“We don’t know.”

“That dude. You know, that, like, dude he hangs out with sometimes.”

“This dude got a goatee?” Angie said.

The roommate nodded. “And like the most hollow eyes. Like he ain’t walking among the living. Be a babe if he was a chick, though. Weird, huh?”

“Dude got a name?”

“None I ever heard.”

As we walked back to the car, I could hear Grace asking me a few nights ago, “Are these cases connected in any way?”

Well now, yeah, they were. So what did that mean?

Diandra Warren receives a photograph of her son and makes a reasonable logical leap that it’s connected to the Mafia hood she inadvertently angered. Except—she didn’t inadvertently anger him. She was contacted by an imposter, and they met in Brookline. An imposter with a harsh Boston accent and wispy blond hair. Kara Rider’s hair, when I saw it, looked freshly dyed. Kara Rider used to have blonde hair and her credit card receipts put her in Brookline around the same time “Moira Kenzie” had contacted Diandra.

Diandra Warren had no TV in her apartment. If she read a newspaper, she read The Trib, not The News. The News had plastered Kara’s photograph across page one. The Trib, far less sensationalistic and actually late on the story, hadn’t published a photograph of Kara at all.

As we reached the car, Eric Gault pulled behind it in a tan Audi. He looked at us with mild surprise as he got out.

“What brings you kids by?”

“Looking for Jason.”

He opened his trunk, began picking up books from a pile of old newspapers. “I thought you’d given up on the case.”

“There’ve been some new developments,” I said and smiled with confidence I didn’t feel. I looked at the newspapers in Eric’s trunk. “You save them?”

He shook his head. “I toss them in here, take them to a recycling station when I can’t close the trunk anymore.”

“I’m looking for one about ten days old. May I?”

He stepped back. “Be my guest.”

I pulled back the top News on the pile, found the one with Kara’s photo four down. “Thanks,” I said.

“My pleasure.” He shut the trunk. “If you’re looking for Jason, try Coolidge Corner or the bars on Brighton Avenue. The Kells, Harper’s Ferry—they’re big Bryce hangouts.”

“Thanks.”

Angie pointed at the books under his arm. “Overdue at the library?”

He shook his head, looked at the stately white and red-brick dorm buildings. “Overtime. In this recession, even us tenured profs have to stoop to tutoring now and again.”

We climbed into our car, said good-bye.

Eric waved, then turned his back to us and walked up to the dorms, whistling softly in the gradually cooling air.

We tried every bar on Brighton Ave., North Harvard, and a few in Union Square. No Jason.

On the drive to Diandra’s place, Angie said, “Why’d you grab that newspaper?”

I told her.

“Christ,” she said, “this is a nightmare.”