Leigh passed a boarded-up house tagged with graffiti. Didn’t look like the neighborhood had improved much since Leigh’s last visit. Most of East Austin was changing dramatically, with young professionals and house-flippers buying up cottages and dumping money into them. But this little pocket had somehow missed the wave of gentrification.

She neared a row of attached brick homes, all with identical front stoops. The units might have once been cute, but the wooden siding was moldy and some of the shutters were hanging off the windows. One unit had an old sofa out front on a weedy patch of lawn. Leigh squinted at some numbers on the side of the building, then checked her phone.

“Three twenty-five Clark Street,” she muttered.

Leigh pulled over and parked behind an old pickup. She leaned over and opened her glove box to retrieve her self-defense weapon of choice, which was a carryover from her public defender days. Her very first week on the job, Gertie had admonished Leigh about personal protection, extolling the virtues of her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson, which fit easily into a purse. But Leigh had no experience with guns, so instead she’d armed herself with a tube of pepper spray.

Leigh got out of her Mustang, locked it, and looked around. The air smelled foul, probably from the water treatment plant nearby, and she realized why the homes in this particular area weren’t getting snatched up. The wind gusted, sending cold darts of air through her clothes. A fast-food bag cartwheeled down the street like a tumbleweed.

Leigh glanced up and down the block, wishing for more streetlights as Brandon’s parting words came back to her. Be careful going home. Somehow she doubted this little errand was what he’d meant.

Stepping onto the sidewalk, she noticed a shadowy figure on one of the porches across the street. A chill snaked down her spine. The man slouched against the house, watching her from the shadows as he pulled a cigarette to his mouth.

Leigh strode up the paved path to unit 104. No interior lights visible from the front. The neighbor’s place was livelier, and she noticed a flicker of light behind the blinds and heard the low drone of a television.

Leigh rapped on the door and waited. Nothing. She rapped again, and the volume of the TV next door went down.

Leigh glanced around the small concrete porch. In the corner was a shriveled fern in a chipped clay pot, and she spotted a package tucked behind it. She crouched down to examine the package. It was a padded bubble mailer from Amazon with a label addressed to COOPER COLLINS. She was in the right place at least.