My jaw dropped. “All I know about him is that he’s vanished as completely as Lamont Gadsden.”

“You wish. You wish, don’t you? Get out of here before I land these scissors inside you.”

The rage in his face was heart-stopping. I parted the handbag-laden ropes, trying to walk naturally, trying not to let the shaking in my legs show. I’d forgotten the train whistle. Its blast made me stumble as I opened the outer door.

A woman passed me at the door, holding a scuffed pair of pumps. “Noise always gets to me, too.”

I tried to smile, but Rivers’s fury made my mouth wobble. I drove slowly to my office, staying off the Ryan: I wasn’t steady enough to deal with semis roaring around me.

11 - NOTHING LIKE ECHÉZEAU FOR RELAXING

11

NOTHING LIKE ECHÉZEAU FOR RELAXING

AT MY OFFICE, I FOUND PETRA HAD WRITTEN THANK YOU in big Magic Marker capitals on a piece of paper with a giant cookie from the coffee shop across the street taped to it. The ingenuous message made me feel marginally better, although I gave the cookie to Elton, who was outside again.

I also found a message from my temporary agency saying they had a Marilyn Klimpton available who met all my requirements including familiarity with legal databases. She’d start in the morning. That was a mercy.

Still, the only thing that would really make me feel better was to understand why Rivers was so furious with me. I spent the rest of the day trying to find out more about both him and Sawyer. My first search had been superficial. Now I went deeper into databases that cost more money. I couldn’t charge these to Miss Ella, but I needed to learn what lay behind Rivers’s rage.

Nothing came back to link either man to me. Rivers had served in the army from May 1967 through July 1969, with his year in Vietnam sandwiched in near the beginning. He’d been married; his wife died three years ago. They hadn’t had any children. He had a sister and two brothers, both living in the Chicago area; I put their phone numbers in my case file. Rivers had never been arrested, and none of his siblings had ties to any of the people whose arrests I’d made possible, at least not in the last six years. Amy Blount had created a database of all the people I’d dealt with during that time, so it was easy to cross-check his name and address against my recent cases.