The avenue was empty. Not the quiet emptiness of the countryside, but one where urban scavengers moved under cover of the dark: rats, druggies, thugs, all looking for a fix. A South Chicago bus labored up the street. From a distance, it looked like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—its windows were filled with light, and the headlights looked like a grin underneath the big front window. Get on board, ride home in warmth and comfort.

I crossed the road and went into the factory yard. It had been over a week since the fire, but a whiff of smoke still hovered faintly in the air, like an elusive perfume.

Even though the traffic on the Skyway was loud enough to muffle my sounds here, I walked along the edge of the gravel drive so that my running shoes wouldn’t crunch in the loose stones. I went around to the side, to the loading bay.

I saw at once what had happened to Bron. Just as he had the heavy front load of the forklift suspended beyond the lip of the dock, ready to drop his load in the truck, Grobian had pulled away. The forklift had pitched headfirst off the dock, burying its forks in the ground. The cartons Bron had loaded on the front end were scattered in a wide circle around it. The fall itself must have broken Bron’s neck; the wonder was that Marcena had survived it.

I shone my flashlight around the ground. Sherlock Holmes would have seen the telltale broken weed, or displaced piece of stone, to say whether Marcena had been in the truck when it went over. I could only guess that her war zone training had given her a sixth sense of the danger, so that she jumped clear of the forklift as it fell.

I climbed around the machine. I looked underneath it as best I could, but I couldn’t see Marcena’s red pen. Maybe it was buried under the front end, but I’d save that possibility for last—it would mean hiring a tow truck to raise the forklift.

I moved in a circle around through the weeds and the gravel. This side of the building faced away from the fire, so I didn’t have to contend with the broken glass and charred remnants of fabric I’d found when I searched here last week, but there was still a tiresome amount of debris, jetsam from the Skyway, flotsam from the street. I’d read recently that Chicago’s landfills were just about at capacity and we were starting to ship our garbage downstate. If all the bags and cans I’d seen on the streets today had been put into the garbage, maybe we’d have filled our landfills even sooner. Maybe litterers were saving taxpayers money.