Final Epidemic by Earl Merkel

seethed, for the first time since the divorce wishing that she still smoked. A sleepover, for God’s sake. Teenage girls don’t have sleepovers anymore.
    The problem was, of course, that she had wanted to believe Katie.
    Increasingly, their relationship had foundered in shoal waters over the past year or so—probably, she did not doubt, a combination of the aftereffects of her divorce from Beck and the natural antipathy between mothers and daughters of a certain age. Any kind of interaction between the two of them risked turning into a conflagration of mysterious origin, and the result had been that both of them avoided any but the most mundane discussions.
    No big surprise there, she thought. Kids learn from watching how their parents act, don’t they?
    But when Katie had raised the subject of spending anextended weekend with J. L. and Carly at the cabin—foolishly Deborah had ignored all the warning signals that had begun blinking deep inside her head.
    It had seemed so . . . so damned touching, at the time. Over the years, she and Katie and—well, Katie’s father—had spent no small amount of time together in the rural Virginia setting. Deborah had told herself that Katie was craving the simple nostalgia of it, and convinced herself that this was a good sign.
    And so the trio of girls had left, driving off in the scarlet LeMans that Carly’s mother had bought the girl the year before, and which always seemed to Deborah to be its own sort of warning flag. Uneasy thoughts had nagged at her all morning, even distracting her during a meeting with an Egyptian industrialist who had run afoul of U.S. import regulations.
    Finally, she had excused herself and gone to her private office. Then Deborah had punched in the number she had been given, the cell phone Carly swore would always be with her.
    No luck, that time or during the three subsequent calls she had made to it. Each call elicited only a vaguely female, automated cyber-voice advising the caller that—here, Carly’s own voice supplied her name—was unavailable but would accept a recorded message.
    Exactly when she had known —known completely, without doubt or equivocation—not even Deborah could have said. There had been no growing suspicion, no litany of the other possible circumstances in which Katie might have chosen to become involved. Deborah had simply known for an incontrovertible fact that her daughter had not gone where she had said she was going, and that it was time for a mother to act.
    She had immediately telephoned J. L.’s parents, whom she once considered close friends; since the divorce from Beck, she had watched all parties reassign the relationship to a far more casual level. They too were concerned—no, theyhad not had word from J. L., and yes, they too had left a message with the cyber-femme—but they had not Deborah’s capacity for the gestalt leap to what was truly going on.
    A call to Carly’s mother was, as Deborah suspected, a complete waste of time; Joyce Holmes was not even in town, let alone working the telephone to get word of her absent daughter. Deborah had no doubt she could track the woman down, if it proved necessary; but for the moment, there were other options and priorities.
    Deborah Stepanovich was not without resources, nor without resourcefulness when the situation required it.
    First things first: a very businesslike call to the office of the Van Dale County sheriff, where she took pains to assure that official that she was not merely a suburban hausfrau fretting over a tardy child. In her legal practice, Deborah Stepanovich dealt with corporate leaders and the international power elite; she could, when she wanted to, command respect not unlike that accorded to the heads of minor governments.
    Within the hour, the deputy dispatched to the cabin was back on the phone with Deborah: there was no sign the cabin was occupied or had been visited in the previous month.
    That her next reaction had been to call her