“A BOLO,” I said. “Yes. But I’ve checked with law enforcement in the four states where Veriden and Ferring might have been stopped and can’t find any record that he’s in custody.”

“But would you get a report from every rinky-dink town between here and Kansas City?” Sal demanded.

I’d worried about that myself, but even if Veriden had been picked up somewhere along the route, I couldn’t possibly check every small town along the interstates between Chicago and Kansas.

Sal’s urging wasn’t what sent me southwest. I’m not sure what my real reason was. It’s true none of my big-money clients needed me right now and most of the cases I was working on could be handled online. Any essential surveillance in Chicago could be offloaded onto the Streeter brothers, a trio whose core business had never been clear to me—they did woodworking, piano moving, bodyguarding, and surveillance, all with the same patient attention to detail.

Mr. Contreras was going to the Caribbean for three weeks to stay with a niece who had a winter place in St. Croix. While he’s able to look after himself, I don’t like leaving him on his own for long stretches now that he’s in his nineties. If he was going to be gone anyway, it removed one reason for my staying in Chicago.

And then there was Jake Thibaut, my bass player. A bass player. We’d been dating, or whatever people our age do, ever since the night he smuggled me past a group of thugs in a bass case.

Jake plays both modern and early music; his early-music group, High Plainsong, had won an important competition whose prize was a year’s residency in Switzerland. Jake had flown out in September, after six weeks of maniacal activity: renting his condo, working out logistics with venues where he already had commitments, helping his students find other teachers.

Long before he left, his head had been in the Alps, dreaming of music and musicians. Jake tried to talk me into going with him, which led to a major quarrel. “You’re in a rut, Vic. You do the same thing over and over. Why not jump off the high board with me, see what the future would hold if you risked everything?”

“You’re not risking anything,” I’d replied, annoyed. “You have a paid-for fellowship. What would I do? Quickly master German so I could start investigating Swiss banks for defrauding Holocaust survivors?”

“That’s what I mean,” he responded, annoyed in turn. “You’re bright, you’re creative—why does your mind automatically go to banks and fraud instead of something bigger, more challenging?”

“Can’t think of a bigger challenge than taking down a Swiss bank,” I couldn’t help saying.