Marcella paid at the register, and I dropped a few bills on the table to cover the tip. When she came back, she scoffed at what I had down and doubled it with the change from the bill.

“Always keep your sources happy,” she said in the tone of an arrogant mentor lecturing a new hire. I had been in the game almost as long as she had been alive, but I kept my offense to myself.

Dolores gave me a bit more trouble this time. Marcella offered to grab her car if we swung back by my office, but I didn’t trust her to drive discretely. Reporters like her weren’t shy about pushing to the front and waving their press badges until someone answered their questions. We needed to be invisible if we were going to catch Virginia.

When I told Marcella Dolores would fit in better where we were liable to go, the sidelong compliment got Dolores’s motor running.

Marcella started to trust me more when she saw how expertly I handled the streets. She looked suspicious when I circled Virginia’s house, but didn’t ask questions.

Virginia lived in a neighborhood that had been carefully planned out and built up, but it had been left to rot when the socio-economic topology of the city shifted away from the Gutter and toward the city center. Every lot was the same size. Each cracked foundation was sunk into a yard of mottled dirt and weeds, with a few hunks of shattered pavement strewn about for ambiance. Each house had the same twenty by twenty floor plan, but the paint-and-mold color scheme and gap-tooth pattern of missing shingles differed from address to address. Most of the houses had a square second story plunked down on top, causing the supporting walls to bend imperceptibly outward. Some even had small garages and sheds, but many of the outbuildings’ roofs were swaybacked and not one of them had all the windows intact.

Virginia’s house might once have been as white as her feathers, but now it was a pale khaki color and had a spray of lichenous black grime growing up every side and gnawing away at the wooden shutters and accents. A child’s bicycle lay in the yard with one wheel over the sidewalk. Virginia had probably griped about it on her way to work the day Ethan got kidnapped and left it for him to pick up when he got home. But Ethan had never come home. Not yet anyway.

If Marcella had asked how I knew Virginia was home, I couldn’t have given her a satisfying answer. It might have been some smell I picked up, or a moving shadow in the window, or the sound of tumbling laundry inside. Some things you sense on a level that defies conscious thought.

“You really think she could have done it?” Marcella asked. “To set up your own kid like that…”

Where I saw destitution some would do anything to escape, Marcella saw a family with nothing to hold on to but love for each other. It almost warmed my heart to think she wasn’t yet as cynical as I was, but I knew it was coming.

I didn’t answer her question. Doing so would have set a tone for the rest of the stakeout. One inane question was manageable, but we might be locked in the car together for hours.

We sat in silence for fifteen minutes, burning precious gas and throwing more pollution into the air. I felt a twinge of guilt even though what spewed from Dolores’s noisy four-cylinder was like a raindrop in the ocean compared to the smog output by plants like the ClearLife factory.

I kept my eyes fixed on Virginia’s front door, but Marcella got impatient quickly. She fidgeted with Delores’s loose trim, cracked the window open with the hand crank, rolled it back up, and fiddled under the seat to see if she could adjust it. I didn’t step in until her wandering hands moved toward the glove box.

“You keep rocking the car like that, someone’s going to think we’re up to no good.”

Marcella stopped pulling on the glove box lever. She looked up and down the empty streets, then pouted back at me. I pretended not to notice, but I didn’t have to ignore her for long.

Virginia’s door opened, and she stepped out. Her face was puffy, especially around the eyes.

“Jesus,” Marcella said. “She sure doesn’t look like someone who could throw her kid under the bus for a bit of clout.”

“You think she knows she’s being watched?” I leaned over the steering wheel, double checking the streets for any ominous black Cadillacs.

“I think she looks like a grieving mother.”

“Front page material, eh? Don’t see you whipping out your camera. Forget your telephoto lens?”

“Cut the shit, Howl. All I’m after is the truth, and I think that’s what we’re getting. If she could act that well, she wouldn’t be stuck at the diner. I think we missed something.”

Virginia locked the door, tested it, then started down the sidewalk, giving the bike a wide berth. When she turned down the street toward the nearest bus stop, she pulled up the collar of her too-thin coat and hugged herself against the chill wind blowing bits of dried leaves down the street like tumbleweeds through an old west ghost town.

“I guess we’re about to find out. Virginia’s on the move.”

I shifted Dolores into drive. Marcella sat up straight, ready to rocket forward, but I kept my foot pressed on the brake. Her anticipation built until Virginia turned the corner and was out of sight.

“Well, aren’t you going after her?”

“Patience,” was my only response. I could feel Marcella storming in the seat next to me, and I dragged it out longer than I would usually dare. As Marcella’s fidgeting resumed, I worried she would throw the door open and go running after Virginia herself. I didn’t trust her to be subtle or to come up with a half-decent excuse when Virginia caught her, so I caved. I let off the brake and gave chase at the posted twenty-five miles per hour speed limit.

Marcella’s feet tap danced on the rusted floor. Any one of her antsy steps could have been the one to bust out the flaking shale-like metal, but I didn’t let her drumming push me any faster. I wasn’t going to ruin our chance at blending in by caroming off mailboxes and leaving tire marks at every corner.

I kept a normal speed as I drove past a bus, which had pulled up to the bent bus stop sign Virginia stood next to.

“There she goes!” Marcella said. “Turn this lug around. The bus is going the other way.”

I did turn around, but I took a handful of side streets to do it. Marcella was on the verge of pulling her fur out when we appeared behind bus number 17 again. I passed it as it approached its stop and watched it unload from around the next corner. Virginia wasn’t among the small crowd milling about on the sidewalk after the bus’s door closed, so I drove on.

It took two more stops, each of which I watched from afar—once from behind the bus, the other from across the street—for Marcella to realize what I was doing. No matter how distraught she was, Virginia would notice if the same piss yellow compact followed the bus for blocks, keeping behind it despite its constant stopping and going. I knew where the bus would stop next and met it there to see if she got off. Knowing the stops wasn’t much of a trick, seeing as the public transit system hadn’t been updated in a quarter of a century.

Virginia got off outside a park I recognized not from my rough-and-tumble beat cop days, but from the weekends I spent as the face of national safety initiatives. I had once hosted a drug free block party there, complete with bouncy castle and face paint booths. Now, enterprising local youths had turned the standalone bathroom building into an avant garde art gallery with spray paint and phallic stencils. The guys hanging out alone in the parking lot and under the pavilion weren’t there to play frisbee, but I didn’t look too close for hand-offs. Even if catching drug dealers was in my job description, I had something more important to take care of.

A drug habit would have explained Virginia’s sudden need for money, her rapid weight loss, and her loose reins on Ethan, but she didn’t approach any of the hooded strangers. She stayed rooted at the bus stop, until the number 4 came and swept her away.

Virginia rode closer to civilization with each hop. After twenty minutes of trailing, she was in a place where the bus stop bench hadn’t been ripped out and sold for scrap. It gave me hope for the auditions theory, but as she passed through the nice patch into the realm of strip malls and office parks, acting classes started to look more likely. Then she kept going, and I had to reconsider the illicit drugs angle.

When Virginia got off again, we were in the realm of liquor stores with bars over the window, payday loan lenders, illegal fried food joints that would never pass a legitimate inspection, and of course, a handful of mattress retailers in fierce competition for a share of zero annual customers.

“There she goes,” Marcella said, pointing at Virginia as I pulled past the street she had started down.

“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled. We only had one shot at this, so I wanted to play it safe. I drove up to the next intersection, but when I started my turn, I ran into a throaty honk and the judgmental stare of two circular headlights. I had to swerve to keep straight and avoid getting jammed up in the unexpected one-way street. The area wasn’t ingrained in my mind the same way the south-eastern side of town was.

I needed another block to get my footing. When I finally wound back around to the street Virginia had been shuffling down, she was gone.

“Great,” Marcella said. “We came all this way for nothing.”

“Relax. She couldn’t have gotten far. If I park up at that intersection, we’ll see her coming out of one of these buildings. Not like she’s going to get lost in the crowd.”

There were a few people passing in a hurry, but most of the people I saw were laying in the lee of empty concrete planters and under the overhangs of boarded-up buildings. Mayor Regis, Commissioner Fosse, and the rest of his cabal had come down hard on the homeless population in the name of cleaning up the city. Instead of building shelters, funding rehabilitation and job training centers, providing mental health resources, or a hundred other helpful solutions, they turned it into a crusade.

They committed significant police resources to roughing up guys like these and made changes to the infrastructure like replacing benches with ones less conducive to sleeping that made life even more unbearable for them. On top of that, Regis’s rhetoric resonated with his supporter’s prejudices, and they became more vocal about their distaste for the homeless. You used to see people turn their nose up and ignore the panhandlers shaking coins at them, but now it wasn’t uncommon for those same people to strike back, spitting in the mendicant’s cups and hurling slurs.

I was smart enough to know the only thing separating me from them was a couple of walls. In my case, those walls were growing pretty damn thin, starting to fall down.

I got Dolores parked at the head of the street with a clear view in three directions, so I’d see Virginia no matter what. Just by looking, you’d think every store and office had been shut down, but I could tell a few were still running.

“You keep an eye out that way,” I said, pointing to the east. “Especially watch out for that laundromat and the radio equipment store. I’ve got eyes on this pet hospital and whatever the hell that is with the red door.”

“Uh… Howl?” Marcella said, looking around. “I don’t want to rain on your parade, but I don’t think Virginia would use any of those. We passed a bunch of laundromats on the way here, and I can’t imagine Virginia decided to pick up ham radio as a hobby right now.”

“Just watch,” I said.

“And the pet hospital doesn’t sound likely either. You think Virginia’s got a little cocker spaniel running around?”

“I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to own another animal. Seems goddamn perverse to me.”

“Right. So we can rule that out.”

“Taken at face value, we can rule out all these places, but then we’d have to assume Virginia disappeared into thin air.”

“You think these are all fronts for something else?”

“Probably not all of them, but some definitely are. One thing’s for sure, if she’s out here for an acting gig, it isn’t going to play at the downtown Cineplex.”

“Pornography…” Marcella said, solving the puzzle.

“Maybe. But they’ll probably eschew the camera altogether.”

“You implied it earlier. I just thought you had something a bit more…glamorous in mind.”

“Doesn’t look like it does in the magazines, does it?” I said. “Not sure there’s a path up to the top from here.”

“She could be meeting someone. Or maybe Ethan’s in one of these buildings. Howl, we could be close to busting this case wide open!”

“Or we could be staring down the barrel of more unanswered questions. Why don’t you pipe down and put on your peepers, all right?”

“Oh, Detective O’Howell,” Marcella said, her voice sweet with mock awe. “I can’t believe I’m on a real stakeout with a real private eye.”

“It’s a treat for me too. Now, for the most genuine experience, see how long you can keep your trap shut.”

To her credit, she lasted almost half an hour before she let out a long, creaky yawn. The stretch of silence had me more anxious than I had expected, and I jumped when she moved. In that second of surprise, I regretted not popping open the glove compartment earlier and arming myself.

“Maybe I should hop out,” Marcella said. “Start knocking on doors. Ask around. I believe it’s what you’d call legwork.”

“No. It’s what I’d call suicide.”

“I’d be smart about it. I wouldn’t just go in shouting Virginia’s name.”

“We’re both tied to this case already. Someone knows we’re looking into it. You keep poking your nose where it doesn’t belong, it’s going to get cut off.”

“You’re calling me nosy?” Marcella fanned her fingers out on her chest. “You and I do the exact same thing.”

“The difference is nobody asked you to. I’m trying to help. You’re trying to leach.”

“Fuck off. Nobody asked you to help either. In fact, I believe Virginia explicitly told you to step back.”

I tried to get a word in, but she raised her voice. Anyone on the street would think we were embroiled in an intense, relationship-ending spat.

“I’m looking for the truth, same as you. I’m just using it different. I want to affect change. In this climate, sometimes the only way to make sure anyone is held accountable is to shout the truth from the rooftops.”

“I don’t think blasting a single mother, grieving and down on her luck, for pursuing sex work to pay the bills is speaking truth to power.”

“I keep telling you I have no appetite for hit pieces. I’m not a pap, and the Glyph isn’t a tabloid. I’m an honest journalist.”

“So if we find nothing here, you’ll be glad to run back to your office empty-handed. You’re going to tell your boss you’ve got nothing to print?”

“You underestimate me,” Marcella said with a laugh. “I wasn’t always on staff as a journalist. I wanted to be one from the get-go, was even promised a shot when I took a job as a copy editor. I tried my damnedest to work my way up, out of the late nights and soul-crushing tedium, but no doors would open. It was a boys’ club like any other.”

I took a deep breath, knew she had to vent. “So how’d you do it?”

“I dug up dirt. Just like you suggest. Only it wasn’t on a broke single mother; it was on my lecherous slug of a boss. Once I had the editor-in-chief by his whiskers, a lot more opportunities opened up. Now I’ve proved myself to the rest of the staff ten times over, but whatever happens, Devon will never fire me. If I’ve got no story, then I’ve got no story. They can run a puff piece to fill the space, but it won’t have my name on the byline.”

“How…ethical of you.”

“Might not be pretty, but it’s the way things are. You can’t always— Shit! There’s Virginia!”

Marcella’s eyes darted past me, then she ducked her head. Her reaction was conspicuous, but Virginia had her own head down as she walked away from the pet hospital.

“She look like she’s walking funny to you?” I asked.

“Sure. A bit, what’s it matter?”

“Not sure, just making notes.” She also had a white paper bag the size of a kid’s sack lunch in her hand. “What do you think she’s buying in there?”

“Drugs? What else could it be?”

I nodded, trying to consider other possibilities but always winding up at the same conclusion. “We know she’s been losing weight. If she’s counting on getting herself in ship shape for her triumphant return to the spotlight, she’s almost there. Might be weight loss cheats, but it could be narcotics, too. Or she could be prepping for cosmetic surgery.”

“You think they do that there?”

“Sure. They’ve got the tools. Once you find a doc disreputable enough to hand out drugs, you’d be hard pressed to find something they won’t do.”

“Are places like this common?”

I looked up and down the street. All the businesses were struggling to get by. Most of them had failed already. “Yeah. I’m sure Virginia had options to choose from.”

Marcella’s eyes flashed with hunger. She saw the opportunity for an exposé.

“Don’t go blaming people like Virginia or the people running clinics like this one. Blame the system that makes it necessary.”

Marcella tracked Virginia as she turned the corner toward the bus stop, her jaw slack so I saw the points of her teeth. “It would be one thing if they did stitches and fixed broken legs. If they’re dealing out painkillers and performing irresponsible and unnecessary surgeries, people could get hurt. That’s exactly what I was talking about when I said it was important to get the truth out.”

“Just… Don’t rush a story, okay? There could be a legitimate reason she was there.”

“Fine. We’ve already got one case. I’ll keep that investigation tucked under my hat for later,” Marcella said. “Should we go after Virginia now?”

I shook my head. “I’ll go after her. Have a little chat.”

“I don’t think so Detective O’Howell. You shook me off once already; I won’t let you do it again. I’m coming with you.”

“You’ll ruin my chance of getting anything out of her.”

Marcella gaped. “I’m as good at getting people to talk as you are. Remember how I played you this morning?”

“How could I forget?” I grumbled. “But it isn’t like that with her. Regardless of the promises you make and the spiels about ethics you have locked and loaded, she knows anything she says to you could wind up in the newspaper.”

“I would never—”

I held up my hand to stop her whinging. “She’s got confidential privilege with me. I’m not with the police, and I don’t blab. You can try to convince her all you want, but she’ll never go for it.”

Marcella let out a huff and crossed her arms. “Fine. Then I’ll get out here and see what I can find out about the clinic.”

She started tugging on the door handle, but it wouldn’t give. “Unlock the damn—” she jiggled the post by the window that controlled the lock mechanism. It went down with a clunk, and she jerked the handle again. When the door still didn’t budge, she lifted it back up and kept trying.

I let her struggle until the rusted door gave way and she spilled half out of the car. “Could be dangerous,” I reminded her. “You don’t know who’s running the place.”

“I’m not afraid of some nerds in white coats and glasses.”

“Sure, but they might not be the only ones inside. We don’t know that the place isn’t a full-blown drug running op under the control of Big Ed and his guys. Maybe you could sweet talk Virginia, but how do you think they’d feel if a reporter came snooping around? You think they’d just clam up. No, they don’t take risks and they don’t play games.”

Marcella paused, still half in and half out. She thought about it, and I used the time to scope out the area for black Cadillacs. There weren’t any. I was being paranoid.

After a minute of thinking, Marcella reeled herself back in and slammed the door.

“Look, if it will keep you from screwing things up, I’ll let you know when I have a solid lead again. You can be on the front lines when I find Ethan. Just let me work and keep your ear to the ground for whatever comes next.”

“I’m going to hold you to that, Mr. O’Howell. You break your word and I can make life rough for you.”

“Blackmail?” I said. Marcella’s first story had me looking better than I deserve, but she could flip the script, summon a mob of torches and pitchforks to break down the door to my office. “Sounds familiar. Maybe you’d want to reconsider the height of your horse when it comes to ethics.”

Marcella scowled. “Means to an end. If fucking you over is what it takes to get the truth out about whatever’s going on with Ethan, I won’t lose sleep over it.”

I nodded, but let Dolores speak for me. She growled as I put her in gear and pulled away from the curb.