They stopped at the few residences scattered around the Barbera factory. And they learned that, no, a man resembling the Composer was not inside. No, a man resembling Khaled Jabril was not inside, either. And neither of them had been seen recently. Or ever.

Ci dispiace…

Sorry.

Back into the car.

Soon Sachs and Ercole were bounding along a badly kept road. Now there were no businesses or residences at all, just the acres and acres of Barbera company olives.

“Dead end,” Ercole said.

“Call the other teams,” Sachs said, distracted. She swatted lazily at a bee that had zipped into the Mégane. “See if they’ve had any success.”

But after three conversations, Ercole reported unsurprisingly that none of the other search parties had found anything helpful. And he confirmed that the Postal Police were carefully monitoring social media and streaming sites. But: “He has not uploaded the video yet.”

So Jabril was still alive. Probably.

They returned to the road.

“Hm.” Sachs was frowning as she looked over the fields.

“Yes, Detective? Amelia?”

“The paste in the Composer’s shoe? The olive oil residue. You call it what again?”

“The word is ‘pomace.’” He spelled it.

“Is it thrown out after the oil is extracted?”

“No, no, it’s valuable. It can be used for fuel in producing electricity. But around here it is mostly used to make organic fertilizer.”

“Then he might not have picked it up at the Barbera oil operation.”

He gazed at her with a look of concern. “In fact, he would not pick it up here. This factory would be careful not to spill or waste any. They would package it and sell it. Now that I am thinking: Most likely the Composer would have picked it up on his shoes at an organic fertilizer farm. Not here.”

“And do you know where one of those farms might be?”

“Ah, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. And the answer is, yes, I do.”

In twenty minutes they were deep in the countryside, near a town called Caiazzo, surrounded by pale wheat crops glimmering in the hazy sun.

Sachs was racing along the highway that would take them to Venturi Fertilizzanti Organici, SpA. She pushed the tiny car up to 120 kph, thinking: Oh, what I could do on this road with a Ferrari or Maserati…She downshifted and took a turn at close to forty. The skid was not remarkable; the volume of Ercole Benelli’s “Mio Dio” was.

A glance at the GPS map told her they were approaching the turnoff road and she slowed and veered onto it.

Five minutes later: “Look there.” Ercole pointed.

The operation was small: what appeared to be an office structure and several warehouses or processing plants, then fields containing ridges of dark material, about fifty yards long and three feet high. “There. Those are the composting piles?”

“Yes.”

She braked to a stop.

“Look, that one at the end is on top of a slope. With any rain the pomace could run down to the property in the valley. Is there a house there, can you see?”