He said, “Hard day out in Pasadena, plumbing leaks, blah blah blah. Mr. Cool and Charming until I mentioned Camarillo. Got this little catch in his voice. Happy to cooperate, Lieutenant, but I just can’t today.”

“You shook him up, he needs to regroup. Maybe he’ll revert to what calmed him down when he was a kid.”

“What’s that?”

“Arts and crafts.”

* * *

Milo went down in the hole again, pounded the door while keeping his distance from the thing on the coat hook.

Sidled away from it and found a spot on the door where he could press his ear without touching dead flesh. He knocked on the metal door, then pounded.

Climbing back out, he brushed away nonexistent dirt. “If anyone’s in there, I can’t hear it and the door’s bolted solid.”

Lowering the hatch, he wiped it clean, scuffed out the footsteps we’d left in the dirt halo.

We put our shoes on and retraced our steps back to the car, worked hard at obscuring our tracks.

I drove off the property and repeated the climb I’d taken when I’d overshot. When we found nowhere to hide the Seville within walking distance, I turned around and descended.

A mailbox two properties down from Billy Dowd’s land was lettered with gold stick-ons: The Osgoods. A sagging plank-and-chicken-wire fence blocked a gravel drive.

Flag up on the box. Milo got out and checked. “Least a week’s worth, let’s trespass.”

Unlatching the gate, he stood back as I drove through, swung it closed, hopped back in.

* * *

The Osgoods owned a much smaller spread than Billy Dowd. Same oak-sycamore combo, a flat brown lawn in place of a meadow. In the center, a pale green fifties ranch house with a white-pebble roof squatted behind an empty corral. No animals, no animal smell. Half a dozen empty trash cans stood against one side. A cheap prefab swing set tilted nearby and a child’s plastic trike blocked the front door.

The sky had started to darken. No light spat from any windows.

Milo reached over the tricycle and knocked on the front door anyway. Left his card wedged between the door and jamb and a note under one of the Seville’s wiper blades.

As we walked back to the road, I said, “What’d you write?”

“ ‘Oh, lucky citizens,’ ” he said, “ ‘you are doing your bit for God and country.’ ”

We reentered Billy’s property on foot, found a watch spot just shy of where the trees met the meadow.

Thirty feet back from the drive. The ground was spongy with dead leaves and dust. We sat against the stout trunk of a low-branching oak, nicely concealed.

Milo and me, bugs and lizards and unseen scampering things.

Nothing to talk about. Neither of us wanted to talk. The sky was bruised deep blue, then black. I thought of Michaela and Dylan, camping down the road.