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could sit right across from him.

“Kevin said you were doing something for him?”

“He tell you what that was?”

“You’re a cagey man, Mr. . . . ?”

“Hazard. B. B. Hazard.”

“Sure,” he said, making it clear he wasn’t buying it.

“But I’m using different ID for this job,” I said, sliding the driver’s license Gem had gotten made for me across to him.

“So I’d be hiring Joseph Grange,” he said, reading the plastic laminate of my photo, “DOB 10/19/52. Is that right?”

“Not ‘hiring,’ “ I told him. “I’m what you’d call an independent contractor.”

“I see,” he said, chuckling to let me know he was hip. “But you’ll need a . . . document of some kind, to verify that you’re on assignment to this office, yes?”

“No. I just need whoever answers the phone here to vouch for that. If anyone should ever call.”

“That isn’t difficult. But . . . Kevin didn’t tell me very much about you. . . .”

“So?”

“Well, I was thinking . . . we might know some people in common.”

“I don’t run dope,” I said, dismissing any chance we had mutual friends.

“I see my reputation precedes me.”

“The way I hear it, it comes to weight busts around here, you’re the man.”

“Lots of people hear that. Where did you hear it?”

“Inside,” I said. Softly.

“Not many of my clients there.”

“Exactly.”

He laughed. “I like you, Mr. . . . Grange.” He leaned back in his chair, lit a long white cigarette. The scent of cloves wafted over me. I looked at a spot behind the middle of his pale eyebrows. “Kevin tells me you did some work overseas,” he said, blowing a smoke ring at the ceiling.

“Does he?”

“We don’t just defend people who have run afoul of the draconian drug laws here. A lot of our work is . . . political, I suppose would be the best way to describe it.”

“Cool.”

“Probably not. At least, probably not your politics.”

“I don’t strike you as a liberal?”

“No. No, you don’t.”

“Your receptionist didn’t like me either.”

“We don’t make judgments here. And we’re very good at what we do. You might want to keep that in mind if you run into any trouble while you’re working for Kevin.”

“I will. You know what that work is, right?”

“You’re looking for his daughter.”

“Yeah. You ever meet her?”

“Buddy? I’ve known her practically since she was born.”

“She ever work here?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Well, the kind of office this is, I figure it’d be like heaven to an idealistic kid. Free Huey one generation, Free Willy the next, right?”

“I appreciate your sarcasm. But Buddy isn’t that kind of idealist.”

“What kind is she?”

“She’s more . . . introspective, I would say.”

“Okay. Any idea where she went?”

“Not a clue.”

“Or why?”

“That’s an even bigger mystery. She had an . . . I almost said an ‘ideal’ . . . life. I know that’s not possible for a teenager; at least not in their minds. But I never knew a happier, more well-adjusted young woman.”

“You have kids?” I asked him.

“No. You?”

“Four,” I told him, just keeping my skills in practice.

Being a teenager in America is a high-risk occupation. They’re the most likely to get shot, stabbed, sexually assaulted, beat up, bullied, turned on to chemicals, turned into zombies—and used and abused by the people who “counsel” them after all that.

And their peer-pressured cynicism makes them the easiest to trick, too.

It wouldn’t have shocked me if Rosebud had been driven to a remote area and killed by some other girls who didn’t like the way she spoke to one of their boyfriends. Or was snuffed out because some freakish boys wanted the “experience.” Or didn’t survive a gang rape.

But those kinds of crimes always seem to pop to the surface, like a river-disgorged corpse. Back in the sixties, there was a young guy in Tucson who killed a couple of girls for the fun of it. Buried them out in the desert. If he’d been a nomadic serial killer, the crimes might still be unsolved. But he had to tell some of his groupies about his feats. And when they scoffed, he showed them where the bodies were buried.

When teenagers commit crimes, they tend to talk about it. Today, they even make videos of it.

But the wires were quiet.

Or maybe Rosebud had been in a secret romance with a guy who killed her in a rage when she said she was going to tell his wife.

It never takes much.

But if she’d had a boyfriend, the guy had to have been sneaking into her room at night. Because it turned out that Rosebud had led a tightly scripted life . . . and one that made Mother Teresa look like a slacker. Two nights a week at the hospital’s children’s ward, visiting kids with cystic fibrosis. Saturdays, she volunteered at a shelter for battered women. That was when she wasn’t reading books into a tape recorder for the blind, or collecting signatures to abolish the death penalty, or delivering canned goods for a local food bank.

I thought back to what the father’s lawyer had said about Rosebud. Maybe, to him, anything less than overthrowing a government was “introspective.”

The high-school principal talked to me readily enough after she got a call from the father. She was surprised, though, that Rosebud was into all those activities—she certainly didn’t do any extracurricular stuff at school. Her grades were good but not spectacular.

When I asked about her friends, the principal just shrugged. At her level, she just heard about the extreme kids—the ones bound for the Ivy League, and the ones they were holding a prison cell for. She told me to try the guidance counselor.

He was a black guy in his thirties, dressed casually, with alert eyes. Told me Rosebud had never been in to see him. About anything. He knew of her only in the vaguest terms. A loner, not a joiner. “It was more like she . . . tolerated school.”

“Any chance she was more friendly with one of her teachers than she was with the other students?” I asked him.

His eyes went from alert to wary. “What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything. Sometimes a kid relates better to adults than to peers. You’ve seen that yourself, right?”

“Not the way you’re implying. Not at this school.”

“Whatever you say.”

“You don’t sound very satisfied, Mr. Grange.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s not your problem, is it?”

“I’m not sure I’m following you.”