Or maybe I was searching for a needle in a needle factory.

An hour later I had two pages filled in yellow, and one in white. I began calling. Yup, at this hour.

The truth is that sometimes it helps when doing this sort of cold-case work to call late at night. To wake people up at eleven p.m. as they climb into bed, unused to solicitors calling at that hour. You piss them off, sure. But you also get their attention.

“This is Detective Merle Berry,” I’d say. My standard way of doing business, in case anything went south. “I just have a quick question for Mr. Pelo.”

If there was any possibility of a lead, I’d circle the name, get what I could, and move on. If it proved to be nothing, I’d cross it out and one less possibility.

“He’s been gone, almost two years now,” a woman said. I’d only been half paying attention and scanned to my white pad. Saw the name Laura Pelo. An older voice.

“And this is Christian we’re talking about?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“This is your son or husband?”

“He was my son,” she said, a Latin accent coming clearer in her voice. “Is my son?”

A statement first. Then a question. Past tense. Then present.

“Do you know where he went?” I asked.

“We assume maybe he’s dead, but no one knows,” she said. “Who are you again?”

“My name is Paul,” I said, now using my real name. “I met a Christian Pelo at his job. He worked in a liquor store that got robbed.”

“The guy who drank the Coke,” she said. “Mason Falls.”

I sat up straighter. “Yeah,” I said. “Cherry Coke.”

“That was it,” she said. “Cherry Coke. I’ve never had it. Are you a police officer?” she asked.

“I am,” I said. “And I tried to follow up with Christian, but he disappeared. I was concerned, way back then, that something had happened to him.”

“I spoke with my son the day after that robbery,” she said. “At first he was scared to death. But then he won the lottery.”

“The Georgia Lottery?”

“No, not the real one,” she said. “He just called it that. Because his boss was going to give him a thousand dollars as breaking-off money.”

“What do you mean, ‘breaking-off’?” I asked.

“It’s called something else,” she said. “Money to never work someplace again.”

“Severance, you mean?”

“Yes, severance.”

Except that two years ago John Adrian told me Christian no-showed for work. He called it job abandonment. There was no severance paid. In fact, since Pelo disappeared his first week on the job, he had never even received his first paycheck.

“He was happy about it,” the mother said. “Because he didn’t want to go back after that robbery.”

“So they paid him off?” I asked.

“He was gonna meet them somewhere. Then we never heard from him again. We went to where he was staying, but it wasn’t his place. He was sleeping on a friend’s couch. His friend said he’d been talking about leaving town all week. Finally he did.”