I had carefully mapped my route to Confidence K-9s, and after I dropped them off, with the dog as my copilot, I navigated to a section of town in the western suburbs. Most houses here were window-dotted rectangles with tile roofs and carports. Some yards were patches of sand and weeds, while others were well-tended St. Augustine or Centipede grass, sporting poinsettias interspersed with garden gnomes and Christmas elves. The neighborhood was solidly working class, and not that different from my own in Delray Beach.

At a stop sign, I checked the street names again as a woman inched through the intersection using a walker that sported tennis balls on the rear legs. If I was lucky, a man named Craig Leone lived two blocks away. I’d traced him here using the phone number that had shown up on Wendy’s deleted voice mail.

I’m always surprised what I can find out about someone after a few minutes on the internet. Forty-five-year-old Craig was either divorced or separated, because he and a woman with the same last name lived at separate addresses now, while last year they had lived together. He was also a father, and definitely a man who’d strayed from the straight and narrow at least one time too many. Without half trying I’d been treated to the specifics of a brief stint in our county jail.

I wasn’t sure what I’d find today, but I knew what I was looking for. I was hoping to find the maniac who had jumped me at Wendy’s town house. I had no intentions of confronting him. If Craig was my culprit, I would turn over his address to the police or get advice about what to do from Teo. If I found a complete stranger, then I’d figure out how I could talk to him about my sister. Of course, I wouldn’t talk here at his house. I would do it in public, at Against the Wind. I thought the chances were probably excellent that I’d find him sitting at the bar tomorrow night. In his message Craig had sounded like a regular.

Once the woman with the walker was safely across, I made my way to the right block, where the house I sought was second from the corner. I pulled over to the shoulder one house away.

Craig Leone’s yard was shabbier than his neighbors’. My high school botany teacher had relished field study, and I could still identify crabgrass and nutsedge—with a few sandspurs thrown in—sprouting in tufts.

The concrete-block house needed a fresh coat of shell-pink paint. Plastic flamingoes and a birdbath had been optimistically placed under a front window, so at some point, somebody at this address had cared. But as I watched the man working on a motorcycle at the top of the gravel driveway, I doubted the happy homemaker had been Craig himself. The muscular tattooed guy with the shaved head and beer belly, the very same guy who appeared to be tearing the motorcycle to bits with his bare hands, wasn’t a flamingo kind of guy, although he might chew the head off a live one on a dare.