I was longing for home, but I sure didn’t miss Chicago traffic: it was forty-five miles from the B and B to Roque’s house, but fifty minutes after hanging up I was pulling in behind Aanya’s hybrid. She was parked near a kind of tiny creek or maybe a drainage ditch that snaked through the neighborhood.

Even under the dim streetlights, it was clear that Roque had lived in a wealthy area—well-kept grounds, large houses set back from the road, most with those little signs announcing their alarm systems. When Peppy and I got out of the Mustang, Aanya opened the door and came toward us on shaky legs.

“Thank goodness you’re here. And you brought a dog.” She knelt to embrace Peppy, who obligingly sat and licked her nose. “I’m sorry to be a coward, but—”

“You’re not a coward. You did what you were strong enough to do, which was a lot. I want to see the house for myself anyway, and we need to call the cops as fast as possible.”

A couple of dogs out for late-night walks barked at Peppy. Their owners lifted a hand in greeting but didn’t try to talk.

Aanya told me no one had come by to question why she’d been parked out front for an hour. “But the Plaza—it’s a place with restaurants and shops just over there, so probably neighbors pay little attention to strangers as long as people are quiet.”

She pointed at lights across a tiny creek—shops, restaurants, which I’d only vaguely noticed when I was driving in. As long as Roque’s intruders hadn’t been noisy, the neighbors would have ignored them.

Aanya didn’t want to go back inside, but I told her I needed her to show me where Dr. Roque had kept his computer and let me see how extensive the disturbance had been.

Extensive. That would be the word for the damage. It looked like the same hands that had torn apart August’s apartment. I’d asked about big or small, to try to gauge what they were looking for, but that had been an irrelevant question. Or maybe they’d been looking for both big and small.

I followed Aanya into the room Dr. Roque had used as his home office. It had been a lovely place, I imagined, before wild hands tore it apart. An étagère had held crystals, but these had been dumped, some shattered.

“Oh, he traveled the world looking for these. I can hardly bear it,” Aanya mourned. “He had a friend in the geology department at the University of Kansas, Professor Hitchcock, who also liked geodes. They used to go to Utah together. They even went to Mongolia once, and to Australia.”

She was on the floor, trying to put pieces of one back together.

“You said his computer was gone. What else?”