The boat with the blue canopy—it would have been a strange detail for Ganz to offer up if it wasn’t true, and an even stranger detail to get wrong if it was. Why deny owning a boat in the first place? Owning a boat wasn’t a crime. Mooring a boat at the same marina as someone you knew wasn’t, either. Darby hadn’t mentioned anything about Tim having OCD or being bipolar. Maybe he didn’t know? He wasn’t his doctor; he only set him up with an insurance payout. And feeling a little down didn’t automatically make you a prime candidate for suicide. If so, half the world’s population would be at the bottom of a lake.

I eyed the house, the red door, the windows. Maybe Darby was calling someone to ask them what he should do about the nosy PI at the door. If so, that meant three things: One, Vince Darby, as good looking as any one man had any right to be, knew more than he was letting on about Tim’s last days. Two, whatever was going on, he wasn’t in it by himself. Three, Darby and his phone mate, whoever he or she turned out to be, were going to have one heck of a time shaking me loose.

I popped a Roberta Flack CD into the slot, but only got two tracks in before Darby rushed out of the house, scanned the street, and jumped into a clean white Mercedes parked at the curb. He started his engine; I started mine. When he pulled off, I waited until a couple of cars got ahead of me and then eased out after him, following at a “tailable” distance.

A rusty Toyota Celica and a fresh Chrysler sedan separated his back bumper from my front fender. None of us seemed to be in any particular hurry as the tiny caravan pulled up to a stoplight at Wabash and Roosevelt, the wide, congested street clogged with cars, trucks, and death-defying Divvy bike riders weaving through the bottleneck. On the sidewalk, texting pedestrians took their lives in their hands as they crossed the street distractedly, a bleating car horn their only salvation.

When the light turned green, Darby turned right, heading toward the Drive. I followed. Halfway through the intersection, though, Darby abruptly stopped with a screech of his wheels. The drivers of the Celica and the sedan honked at the show of bad form, but didn’t linger to make a federal case out of it. They swerved around the impediment and took off, which left me with no buffer and a growing unease, my efforts at covert surveillance shot to hell.

“This can’t be good,” I muttered, my foot still firmly on the brake.