I even saw a couple of campus police cars. Normally the Caerphilly police and the Camcops, as the students called them, were barely on speaking terms, but I saw a brace of Camcops talking amicably to Sammy Wendell, one of Chief Burke’s deputies. I slowed down and waved at him. He waved back.

And while waving, I realized where all the police activity was centered. The second stairwell. Apartment twelve. Wasn’t that—?

I glanced down at the piece of paper I’d gotten on Hawthorne Street. Yes, it said apartment twelve.

“Oh, sh—oot!” I said, catching myself at the last moment before I taught Timmy another word Karen wouldn’t thank me for when I turned him back over to her. If she was still around to—no, I wasn’t even going to think that.

I pulled up to the next corner and stopped to mull things over—leaving the engine on, though, so I wouldn’t stop the air conditioner or the wretched music. I needed to find out what was going on there—apparently in Karen’s apartment.

“Go see ‘leese car?” Timmy suggested.

“In a minute,” I said.

Maybe I could get some information out of Sammy. Like our neighbor, Mr. Early, Sammy was infatuated with my cousin Rose Noire—who was a free spirit, and so far had barely noticed the existence of any of her suitors. As a result, Sammy was highly vulnerable to manipulation by any member of my large extended family who wanted a favor, or the answer to some question about police business that she really shouldn’t even be asking. I tried to be the exception to the family rule, and only play the Rose Noire card in truly dire emergencies.

“ ’Leese car now?” Timmy repeated.

But with county and campus police swarming in and out of Karen’s apartment after more than twenty-four hours during which she hadn’t been seen, hadn’t called, hadn’t answered her cell phone or her home phone—this was a dire emergency, wasn’t it?

Just then the car tunes CD segued from “Old McDonald’s Farm” into Barney the dinosaur singing “I Love You, You Love Me.” That settled it. Definitely an emergency. I cut the ignition, grabbed the diaper bag, and resigned myself to liberating Timmy from the safety of his car seat.

“Come on, Timmy,” I said. “We’re going to see the police cars.”

Keeping a grip on Timmy’s hand proved to be an impossible task, so I settled for getting a good grip on the waistband of his pants. The shirt collar would have worked better—I wouldn’t have had to stoop so much—but I suspected that would work much as a choke chain did on Spike. Unlike most dogs, Spike never seemed to notice the first warning signs of strangulation, and I suspected Timmy would prove equally oblivious to pain. With Spike, we’d solved that problem with a harness that shifted the pressure from his throat to his chest. Did they make toddler harnesses? And if so, was it worth finding one for what I hoped would be the short remainder of Timmy’s stay with me?