“Probably the same one you do.” I waved my meter toward the house. “I’m with Florey and Kapper, the mechanical engineers. We heard some woman thinks little green men are hovering around here in the night. I’m just checking the circuits.”

“You set something off in the garage,” the cop said.

I smiled. “Oh, dear: I was trying brute force. They warned us against that at IIT, but I wanted to see if someone could actually lift those doors. Sorry to bring you out here for nothing.”

“Not to worry: you saved me from our eighty-third call to look at suspicious mail.”

“It’s a hassle, isn’t it,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask for my ID. “I’ve got friends in the Chicago PD who feel stretched to the limit these days.” “Same out here. We’ve got the reservoir and a bunch of power stations we have to keep an eye on. It’s about time the FBI nailed this anthrax bastard-we waste an unbelievable amount of manpower, responding to hysterical calls about letters from old Aunt Madge who forgot to put her return address on the envelope.”

We hashed over the current situation the way everyone did these days.

Police forces were badly affected, because they had to gear up for incalculable terror attacks and couldn’t keep up with their local crime loads. Drive-by shootings, which had dropped to their lowest level in decades, had jumped in the last six months.

The cop’s cell phone rang. He grunted into it. “I’d better be going. You okay out here?”

“Yeah. I’m taking off, too. Place looks clean to me, except for the usual garbage-” I pointed a toe at an empty cigarette wrapper near the foundation. “I don’t see how anyone could be using the place.”

“You find Osama bin Laden in the attic, give me a call: I could use the extra credit.” He waved good-bye and got back into his squad car.

I couldn’t think of anything else to look for, and, anyway, it was getting too dark to see clearly. I walked to the edge of the gardens, where they faded into a substantial woods, and looked up at the house. From here I could see the attic windows, but they presented a blank face to the sky.

CHAPTER 2

The Iron Dowager

I had to go through various security checkpoints to reach Geraldine Graham. Anodyne Park was a well-gated community, with a guard at the entrance who wrote down my license plate number and asked my business before phoning Ms. Graham for permission to let me enter. As I snaked along the curved road that suburban developers relish, I saw that the complex was bigger than it appeared from the outside. Besides the town houses, apartment buildings and a nursing home the size of a small hospital, it held a little row of shops. Several golfing quartets, undeterred by the dreary weather, were leaving their carts outside a bar at the edge of the shops. I ran into a grocery store designed like an Alpine chalet for a bottle of overpriced water and a banana. Getting my blood sugar up would help me interview my client’s mother.