“What’d I tell you?” Angie said to Oscar and opened the middle cabinet. “No chips here, either.”

“You two’ll get along just fine,” Devin said.

After Bubba, I’d asked Lyle to keep his music down because Mae was still asleep. And he said…

“Last try.” Angie reached for the right cabinet door.

…he didn’t mind because he had a dentist’s appointment and was only working a half day.

I stood up and looked out the window, down into the yard below the scaffolding, as Angie screamed and jumped back from the cabinet.

The yard was empty. “Lyle” was gone.

I looked at the cabinet and the first thing I noticed were eyes staring back at me. They were blue and they were human and they weren’t attached to anything.

Oscar grabbed his walkie-talkie. “Get me Bolton. Now.”

Angie stumbled back along the table. “Oh, shit.”

“Devin,” I said, “that housepainter…”

“Lyle Dimmick,” he said. “We ran a check on him.”

“That wasn’t Lyle,” I said.

Oscar caught on to our conversation as Bolton came over the walkie-talkie.

“Bolton,” Oscar said, “fan your men out. Arujo’s in the area dressed like a cowboy housepainter. He just left.”

“Heading in which direction?”

“I don’t know. Fan out your men.”

“We’re rolling.”

Angie and I took my back stairs three at a time and vaulted the porch railing into my back yard, guns drawn. He could have gone in three directions. If he’d gone west through back yards, he’d still be doing it because there wasn’t a cross street on this side for four city blocks. If he’d gone north toward the school, he would have run into the FBI. That left south to the block behind mine, or east to Dorchester Avenue.

I took south, Angie went east.

And neither of us found him.

And neither did Devin or Oscar.

And none of the FBI had any luck either.

By nine, a helicopter flew over the neighborhood and they’d brought in dogs, and agents were doing house-to-house searches. My neighbors weren’t too keen on me last year when I nearly brought a gang war to their doorsteps; I could only imagine what ancient Celtic curses they were hurling at my soul tonight.

Evandro Arujo had bypassed the security system by posing as Lyle Dimmick. Any neighbor looking out a window and seeing a ladder propped up by my third-floor windows would just have assumed Ed Donnegan now owned my building too and had hired Lyle to paint it.

The motherfucker had been inside my home.

The eyes, it was assumed, belonged to Peter Stimovich, who’d been found without his own, a detail Bolton had omitted.

“Thanks for telling me,” I said.

“Kenzie,” he said with his perpetual sigh, “I’m not paid to keep you in the loop. I’m paid to bring you into it only insofar as it suits our needs.”

Under the eyes, which a federal ME lifted gelatinously from my cupboard and placed in separate plastic bags, I’d been left another note, a white envelope, and a large stack of flyers. The note said, “sonicetoseeUagain” in the same typeface as the first two.