I thanked the woman as civilly as I could—why hadn’t she given me the information this morning?—and sent an e-mail to Cady Perec.

Peppy, who’d been totally safe in the car, was getting restless. I drove her over to the Kansas River, which ran along the north edge of town. We spent a happy hour ambling along a river path, with Peppy running in and out of the muddy water, chasing seagulls and ducks, and me answering e-mails from clients in Chicago. One of them included a twenty-megabyte file, the discovery document for a fraud case where I would be a major prosecution witness.

I was so focused on the file that I didn’t realize we’d reached open country. I called Peppy out of a plowed field, where she’d stirred up some gophers, and headed back toward town. It seemed disconcerting to have my head in Chicago and my body in a field, as if I were inhabiting two unconnected universes at the same time.

Yelp directed me to an Internet/office-services café on a side street near the best of the coffee shops I’d visited. I found free parking in a lot. Chicago’s mayor and city council would go berserk if they found out there were towns in America that offered free parking in the heart of their downtowns. How could they overlook such a perfect opportunity to gouge the citizenry?

In the Internet café, I Photoshopped August’s picture together with Emerald Ferring’s. I typed in my cell phone and e-mail, asking anyone who’d seen either August or Emerald to get in touch with me. I printed out several dozen copies, both of August alone and of him with Ferring.

While I wandered around the downtown streets, asking the myriad beer joints and little restaurants for permission to put the photos in their windows, I also showed the pictures to the homeless people squatting on the sidewalks. Life on the streets leaves most people inward-turned and listless: it’s not just physically draining but also really boring, so the mind drifts. However, everyone who passed through the downtown went by the people on the streets—it was worth a chance.

“You get anything if you find ’em?” an older man asked.

“Like a reward, you mean? Absolutely. If the lead pans out, I’ll pay twenty bucks.”

“Twenty-five,” he said.

“Did you see either of them?”

He scratched his head. “I might have. You give me the money, and then I’ll tell you.”

His blue eyes were sunk so deep in their sockets that I couldn’t read his expression, but I was guessing the need for a drink predominated.

“If you might have seen them, when would that have been?”

“My memory would work better if it got some lubricating.”

I knew I was being played, but I handed him a five. “When do you think you might have seem them?”