“That I’ll explain clearly to you at the courthouse. But I need the warrant right away.”

“And this isn’t a dead end?”

“No, Dottore.” Over the phone, Rocco heard a distant car horn. “Wait, Dottore, you aren’t at home?”

A moment of awkward silence. Then: “No . . . listen, Schiavone. We can’t meet at the prosecutor’s office right now. This isn’t the right time.”

“This isn’t the right time?”

“No. Now just do me a favor, wait until after lunch. Then you’ll see that I’ll explain everything clearly to you as well.”

“You’re starting to worry me, Dottor Baldi.”

“I’m not the one who needs to worry, and neither are you. It’s someone else. We’ll talk later.” And he ended the call.

Rocco stood there with the cell phone in his hand, not sure what to think now. Lupa looked at him, her muzzle wedged between her two front paws. “Oh, well . . .” he said to her. “Maybe he was just over at his girlfriend’s house and wanted to cut the conversation short.” Someone knocked at the door. Lupa barked.

“Come in!”

Deruta and D’Intino made their entrance. They were gray, wrecked, and carrying a notepad. “Dottore! Here we are! Ciao, Lupa!”

“What’s up?”

“We’re done. We only have Val d’Ayas and Cogne left.” And they laid down a sheaf of twenty pages or so on the deputy chief’s desk. “We’re dead tired, but we’ve done a good job, haven’t we?”

“Sure,” said Rocco, looking at the stack of lists they’d just set down. Including the lists dotted with colorful highlighter stripes. “Can you tell me why you highlighted all the names?”

“Certainly,” said D’Intino. “So, pink is the females, blue is the males, green is the families, and yellow is the foreigners. Sharp, right?”

“Male foreigners or female foreigners?” asked Rocco.

D’Intino turned and looked at his colleague with a glance of despair. “All the foreigners.”

“And if I were looking for a male foreigner, or a foreign family, or a foreign woman, what am I supposed to do?”

He had posed them quite a problem. “What are you supposed to do?” D’Intino asked rhetorically, stalling for time.

“You can’t,” Deruta admitted in defeat. “You’d have to read them one by one.”

“No, no, that just won’t do,” said Rocco. “No, no, you have to come up with a method.”

“I’ve got it!” Deruta burst out. “Now we’ll list all the foreigners on another sheet of paper, with hotels and times, and then we’ll make the males blue, the females pink, and the families green.”

“Then that means you wouldn’t use yellow at all anymore?”

“I’m afraid not, Dottore.”

“Fine. It strikes me as a good idea!” Rocco scooped up the sheets of paper and handed them back to the two policemen. “All right then, get to sorting.”