“Yeah. Exactly. But we got a couple of problems. The guy who bought the house isn’t named Garth Hammerling. His name is Richard Hammer. Scott and I call up our buds Lonnie Silver and Rodney Major and ask them what they think. They’re good guys. They come right down. Carlotta wants to go home, but we keep stalling. So we all confer and we decide that with Carlotta’s ID of Garth, any reasonable person would conclude that Richard Hammer is Garth Hammerling. But we still got a few problems. First, Garth or Richard isn’t in default of anything, and second, we don’t really have anything on Garth Hammerling except that he’s missing under peculiar circumstances.”

“So you don’t have a good reason to enter the property.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“What about imminent danger?”

“That’s what we all came up with. Garth and Mandy went missing roughly at the same time. Mandy nearly died, so Garth may be in trouble. It would be negligent not to check out the house. Silver calls up a judge. He says it’s good enough to get into the house and look around as long as we don’t trash the place. No opening drawers or anything like that. If we see something in open view, we can go for it. Other than that, we’re pretty much hog-tied. It’s about eight when we finally went in.

“Everything seems fine. We do see a couple of pictures of Garth, so we know that we’re in the right place. We’re dying to search the drawers, see if there are any more masked pictures of him and Mandy, but that’s clearly off-limits. We shrugged and figured: that was that.”

“My flight’s starting to board, Margie. I’ve probably got another ten minutes before I have to go onto the airplane.”

“I’ll make it as quick as I can. So we’re weighing our options. Should we put a police car on the house in case Garth comes back? But then we agree that any idiot would make a tail. There’s no place to hide out here. We’re still mulling over ideas when I get a call from Frieda Kowalski. I told you they were bringing Mandy out of her medically induced coma this morning, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. So Frieda calls me up, clearly very upset. She starts telling me stuff while we’re still at the development, trying to plan our next step. Plus we’re under time pressure. Carlotta Stretch wants to lock up and go home.”

“What did Frieda tell you?”