Free She's Not There by P. J. Parrish

morning out in the duck blind on Old Hick Lake with his dad—found out that he could spot the green heads even before the dogs could hear them. It took him ten more years of sitting in blinds before he realized he didn’t like shooting the ducks. He just liked watching them. He liked watching any creature that flew. He liked the fact that he could tell a Ruddy from a Merganser on the wing with his bare eyes. Liked the fact that he could check off another line in his journal after a sighting. Liked that he had a Wings Over Tennessee certificate on his wall that said he had recorded five hundred sightings. And he really liked the fact that nobody who came into his office had ever had the balls to ask him why a guy like him liked to watch little birdies.
    Buchanan took another sip of bourbon, his eyes flitting over the bar crowd.
    When he was in a place like this, or any place where humans gathered, he saw himself as a big bird of prey—a peregrine falcon maybe—soaring high above and looking down at the world below from all the angles. He could see things that others, so intent on their little grounded lives, could not. He could see the big picture.
    Funny how things turned out. There had been some bad detours in his life and a soul-killing job as an insurance fraud investigator. Yeah, it was funny, that all those mornings freezing his ass off in a duck blind had led to this, doing something that he was really good at.
    He finished the bourbon and thought about ordering another but he was tired from the job he had just finished up in New York and the plane ride in from Kennedy, and he needed to stay alert. He asked the bartender for a glass of water instead and glanced at his watch.
    Almost six . . . a half hour late. So where was this guy Alex Tobias?
    Then he saw him, getting out of the white Mercedes G-Class SUV about twenty feet away.
    The man looked just like his Google images—an easy six six and reedy thin, like he ran marathons or, more likely, power-biked up computer-screen mountains. He had thick black hair and was wearing a gray suit, white dress shirt, and light blue tie.
    Buchanan honed in on the details: The suit was a two-button tight fit, probably John Varvatos. The shoes were sleek and black, maybe Tod’s. The effect was stylish but restrained, like Tobias wanted to be the hippest guy in the room but pulled back from the edge just enough to keep the old guys from feeling too old.
    Buchanan wished he’d had more time to check out Tobias. He didn’t like taking on a case without knowing as much as he could ahead of time.
    Back at Kennedy, there had been just enough time for him to fire up his Acer in the airport and do a quick search on the man. Plenty of sites popped up that gave him the basics: that Tobias was thirty-eight, had graduated from Florida State law school but was now a partner in McCall and Tobias. It was one of the Southeast’s best law firms, complete with sleek mahogany and glass offices in a high-rise, a staff of eighty, and a client list peppered with the names of basketball stars, banks, and cruise-line titans. The firm even had a motto: “We’re In This Together.”
    Tobias was a hotshot in social circles, donating major bucks to Big Brothers, American Cancer Society, Humane Society, the Dan Marino Foundation. Just three months ago, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel business pages, he had paid $800,000 for a vintage gullwing Mercedes at the Auctions America classic car auction. His house was featured in Florida Design, and Tobias himself had been a cover boy in Lawyer Monthly.
    A visit to the Broward County property appraiser’s site told Buchanan that Tobias lived on Castilla Isle in a house he bought in 2007 for $1.2 million. Five keystrokes later, Buchanan found the Tobias home on Trulia with a current value of $4.8 mil. A nice tidy increase in just seven years.
    Buchanan wondered if the guy came from money or if he’d had to work his way into it. Maybe he started