I made it through the back gate without anyone seeing me. Out on Silverwood Lane, I kept my lights off, moving slowly down the unlit road until it merged with a larger artery. When I got to a service station, I pulled in to fill the Mustang and to check my maps. I was a couple of miles from a major expressway here that would ultimately take me into the city. It seemed easier to take a fast route home than to trek cross-country to Morrell’s, especially since I’d be sharing the evening with Don. I took out my cell phone to call Morrell and then remembered my own advice to Billy: my phone, too, had a GSM tracking signal. That was how Carnifice, or whoever, was keeping track of me, of Morrell, of all of us.

I turned it off. I thought about finding a pay phone so I could call Morrell on a landline, but if they were bugging his phone they’d pick that up, anyway. I pulled out of the gas station, feeling oddly liberated by my anonymity, gliding through the night, no one knowing where I was. As I slid onto the expressway, I began belting out “Sempre libera,” although I could tell I was woefully off-key.

There was so little traffic now that I pushed the needle up to eighty, coasting from expressway to Tollway, slowing only for the inevitable knot of traffic around O’Hare, and cruising to my exit in the city in twenty-seven minutes. Keeping time like that, I could replace Patrick Grobian, monitoring his truckers down to the second. I grinned to myself, picturing the family’s reaction if I suggested it.

I wondered why they’d summoned me tonight—to prove they could? Of course, they’d drawn me away from Morrell’s—maybe they wanted Carnifice to go back in for a more thorough search. Or maybe they had acted out of genuine concern about Billy. I supposed that could be true of his grandmother, but neither of his parents showed a tenth the distress that Rose Dorrado was feeling over Josie’s disappearance.

I wished I had taken advantage of the opportunity to ask more questions of my own, such as what had happened to Billy’s Miata—had they brought it home as a memento or sold it for scrap? I might stop by the underpass tomorrow afternoon to see if anything remained of it.

It had been stripped, William had said this afternoon; there was nothing left of it. And what was left had probably been explored pretty thoroughly by his high-powered Carnifice operatives. They could have carried the remains of the car to their private lab and examined every fiber of the floor to tell them when Billy had last driven it. Maybe it was among the ten acres of cars in the pound along 103rd Street, but, either way, the remains were most likely out of my reach.