I slid open my lowest desk drawer and found an envelope toward the back. Inside it was a motley assortment of pieces of paper, the names and phone numbers of my informants. Now I shuffled through them, thinking of where to start. Prewitt hadn’t said anything to suggest the unlicensed doctor was urgent. Nor had he even sounded hopeful that I was going to find anything. For that very reason, I wanted to start working on this right away. I was going to find this guy, and faster than Prewitt expected, too. I was going to show him my stuff.

Someone cleared her throat before me. “Sarah?”

It was Tyesha, one of our nonuniformed support staff, standing in front of my desk. She was five-two and still thin at 30 despite having three children. She greeted people at the front desk, answered the phone, and generally directed traffic.

“What’s up?” I said.

“There’s a young woman here who wants to talk about her brother being missing,” Tyesha said.

“Has she filed a report?” I asked.

“She says she has, but that it’s a little more complicated than that,” Tyesha explained. “She’d like to talk to someone about it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Send her back.”

Tyesha returned a moment later with a woman even shorter than she, about five-one, with a fragile, slender build. She wore what I took for office clothes, a shimmering lavender silk shirt over black trousers and low-heeled black shoes. She had long blond hair, blue eyes, milk-white skin. “This is Detective Sarah Pribek,” Tyesha said. “Sarah, this is…” She stopped, in the manner of someone who’s either forgotten a name or how to pronounce it. “I’m sorry,” she said to the visitor.

“Don’t be,” the young woman said. “It’s Marlinchen.”

“Nice to meet you, Marlinchen,” I said. “Please, have a seat.”

She did, and Tyesha left us together.

“Spell your name for me, will you?” I asked her.

The young woman reached for the yellow sticky pad on my desk and turned it around to face her. Taking a pen from her backpack, she wrote quickly, then pulled off the top sheet.