It had been five days since my first meeting with Troy Hempel; I’d been in Kansas for two of them. It had taken Hempel, his mother, and six other neighbors several days to agree to hire me—after a fierce discussion on my abilities, whether I could be trusted to take Ms. Ferring’s disappearance seriously, and whether my fees constituted price gouging. Troy and his mother called me to a neighborhood conference; Troy had invited Sal as a character witness.

I brought Bernie and Angela, putting them under strict orders not to speak. Both young women were furious when I weighed in on the side of “No, this private detective doesn’t know or care enough about Emerald to waste our money on.”

I shut them up and continued to explain that Chicago was my briar patch. “I know how to get things done here, who the players are, and what games they cheat at. It’s where my friends are, so if I fall on my face, as we all sometimes do, the people are here who will glue me back together. Kansas—I might as well try to solve a crime in Milan. In fact, I’d probably feel more at home in Milan—at least it’s an industrial hub with an identifiable group of thugs. There are local agencies in Kansas who know all the players. It makes more sense for you to work with one of them.”

“None of us can go down there to evaluate an agency, except maybe Troy, and even then we wouldn’t know if they could be trusted to do the right thing,” Troy’s mother said. “Believe me, Ms. Warshawski, we talked about that, we talked about calling the Kansas state police. And Missouri and Iowa, depending which route August and Emerald took. It’s hard to involve an investigator in your private business, but at least we’ve met you and we’ve talked to people who think highly of you. Sal Barthele here says you are honest and reliable. We can pay you for a week’s work down there.”

Bernie interrupted to applaud vigorously. Angela said, “Another three days have gone by, and we don’t know where August is, or Ms. Ferring either. You really have to do this, Vic.”

I tried to suppress my visceral, two-year-old’s objection to people telling me what I really have to do, especially when Sal weighed in on that theme as well, saying she’d go herself if I didn’t.

“Ferring could be lost in some Iowa cornfield. Or this young moviemaker could have been hauled off to jail or shot by some small-town cop. Didn’t you say the police put out one of those reports on him because of the break-in at the gym?”