The news warms my heart a little. The Asturias family looked for their daughter Yoselin for months, and I was happy to find her, even if she’s in foster care in North Dakota. That’s another hurdle for them to deal with, although with Ellie Mangum helping them they shouldn’t have too terrible a time. The hardest part will be figuring out how to negotiate their lives once Yoselin is back, because things won’t ever be exactly the same again. But no kid deserves to be taken from a loving family.

“Not to sound ungrateful, because I’m not,” Ellie says, “but I’m surprised you called.”

I’ve worked with Ellie twice now, and she knows the drill. Usually I keep a distance from my clients, giving them plausible deniability if anything I do in the course of my work for them goes sideways. So I understand her surprise.

“I need your help,” I say. “I’m trying to find an Iraqi refugee who immigrated to the States sometime in the mid to late aughts. How would I do that?”

“Depends,” Ellie says. “Was this person employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government?”

“He was a translator working with the Army in Iraq, so yes.”

“Then he probably applied for a green card. If he got one, he’d be in the USCIS database. The IRS would have his info, too.”

“Any chance you have access to the USCIS database?” I ask.

“How badly do you want to find this person?”

“Badly enough to send you to a spa of your choice for an entire weekend.”

“Now, that is tempting. Even though the last weekend I took off was when Obama was president. What’s the name?”

“Yousef Hassan. Y-O-U-S-E-F.”

“Let me make a call, do a little digging.”

“You’re the best. I’ll call you later—maybe from this number, maybe not.”

“Gotcha. One more thing. About … that cat.”

“Shoot.”

“Whoever took her, what did you …” Ellie pauses. As a lawyer, she doesn’t want to know about anything illegal I may have done. “Is that person okay?”

I think of Bobby Bonaroo sitting in a San Antonio cell. “No,” I say. “He’s definitely not okay.”

There’s a pause. “Good,” Ellie says. “Gotta run. Call me later.” And she’s gone.

By the time the pizza arrives, I may have found one of the three soldiers. Stephen Chow, an Iraq War veteran, was killed in Miami when a drunk driver T-boned Chow’s car. Chow’s family sued the driver, who was the daughter-in-law of a wealthy family, so the whole incident got a write-up in the Miami Herald. Chow was Army, did two tours in Iraq, and—this is the clincher—served in the same company as Finn.

The three soldiers will have to wait. It’s after seven o’clock—time to go watch the cops bust the Sureños.