Chapter 31

LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS

Episode Eighteen of the Treehouse podcast is troubling. Poppy listens on her phone’s tinny speaker as she drives home from Ziggy’s house. Tonight, the interstate is crowded with long-haul trucks. Unlike the police, Ziggy had identified a witness, a thirty-year-old woman who claims to have seen a suspicious man at Lovers’ Lane the night Alison was taken. Ziggy’s voice sounds higher in the interview than when Poppy met with him.

“What did you see?” Ziggy asks.

“My boyfriend at the time and I were parked at Lovers’ Lane, the section that’s farthest from the road. He got out of the car to take a pee and he said he saw somebody prowling around near the other car.”

“What was the man doing?”

“My boyfriend watched the guy. He seemed to be spying on the couple in the other car.”

“You believe the other car was Alison Lane’s father’s car?”

“I’m not totally sure of it. But there aren’t too many BMWs at Lovers’ Lane. My boyfriend had commented about the car. So we’re watching and the guy is lurking and then we lost sight of him. But I was creeped out, so we got outta there.”

“Why didn’t you come forward sooner?” Ziggy questions like a skilled prosecutor, yet he must have been only ten or so at the time of the interview.

“’Cause I was married to someone else at the time. We’ve since gotten divorced.”

Poppy feels a hand squeezing her insides. How could the police—her office—miss this witness? Or were they not looking? Purposefully not looking.

Look in your own house.

Ziggy continues: “Could you identify the man if you saw him now?”

“No. He was tall, kinda lanky, but I didn’t get a look at his face.”

“Was there anything you saw that would help identify him? His age or race? The type of car he was in?”

“No,” the witness says. But then she says something that nearly causes Poppy to veer off the road:

“When we were leaving Lovers’ Lane, we saw this old-time motorcycle parked out of the way. No owner in sight.”

“What do you mean by ‘old-time motorcycle’?”

“It was like one of those ones with a sidecar, like old war movies where there’re two people who can ride at the same time.”

Poppy feels nauseous, she thinks she may throw up. But it’s coming together.

Dash.