone number between two people I barely know. For all I knew, Ashley never even called Ms. Henshaw.”

“I was told by Ashley’s lawyer that you set up the adoption,” Gil said, keeping the insinuation out of his voice. He was simply stating a fact.

“The only thing I did was give Ashley a phone number of an acquaintance,” the judge said without seeming defensive. “I didn’t ‘set up’ anything. All I did was help two people who were in difficult situations.”

“And you don’t know why Ashley waited until Brianna was eighteen months old to have her adopted?”

“I have no idea,” the judge said, smiling as a group of people eating funnel cake and ice cream approached them. Clearly, this was his family. “My guess would be that she found that motherhood was too much for her.”

Lucy sat at her computer in the newsroom. It was Saturday afternoon, so no one was around. Copydesk would be arriving in a little while, as would a single reporter. There was no city editor on weekends anymore. That had been one of the first things to go during a round of cutbacks and layoffs. Her fellow editors spent many an hour bemoaning the death of newspapers, but they were old school. They hadn’t grown up using the Internet, as she had. Lucy had made her peace with the fact that one day, after most print newspapers closed, she would probably work as a blogger or as an editor for an Internet news company.

She looked at her computer screen as she typed “Alex Stevens” into Google.

She found a MySpace page for an Alex Stevens from the Czech Republic, who, judging from his shirtless photo, was a gay porn star and had apparently just finished filming The Empire Strokes Back II.

She tried the search again. This time she added “Santa Fe” next to his name on the query line, yet still came up with only porn-related entries.

She was just getting started. Some people made the mistake of thinking that a journalism degree was the same as an English degree and assumed that Lucy had spent all her time in college writing compositions. In fact, a journalism degree is more like one in criminology. She was taught to read upside down and backward, just in case someone she was interviewing had a file folder on the desk she would have to read surreptitiously. She learned surveillance techniques and the legalities of secretly recording conversations. Her professor had once given her a list of ten names of elected officials. Her job: to track down their Social Security number, describe the interior of their home, get their police record, and find out if they drank coffee. All of that required hours of stakeouts and undercover interviews.

Lucy, still in front of her computer, next went to the newspaper’s digital archives. Here she found actual information about Santa Fe’s Alex Stevens. He had his own tow truck company, called Alex’s Towing, which Lucy found mildly interesting. Her second run-in of the day with a tow company. There was mention in the police notes about a break-in at the tow