After I walk Frankie through the whole meeting-with-the- Sureños scenario, I text Special Agent Rondeau, just two words: Message received. I drop my cell on the ground and stomp on it with my boot heel until it’s shattered, then toss it into a dumpster. Time to get another burner phone.

I GET BACK to Ethan’s house just before two o’clock. Wilson dances around my feet and bolts outside to pee and chase chipmunks in the landscaping. I take him for a quick walk around the block before making a quick sandwich with some cold cuts from the fridge. Organic turkey, no preservatives. Ethan is turning into a total millennial.

I scarf down the sandwich and a vanilla yogurt from the back of the fridge—only one day past its sell-by date—and then turn back to the various stacks of paper waiting for me. I’ve got less than three hours before I have to call Finn with an update. The fact that I have to do this at all chafes me. I’m investigating my own father, and digging around in my parents’ past feels … sordid, I guess, like I’m rifling through their bedroom. And it also brings up memories, and lots of my memories are potentially explosive. But then I think of Tane, sitting blindfolded and strapped to a chair wired to real explosives, and I start looking back through the paperwork all over again.

AFTER ANOTHER HOUR I have something.

I’ve been spending most of my time looking at my parents’ financial records and any correspondence with Dad’s old bank—again, not that I would expect to find a series of enormous deposits or anything, but I’d assumed there would be some sort of activity or notification of transfers or linked accounts or something. There isn’t, and if there are any subtler clues, I’m not seeing them. Tracking people via their banking activity is one thing, but I’m not a forensic accountant, so if someone is working to hide some financial shenanigans, and they know what they’re doing—like Dad would have known how to do, presumably—I probably won’t discover whatever they’ve hidden.

So I put the banking stuff to the side and look again through the phone records.

When searching through data, I look for patterns. Human beings are pattern makers. We love the routine, the familiar, the tried and true. When I’m trying to find someone, I look for patterns in the chaos. And once I find those patterns, I look for breaks, changes, interruptions. Many times those changes will be random or meaningless, but more often than not that break in the pattern will be a thread I can pick at and loosen and unravel so it leads me right where I need to go.