He let the heaviness hover for a minute while he turned into an even shadier area—one of those abandoned-looking streets that immediately took me back to the day we went to the Dom Distribution warehouse. My palms started sweating with the memory. “So what did you find?” he finally asked, quiet, contrite.

“The house is completely gutted. Nothing and no one to be found.”

“So you got nothing?”

“I did, actually. I hacked into the Realtor’s phone and got this.” I held up the palm of my hand, on which I had scribbled Peter Fairchild’s number the moment I’d gotten back in my car.

“You hacked . . . never mind. Whose is it?”

“Peter Fairchild. Luna’s dad. Also, it turns out, her getaway driver. The thing is, I’ve seen him before. I know who he is, where he works, everything.” Well, not quite everything. I still didn’t know what exactly he had to do with my parents. Why he was hanging around in the background of their photos.

Chris raised his eyebrows. “And?”

“And he’s the director of that movie over at Pear Magic.”

“Interesting.”

I nodded. “It gets even better. He was the guy who pretended to be an agent. I’m convinced Jetta was Luna in disguise. He’s trying to hide her. He sold his house to buy a yacht.”

Chris turned into a parking lot and came to a stop. An empty, rusted grocery cart was overturned at the nose of our car. “A yacht,” he repeated once he’d turned off the car.

“A houseboat,” I said, emphasizing the word house. “Right after Luna mysteriously disappeared. Coincidence?”

“You think Luna is living on the yacht.”

“Can you think of a more Luna place to hide?”

I had only just then noticed a knot of people nearby, tucked up high under an overpass, clustered on a single filthy blanket. They were watching us carefully. Chris caught me looking.

“Is this who you’re questioning?” I asked.

He nodded. “Here’s the thing. When a homeless person goes missing, nobody even realizes it, right? They’re invisible to the rest of the world.”

“Sad thought.”

“True thought. But the thing is, they actually are missed. Their circle of friends misses them. And those friends also might know more than they even realize they know. They just don’t bother to come to us with the information. They figure it’s pointless.”

“Because they’re invisible,” I said.

“Yep,” he said to the window. “Our job is to see them anyway. To remember that no invisible person is really invisible.”

Made total sense to me, but I wondered how many cops would look at it that way. How many would think to talk to the other homeless about their murdered friend? Maybe all of them, I didn’t know. But for some reason I guessed not. For some reason, I guessed that was one of the things that made Chris special.