“Multiple people have looked at street camera video. Nobody has picked up a little girl being driven in a vehicle.”

“I know. We’re back to crackpot.”

Rena started heading back to their vehicle but he stopped her. “There’s one more thing we need to do now that we’re in this neighborhood.”

“What?”

“Remember Coyote Frogg? I asked Ferguson to try to find him. He would be twenty-nine years old. There’s no record of him being employed since 2017. Yet he never collected any federal or state assistance after that. And there’s been no electric bills, gas bills or telephone bills in his name since around the same time.”

“So he dropped off the grid.”

“We all know that’s almost impossible to really do. But he’s been pretty much a shadow. He did seek some medical treatment about six months ago in Milwaukee for a chemical burn. Told the doctor that he was a student and he’d been doing an experiment in his basement.”

“Cooking meth?” Rena asked knowingly.

“Good a guess as any. But we were able to get a recent photo out of his medical record and I had Ferguson scan it and send it to me. I want to show it to Mr. Gibacki at the Panini Playground.” He held out his phone and let Rena see the photo.

“Definitely meth,” she said.

Heroin was the drug of choice for many but that didn’t mean the meth industry had died out. Far from it. While most of the meth circulating came in via Mexico, cheaper and stronger than ever, there were still some local cooks. They had to work harder to get the ingredients and ultimately produced in limited quantities, but there was enough money in it to keep them doing it.

A.L. glanced at the photo again. The years had not been kind to Coyote Frogg. He skin was pasty white and another twenty pounds would have kept him from looking emaciated. But he did have a hell of a head of red hair. It wasn’t terribly long in the photo, just falling below his chin. It was a head shot so there was no way to see whether he had a sleeve tattoo. The detail in the medical record likely would have included it but they’d only been able to obtain the photo. A warrant would be necessary to get more.

Mr. Gibacki had described shoulder-length coarse red hair.

Hair could grow. That’s why they were going to let him take a look.

The Panini Playground wouldn’t open for hours but there was a car parked behind the restaurant. A.L. knocked on the back door. It opened a few inches and A.L. shifted so that the man could see him. “A minute, sir?” A.L. said. “We have something we’d like to show you.”

The door opened and Mr. Gibacki came out. “Detectives?” he said.