Free The Neighbor by Lisa Gardner Page A

working overtime for the next ten years.”
    She couldn’t blame him. “So you’ll track financials, cell phones, and grown-up twelve-year-olds. I’ll go to work on searching the truck and lining up a forensic interviewer.”
    “Think he’ll let us talk to the daughter? We don’t have anything to threaten him with anymore.”
    “I think if Sandra Jones hasn’t magically been found by tomorrow morning, he won’t have a choice.”

    D.D. had just risen from her chair when her desk phone rang. She picked it up.
    “Jason Jones is holding on line one,” the receptionist said.
    D.D. sat back down. “Sergeant D.D. Warren,” she announced into the phone.
    “I’m ready to talk,” Jason said.
    “Excuse me?”
    “My daughter is napping. I can talk now.”
    “You mean you would like to meet with us? I’ll be happy to send two officers to pick you up.”
    “By the time the officers get here, my daughter will be awake and I will no longer be available. If you want to ask me questions, it needs to be now, by phone. It’s the best I can do.”
    D.D. highly doubted that. It wasn’t the best he could do, it was the most convenient. Again, the man’s wife had been missing for twelve hours, and this was his idea of cooperation?
    “We have arranged for a specialist to interview Ree,” she said.
    “No.”
    “The woman is a trained professional, specializing in questioning children. She will handle the conversation delicately and with the least amount of stress on your daughter.”
    “My daughter doesn’t know anything.”
    “Then the conversation will be short.”
    He didn’t answer right away. She could feel his turmoil in the long pause.
    “Did your wife run off?” she asked abruptly, trying to keep him off balance. “Meet a new guy, head for the border?”
    “She never would’ve left Ree.”
    “Meaning she could’ve met a new guy.”
    “I don’t know, Sergeant. I work most nights. I don’t really know what my wife does.”
    “Doesn’t sound like a happy marriage.”
    “Depends on your point of view. Are you married, Sergeant?”
    “Why?”
    “Because if you were, you’d understand that marriage is about phases. My wife and I are raising a small child while juggling two careers. This isn’t the honeymoon phase. This is work.”
    D.D. grunted, let the silence drag out again. She thought it was interesting that he used the present tense, are raising a child together, but couldn’t decide if that was calculated or not. He used the present tense, but not the actual names of his wife and child. Interesting person, Jason Jones.
    “You having an affair, Jason? Because we’re asking enough questions at this point, it’s gonna come out.”
    “I haven’t cheated on my wife.”
    “But she cheated on you.”
    “I have no evidence of that.”
    “But you suspected it.”
    “Sergeant, I could’ve caught her in bed with the man, and I still wouldn’t have killed her.”
    “Not that kind of guy?”
    “Not that kind of marriage.”
    D.D.’s turn to blink. She turned this around in her head, still couldn’t sort it out. “What kind of marriage is it?”
    “Respectful. Sandra was very young when we married. If she needed to work some things out, I could give her space for that.”
    “Mighty understanding of you.”
    He didn’t say anything.
    Then D.D. got it: “Did you make her sign a prenup? Some kind of clause, if she cheated on you, then you wouldn’t owe her anything in the divorce?”
    “There’s no prenup.”
    “Really? No prenup? With all that money sitting in the bank?”
    “The money came from an inheritance. I never expected to have it, ergo I can’t mind too much if I lose it.”
    “Oh please, two million dollars—”
    “Four. You need to run better reports.”
    “Four million dollars—”
    “Yet we live on twenty-five hundred a month. Sergeant, you’re not asking the right question yet.”
    “And what would that be?”
    “Even if I had motive to harm my wife, why would