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information,” came the reply, “but the manner of abduction was the same, and they narrowed the suspects down to a stranger. The victim was assaulted and stabbed. I don’t know about red ribbons. I filled out our case on the form for VICAP and I did turn up several child murders in other states. But none of the children were strangled and stabbed, which may signify some other perp.”
    â€œOr he might have changed his habits. Maybe a gun gave him more power in an abduction.” As they both knew, a murderer might change the way he killed, but if the crime had a signature, it usually wouldn’t vary from crime scene to crime scene.
    â€œAny red ribbons in those other cold cases?” he asked, because the ribbon did seem to serve as a signature in at least one case.
    â€œNo. At least,” he added, “there were none in the information I accessed. As I said earlier, we always hold back one or two details that we don’t feed to the media. Maybe those detectives did, too.”
    â€œDid you try calling the detectives who worked the Oklahoma cases?”
    â€œI did. The first Oklahoma one was sure I was actually a reporter trying to dig out unknown facts in the case. I gave him my captain’s phone number, and he hung up on me. He said anybody could look that information up online. Nobody at the second police department knew anything about a cold case.”
    â€œHow about the other Texas case?”
    â€œThat’s a doozy of a story,” Marquez told him with pure disgust in his tone. “It’s in Palo Verde, a little town up near Austin. I couldn’t get their single policeman on the phone at all. I tried e-mailing him, along with my phone number. That was week before last, and I’m still waiting for an answer.”
    â€œWe get a lot of kooks e-mailing us for various reasons,” Garon told him. “And we get about two hundred spam messages a day. The captions are so misleading that you occasionally open one without meaning to. It’s always a scam or a link to a porno Web site. Even with filters, they get through. Maybe your message ended up in the deleted files.”
    â€œI hate spammers,” the younger man muttered.
    â€œWe have a cyber crime division that spends hours a day looking for scams and shutting them down.”
    â€œGood for you, but that still doesn’t solve my problem.”
    â€œYou can fly to Oklahoma and show your credentials in person, can’t you?”
    â€œI can barely pay my rent,” Marquez said miserably as he finished his steak. “I can’t afford the airfare.”
    â€œYour department would pay for the tickets,” Garon said.
    Marquez’s eyebrows met his hairline. “Like hell it would,” he shot back. “Didn’t I tell you that I had to buy my own damned digital camera because my lieutenant wouldn’t authorize the expenditure? He likes his job and the city manager goes over departmental budgets with a microscope.”
    â€œI know how that feels.”
    â€œNo, you don’t,” the younger man assured him. “Unless you’ve had to bring in a receipt for a cup of ice water you bought from a convenience store to back up claiming it on your expense account!”
    â€œYou have got to be kidding!” Garon exclaimed.
    â€œI wish I were,” the other man said sadly, shaking his head. “I guess they’d lock me up for a whole giant Coke.”
    Garon chuckled helplessly. “You need to come and work for us,” he told Marquez. “You could even have a Bucar.”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œA bureau car,” Garon told him. “I get to drive mine home at night. It’s like moving storage for all my equipment, including my guns.”
    â€œGuns, plural?” the detective exclaimed. “You have more than one?”
    He gave the detective a wry look. “Surely you have access to body armor and stop sticks and a riot