I gave the cabbie everything I had left from Virginia’s premature payout as soon as we pulled up behind my car. It didn’t make much of a tip considering how far off the beaten path he had to go to get there. He grunted something between thanks and a curse, rolled up his window, and left me stranded. Going out to Dolores without a wrecker to haul her away was a risk, but I was sure I could get her to come around as long as I had a few minutes to coax her.

The first thing I did was stuff the papers Detective Boggs had pulled out when he turned the inside of the car into a snow globe back into the glove compartment. I packed them down to make a nest for my gun, which I lay down only after making sure the hammer was fully seated. While I was at it, I dug the new licenses out of my pocket and tucked them in with the rest of my wadded paperwork.

I thought about taking another swing at investigating the grow op, but a few passing cars dissuaded me. Roush wouldn’t be able to help if the cops caught me prowling again. Now that I knew the police had been there already, there wasn’t much point in checking anyway. I didn’t trust them to dig up all the evidence, but I was damn sure their bumbling attempts at searching had destroyed anything that wasn’t right on the surface.

I waited a few minutes, thinking I might draw out the black Cadillac I saw the night before. It looked like I was alone, so I allowed myself to enjoy the weather. The sky was as clear as it got—a blanket of white-gray smog that let in enough sun to dry the puddles from the overnight drizzle. A few birds who hadn’t accidentally eaten pesticide or strangled themselves with plastic six-pack rings chirped from nearby rooftops. If the place wasn’t such a dump, it might have put me in a good mood.

The pervasive smell of rot and the humid heat seeping out of the cracked pavement didn’t take long to get under my skin, and I started to itch all over. It took me a few jittery stabs to get the key into the ignition, but all the mental loin-girding I had done to prepare for the great pankration had beeb for nothing. The engine turned over with the first twist of the key.

I let my hands steer Dolores where they wanted to go, and my mind wandered. I didn’t have much to go on after getting shut down by Roush, but my gut said Isabel would come through. Our parents had imprinted us both with a strong urge to pursue justice no matter the cost. They taught us to always defend those who couldn’t defend themselves. They had meant well, but both of our lives would have been a hell of a lot easier if we hadn’t been fed so many fairy tales of knights in shining armor saving townsfolk and princesses emancipating the kingdom’s slaves.

I was surprised when I saw my apartment building instead of my office, but only until I turned the wheel to round the corner. A waft traveled up from my underarms and out my collar, and I nearly passed out. My subconscious had known how badly I needed a shower.

I slowed as I approached an open parking spot but got cold feet when I saw a pair of headlights in my mirror. The car behind me broke away at the first turn, but I did a full loop around the block to be sure, then another turn specifically looking out for black Cadillacs. It felt sillier every time I thought about it, but I trusted my instincts. If I had a bad feeling, it was for a reason. Ignoring those silly hunches was a good way to get hurt—or worse, to get others hurt.

My apartment was on the third floor and a perpetually out-of-service elevator made it a walk-up. An outsider might think my pad looked tidy, but it was an illusion. Really, it was just empty. The space was nothing more than three blank rooms to hold my clothes and give me somewhere to sleep that wasn’t my desk. The walls were decorated only with water stains and a lurid yellow wash from the previous tenant’s smoking habit.

I went straight to the bathroom and got the shower running. The pipes clinked and clanked, then vomited a spray that looked like tea but smelled like kerosene. I gave it some time to clear the worst of the rust and plundered the cupboards in the kitchenette for anything edible. I ate a breakfast of stale crackers and a few fistfuls of cereal. A chitinous coating of sugar and preservatives had armored the kibble against the deleterious effects of time and mold, but the pieces were dry and sharp.

I opened the fridge on a whim. A lonely carton of milk was on the top shelf, trying to make friends with the ketchup and mustard. I didn’t remember buying the condiments; they were as much a part of the refrigerator as the burned-out bulb and whiny coils. The carton’s sides bulged out, and a green crust had formed around the spout. Whatever was growing inside was one step away from gaining sentience. Opening it even to dump it down the sink might have been punishable as a war crime. Since I didn’t have time for a trip to the Hague, I left it where it was and grit my teeth against the razor shards of undampened cereal.

I muscled down enough reconstituted sawdust to mediate the war between liquor, coffee, and the hungry digestive juices inside my stomach, then went back to the bathroom. The spigot that stuck out from the broken tiles of the shower’s wall wasn’t sputtering as much. The stream gushing out alternated between cloudy yellow and black-flecked clear. After watching it a minute, I decided it was more clear than not and hopped into the weak jet of icy needles.

It took a few minutes and half a bottle of shampoo before the water running around my legs was the same color as the water hitting my head. I didn’t spend a second longer in the stream.

Isabel would need time to collect information, then a bit longer to realize sending it was the right thing to do. I thought I might be able to get a few hours of sleep, but as soon as I laid down on the lumpy, floorbound mattress, my tiredness fluttered away.

My thoughts spun the way the world seemed to when I was right in the sweetspot of drunkenness between harsh reality and cool oblivion. In those cases, I put an arm or leg on the ground as an anchor and let the depressant effect of the alcohol drag me under. It wouldn’t work now. My mind kept hitching like a record on a turntable with a busted arm.

The cyclic motion turned into ambulation. I paced around the lath and plaster cage of my apartment in my boxers. No idea would stick. I needed something I could dig my teeth into, and I needed to be there the second Isabel called or sent me something. Sleep was as much a pipe dream as finding Ethan, and I could only chase one at a time.

I pulled up to the office and saw it with fresh eyes for the first time in years. The squat building seemed to sag, and the various patches of dirt meant for landscaping ran the gamut from barren to overgrown with weeds. The paint was chipped, and a film of dust and caustic chemicals from the ClearLife factory dimmed every window. An archaeologist could have tracked the gradual easing of regulations and oversight by analyzing the concentration of toxins present in the striated precipitate.

I was so busy gawking at the partially occluded sign that I didn’t watch where I was putting my feet. My toe caught on the turned-up corner of a concrete slab, punched up by shifting dirt and expanding ice over several winters of neglect. I caught myself on the railing stairs’ railing, nearly ripping the flimsy metal lattice out of the wall.

The place was a deathtrap. If I ever had a few bucks to rub together, I’d have to get it fixed up—or at least have Cal find us an insurance policy. For now, lawsuits weren’t a high priority. I was deep underwater on my mortgage, had no assets to speak of, and no wages to garnish.

The newly acquired other-sight followed me into the office. The lobby was bleak with its yellowed lights and worn furniture, but Cal made sure it was clean enough to not be an embarrassment. My office was another story.

Every time I thought of the cramped space, I imagined it as it had been in the beginning. Now, it was impossible to see it as anything other than a midden of loose paper, discarded fast food wrappers, and cast off scotch bottles. It was a marvel the few clients I had in the last years made it past the door. The only clear spots were a single chair in front of my overflowing desk and a narrow aisle to it.

I tried to ignore the mess, but when I went to look at the documents Virginia had provided at the beginning of my search, I couldn’t find them. Sometime in the last two days, they had been sucked into the churning Charybdis of my office. I turned over reams of crumpled paper in my search, finding places to stuff them as I went. Before I knew it, Virginia’s files were out of my mind, and my focus was on cleaning.

My room got bigger as I picked through the trash, and I felt less closed in. I cleaned the floor until I unearthed the couch off to the side, then dug in and around it, picking up spare change. I found enough between the cushions to buy a new bottle of scotch, then dove far under the divan to clear some of the most ancient junk. I found an envelope, pinned against the wall by the couch’s stubby leg, amid a graveyard of used kleenex and the crusty amber husks of dead insects.

The envelope fallen off the abutting filing cabinet in some bygone era. Inside were four crisp ten-dollar bills. I found it hard to imagine a time when I could lose forty dollars and not spend the next two weeks tearing the place apart looking for it.

Now it felt like a prize, some nameless entity rewarding me for moving in the right direction. The money could bump up the quality of the bottle I bought to somewhere near the top shelf. That, or it could buy me a couple meals and a tank of gas.

Every time I heard the lobby door open, I stopped rustling and strained to hear over the settling papers, plastic garbage bags, and clinking bottles. Each time, Cal’s voice answered, and he led the customer back into his office.

I picked up the handset on my desk to check the dial tone and made sure the phone company hadn’t shut off my line. The robotic squeal was there, but the ringer kept quiet. The fax machine in the lobby was equally taciturn. When I bought it five years ago, I thought I’d have more than enough cases between me and my lieutenant detectives to keep it fed, but now it languished from disuse. The only work it got was a few forms a week from Cal.

Noon came and went. My stomach hurt from emptiness, but I was accustomed to the pain. The crackers and cereal I ate earlier gave me enough strength to pack away nearly all the trash, but there were still a few piles left when the sleep I’d been missing caught up with me.

I put a knee down on the couch to reach a bottle I’d spotted around the side. Once I got it and stuffed it in a bag, the couch sucked the rest of my body down.

It was the kind of nap a dog can only dream of. My body floated as my mind flipped in and out of this world, trading places with another Howl who existed in a brighter, happier universe near ours—one where the red baseball cap hanging by a hook next to the door was instead screwed down on Growl’s head. He was out on the street, solving petty crimes and disappearances like his favorite uncle.

A string of beeps shunted my mind back into my body, and the mechanical whirring that followed pulled me up like a backhoe dredging muck from the bottom of a pond. I made a schlorp sound as I unstuck from the soft cocoon of the cushions and knocked over a bag overflowing with bottles as I ran across the room.

Cal held the outer door open, shaking hands with an elderly couple, a muskrat and a llama, as they departed. They startled at the sight of a half-crazed bloodhound with cowlicks all over his body charging out from the dark hallway, but Cal’s lack of a reaction calmed them.

I ran to the fax machine and looked at all the flashing lights, praying the damned thing had ink and paper and wasn’t jammed. Something clicked inside the cabinet responsible for all the whirring and grinding sounds, and a piece of paper stuck out of the printer like a tongue. I let it grow for a second but tore it out before it dropped. The last inch became smudge where the grainy artifacts caused by the machine’s inability to mimic the original’s colored stationary had smeared.

There was no letterhead and no official seal to indicate it had come from the DA’s office. Isabel wouldn’t want to incriminate herself with a paper trail. Then again, she wouldn’t have used a watermark at all. The formal letter in my hands was typed over a grayed image of a carrot. I didn’t recognize the calling card or the name in the closing line my eye shot to: Lady Demoiselle.

It wasn’t like Isabel to use an alias so whimsical. My eyes ran up the block of text to the top, and I read a few lines.

“Salutations, Inspector O’Howell. I hope this message finds you well. I don’t wish to be a bother, but I am in most dire need of your assistance.”

The same stilted style continued through the document. I skimmed it to suck out the information without putting myself back to sleep.

The letter was about a case. A woman, apparently a big name in the Parisian fashion industry, had misplaced a whole shipment of rather expensive jewelry. Lady Demoiselle watched the crate get packed onto a cargo ship, and she had records of it arriving safe in New York City. From there it had been loaded onto a freight train to Hot Type City where it was unloaded and held in a warehouse for no more than three days.

When her shipping company went to give it a shove on to the next leg of its journey, they noticed the crate was too light and popped it open. They found nothing but straw packing material inside. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of precious metals and gemstones were gone without a trace.

That’s where I came in. I was to sniff out this elusive treasure and arrange a reunion with Lady Demoiselle’s agents when they came to town a week from now. She assured me the case would be hard, and I’d need to drop everything to work on it.

And why shouldn’t I? The reward she proposed started at five thousand dollars and included a substantial bonus if I got things wrapped up with a nice bow before her people got to town.

Not a bad payday, but Lady Demoiselle insisted it was fair. She was paying not only for my experience and know-how, but also my discretion. She had no appetite for a circus. If she called on the police to help her, it would become an international affair—front page news all over Europe and a real blow to Lady Demoiselle’s good name.

When I finished the letter, I flipped it over to check for more information. My fax machine printed only on one side, so the paper was as blank as it had been when Cal loaded it into the tray.

“Something not adding up?” Cal asked when he saw my scowl.

I shook my head, re-reading parts of the letter. “Adding up a bit too nicely. Like a fist grade math test.”

I handed the page to Cal to get his take on it. He mopped both eyeballs with his tongue as they moved down the page.

“I don’t need a crystal ball to see this is a scam,” I said as he finished. “Two nights ago, Virginia’s telling me to bail on the kid and drop the case. Now, after I kept prying, this comes along to take my mind off it. It’s too clean. I smell a ruse.”

“You think she sent this?”

“No, probably not. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s been seeing a couple black Cadillacs of her own. Somebody doesn’t want this kid to get found.”

“Any clue who it’s from?”

I took the paper back and looked more closely. Besides the watermark and the bogus name at the bottom, there was nothing to identify the writer. I might have recognized a handwritten letter, but this had been banged out on a typewriter.

“Why the time limit?” I said, letting Cal’s question drop as I thought out loud. “What’s going to happen this week?”

Cal filled his lungs to offer a few guesses, but another trill from the fax machine cut him off. The mechanism whirled and clunked, spitting a new sheet.

I expected a follow up, another page with a carrot watermark and a few more clues to unravel, but this message came on a piece of lined paper ripped from a legal pad so the frayed edges at the top were seen as shadows in the print-out. I recognized the handwriting from a dozen forged doctor’s notes when I was in school.

“Howl. You were wrong about the matter being the talk of the town. I had to go digging before I heard anyone mention the bust, but I found why they were keeping it quiet. Two of the other kids involved were the usual delinquents, but the third was Russel Sanders’s son, Douglas. He and Commissioner Fosse are joined at the hip, so I suspect his friend is paying him back for old favors. I’m taking a risk sending this to you, but you need to know. —I”

I read the message twice, then crumpled it up in an ashtray and put a lighter to it. I kept the letter from Lady Demoiselle as pristine as possible. There might be some clues there, but with a more direct lead to follow up on, I had to set it aside for now.

Cal wet his eyes again and looked at the smoldering paper in the ashtray, bringing my attention back to it just as a glowing ember drifted up like a balloon out of a child’s weak grip and floated toward a rack of Cal’s pamphlets. Some were dry while others had an unholy chemical coating to make them as glossy as polished glass.

I clapped the spark out before it settled in with the papers, then watched the rest of the note burn down, ready to put out any more escaped embers. I’d pushed Isabel out on a limb to send that. The least I owed her was a solid effort to keep it between us.

Once all the incriminating text had burned away, I stamped out the rest with a few quick pats.

The information was days old by then—I would have had it the night before if the police weren’t so cagey—but that only heightened the urgency. I wouldn’t go as far as suspecting Fosse or Sanders for being directly involved in Ethan’s disappearance, but Douglas must know something. Interviewing him might put a black smirch on the Sanders’s name, but only a complete sociopath would think that wasn’t a fair cost for finding a missing child. Unfortunately, Russel Sanders—the executive of a slew of broadcast networks used to disseminate misinformation, influence the public, and incite political dissent for financial gain—ticked all the boxes.

Cal tracked me scurrying around the lobby as if he was watching a swinging pendulum. I dumped the ashtray into a garbage can, poured myself a cup of coffee, dropped the letter with the carrot watermark off in my office, grabbed my hat and coat, and was out of the building all in the space of thirty seconds.