Page 51 of The Instruments of Darkness

“How did the subject come up?”

The fresh beers arrived, and we paused until the server was out of earshot.

“We asked about the state of the marriage,” said Steady Freddy. “You know the drill. If a child disappears, you start with the parents and work outward. She told us that her husband had cheated on her, but they were getting through it.”

“So he wasn’t present when you spoke with Colleen?”

“No,” said Steady Freddy. “The procedure in these situations is first to interview the parents separately, compare notes.”

“Was this interview conducted at the house or the station?”

“The house. The husband was in the kitchen, with an officer keeping him company, and she was in the living room. Then we switched them around.”

“Did you ask Stephen Clark directly about the affair?”

“He said they’d had some ups and downs, just like any married couple. Furnish then asked if it had ever been more than that, and Clark responded by demanding to know what his wife had said.”

“Did you tell him?”

“I told him we were interested in what he had to say first, so he squirmed before admitting to an affair that arose out of a conference. He didn’t use the word ‘affair,’ though. He called it a ‘two- or three-night stand,’ which I hadn’t heard before, and gave us Teller’s name, along with whatever contact details he had for her.”

“The dormant website, and a cell phone number that no longer worked?”

“So it was hinky,” conceded Steady Freddy, “but not off the scale. I’ve never had an affair—I find it hard enough to keep one woman happy, and the stress of trying to satisfy two might kill me—but if I got involved with someone and then thought better of it, the first thing I’d do would be to get myself a new cell phone number.”

“What about the website?”

“Some business ideas never get beyond a wish and a name. Or it might be that she no longer wanted Stephen Clark in her life after spending a few nights in his company, and simultaneously decided to find alternative employment.”

“Those theories might be plausible,” I said, “if the website wasn’t the only indication that Mara Teller was anything other than a shadow identity. It’s not a particularly common name, and someone in her profession shouldn’t be so hard to find.”

“That’s the part that itches,” said Steady Freddy. “Even Furnish wasn’t rushing to sign off on it. We had marked her, but then the blanket turned up, followed by word from Nowak’s office that they were going to proceed against Colleen Clark with what they had. But I had intended to talk to the organizers of the forum to set my mind at rest. I might find the time when my wife and I head south tomorrow. It’ll give me an excuse to do something other than drink Earl Grey tea while basking in her mother’s disapproval.”

I decided to play the Delaney Duhamel card. There was no point in holding on to it, not if Steady Freddy was going to contact her anyway. If I didn’t mention her, it would leave bad blood between us.

“I already did,” I said. “Talk to the forum people, I mean, not bask in your mother-in-law’s disapproval.”

“And?”

“Mara Teller paid her registration fee with a money order, so I might be able to trace that back to the post office where it was bought. She would have been asked for ID at the forum registration table. In theory, that should have required her to produce a driver’s license or similar. In practice, a company ID would also have been acceptable, and she could have run one of those off on her home printer. Whatever ID she used, no copy of it was kept, so that’s a dead end.”

Steady Freddy took all this in, fed it through the machinery of his brain, and waited for a result. Whatever emerged didn’t impress him.

“I’m still struggling to make the leap from bed-hopping to abduction and murder,” he said. “Why would Teller be so angry with Stephen Clark that she’d want to harm his son? After all, Clark claimed it was Teller who cut off contact with him, not the other way round.”

“He could be lying about how the affair ended. Or—”

“Is this the part in a Sherlock Holmes story where Watson looks shocked by Holmes’s powers of deduction?” asked Steady Freddy.

“I think you’d have to play Lestrade, but the principle is the same.”

“Happy to oblige.”

“What if Mara Teller attended the forum with the express purpose of targeting someone? Suppose she wasn’t looking for an affair.”

“So if not for business or sex, why was she there?”

“What,” I said, “if she was looking for a victim?”