Trevor’s eyes were wide. “Ahhh. Interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever met an actual private detective before. Do you have, like, a license or something? I’d love to see it.”

“How’d you like to see your face planted on the sidewalk?”

That didn’t seem to faze Trevor. But rather than try to up the attitude, he adopted a reasonable tone. “I’d merely like to know whether you have some authority to interrogate me like this. Mr. Walker here, this is his property, and he’s entitled to ask what I’m doing here, and I can understand why he might be troubled, but I’m afraid I don’t understand your role here.”

He was good, I had to give him that.

Lawrence eyed Trevor like he was a cobra waiting to strike. Slowly, Lawrence reached into his jacket and extracted a small white business card. “Here,” he said, handing it carefully to Lawrence. “You can shove this up your ass.”

Trevor glanced at the card, smiled, and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans. “Thanks,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” Lawrence said coolly. “Someday, when you want someone to tail your wife because she’s having an affair, you can give me a call.”

“Oh,” Trevor said, smiling, “I don’t think that will be necessary. There are so many other ways to find out what people are up to, folks like you will be out of business in a few years.”

“Why don’t you just show us what’s in the bag,” I said.

Trevor slipped a laptop from inside it, opened it up, where the screen was already up and running.

“Wireless Internet connection,” he said, “so I can do this sort of thing from anyplace.”

“Amazing,” I said. “Do what?”

“You see this? This is a map of this quadrant of the city.”

Lawrence and I looked. He was right. There was Crandall and a five-block radius around it. And what looked to be a moving dot that was pulsing.

I pointed to it. “What’s that?”

“That’s Morpheus.”

“Morpheus?”

“My dog. His name’s Morpheus. It looks like he’s moving back this way.” The dot appeared to be traveling from one side of the street to the other. “He’s probably on the trail of a squirrel. Or looking for a place to take a whiz.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “How can you do this?”

Trevor gave me a no-big-deal shrug. “There’s a tiny transmitter on his collar, and that sends the message to the satellite, and it shows up on here.” Looking at Lawrence, he said, “I’m sure you must have equipment like this for the kind of work you do.” Saying it like he knew Lawrence didn’t. Lawrence said nothing.

I still wasn’t buying it, until Trevor, looking up the street, jumped up and shouted, “Morpheus! Here, boy!”