In contrast to the rest of the house, the front door had been recently painted a high gloss white and was secured with several high-tech locks. (I knew front doors. I’d spent a lot of time staring at front doors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then I went through a lot of them. It was easy to figure out who most wanted to keep you out.) Oddly, though, a Christmas wreath was still hanging on it. Well, there’s a nice sentimental touch, I thought.

There also was a steel storm door. The kind with scrolled-steel bars in the frame. I enlarged that door and saw that an additional lock had been added. If I were betting, I’d place my money on the possibility that this door bolted into the frame.

Given those precautions, it did not surprise me that there was no welcome mat.

Frankie was leaning over my shoulder, one arm balanced on Mighty Chair’s arm. “It’d take a pretty tough Girl Scout to sell cookies at that house. What do you think?”

Frankie had been a great street reporter at the Chicago Trib. He knew how the world worked. I shrugged. “It doesn’t shout terrorist to me.”

“No,” he agreed, shaking his head. He tapped his finger on the door. “See that?”

I enlarged the image and began moving the cursor. I saw what he was talking about, barely visible lines outlining a flap in the front door. I twisted and looked at him. “Isn’t that interesting?” It was a drug door; money goes in, drugs come out. Nobody sees nobody.

“Abso-fucking-lutely.” He stood up and indicated the house with a nod. “Maybe some of these guys stayed there. But that, that’s a drug drop. See what Zillow has to say about it.”

I typed the address into Zillow. Zillow told me it was a four-bedroom house with a finished basement. It had been built in 1952, sold in 1985 for $46,500. No transactions after that. It had a current value of $0. I pulled back on the satellite image and the rest of the block came into view, then the several surrounding blocks, several of the homes of equal value. $0. A couple of them, it appeared, had holes in the roof. This was a dying neighborhood.

“Squats,” Frankie explained. “That’s what happened out there. Middle-class jobs went south with the auto industry. Without the tax base, the whole neighborhood collapsed. People just took midnight moving vans and left the banks holding shit. The banks didn’t care, they just packaged them up with decent mortgages and sold them for Christ knows how much. People like these guys…”—he nodded at the screen— “… squatters, they just moved in. They hooked up to lampposts for power. Then the gangs came in and took over the best places. Dave Bing, the basketball player, when he was mayor, he contracted the whole city. He cut off public services to those neighborhoods.”

“So nobody knows who’s there?”

“Let’s say they won’t be filling out census forms.”