I heard Morrell’s uneven step as he limped up the hallway to get his laptop and his phone directories. In a couple of minutes, he’d read out addresses to me of all the girls on the team who had phones, including Celine Jackman, although I couldn’t imagine Josie going to April’s archenemy on the team. I sketched out a map of the neighborhood and jotted the addresses onto the grid of streets. The addresses covered over a mile going north to south, but didn’t range more than four blocks east to west, except for April’s father. Benito Dorrado had moved out of South Chicago to the East Side, a relatively stable, marginally more prosperous neighborhood nearby.

It took well over an hour to poke around the streets and alleys near the homes of the girls on my squad. I didn’t feel like rousing any of them to ask after Josie: a late-night visit from the coach, looking for an errant player, would only get everyone on the team completely freaked out. With Mitch next to me on a short leash, I peered into the garages we found—most of the girls lived in the bungalows that dominate the neighborhood, and these often had garages in the alleys behind the houses. In one of the garages, we’d surprised a gang meeting, eight or ten young men whose flat-eyed menace made my skin crawl. They’d thought about jumping us, but Mitch’s low-throated growl made them back away long enough for us to beat a retreat.

At one-thirty, Rose called to see if we’d found any signs of Josie. When I gave her all my negatives, she sighed, but said she guessed she had to go to bed: she had to continue her job search tomorrow, although as heavy as her heart was lying in her chest she knew she wouldn’t make a good impression.

Mr. Contreras and I headed on south, under the legs of the Skyway, to Benito Dorrado’s small frame house on Avenue J. There weren’t any lights on in the bungalow, which was scarcely surprising since it was now after two, but I didn’t feel the same scruples against rousing him as I did for the girls on my team—he was Josie’s father, he could pay attention to some of the dramas of her life. I rang the doorbell urgently for several minutes, and then called him on my cell phone. When the phone had rung tinnily a dozen times or so behind the dark front door, we went around to the back. The single-car garage was empty; neither Benito’s Eldorado nor Billy’s Miata were anywhere in sight. Either he’d moved or he was spending the night with the overpainted puta.