I couldn’t have known then I’d be happy just to come out of all this with my life.

I woke up at eight-thirty. For me, that’s sleeping in. I had a quick shower, dressed, and went to the hotel lobby for breakfast. They’d laid on Special K and Frosted Flakes in sealed, single-serving plastic bowls, muffins, doughnuts, Danishes, coffee and tea. It was self-serve and all-you-can-eat, and a family of four was taking full advantage, stuffing cereal and pastries into bags for the road ahead.

Once in the car, I got out my map and double-checked how I was going to reach Groverton. There was a yellow wooden pencil in the tray between the seats, and I used it like a pointer, tracing the route I would take.

It was a long shot, of course. All I had was a gas receipt leading me there. But it was the best, and only real clue I had. Groverton was farther away than I’d first realized—two hours, and still heading in the direction away from home.

I didn’t have much of a game plan for when I reached my destination. I figured I could find the gas station where Trixie got her receipt, but beyond that, I couldn’t think of much to do but drive around looking for my car, the one Trixie had fled in. Perhaps, once I got there, other opportunities would present themselves.

As I drove, tuning in Trixie’s eight-speaker stereo to a jazz station—my friendship with Lawrence Jones had expanded my musical tastes in the last couple of years—that was playing some Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, and Diana Krall, I tried to sort out the things I had learned in the last day.

Trixie, if she was the person I’d been hearing about named Candace, or Candy, certainly had a colorful background. She’d come to work at the Kickstart, fallen in love with a man named Swain, who ended up plastered onto the front of a locomotive. She’d had a child. She’d disappeared after three members of the Slots motorcycle gang were murdered at the Kickstart. And the surviving gang leader, Gary Merker, trying to earn a bit of cash selling presumably stolen stun guns, had been putting the word out, for years, that if anyone ever saw her, they were to let his mother know, so that she could pass the message on. And shortly after that happened, Martin Benson was found dead in Trixie’s basement dungeon, with two telltale marks on his body indicating that he’d been shot with a stun gun before he’d had his throat slit.

And Merker’s charming mother had said that the reason her son wanted to find this Candace so badly was because she’d taken something from him. Something that he wanted to take back from her.