“It won’t be easy,” Miss Howard said. “She’s being watched very carefully, day and night.”

“Then we must be creative,” the Doctor answered. “But we must know. This mysterious little man’s behavior has been marked by two apparently contradictory intentions-we must find out why, so that we can determine when or if we are likely to encounter him again.” As he crossed back to the sketch on the wall, his voice grew discouraged again. “None of which, I fear, solves the problem of this bloody basement… How do we get in? And once in, how do we discover what she’s created there, and if, in fact, she is keeping the child within it?”

Lucius grunted. “There aren’t many times that I’d advocate the department’s usual methods,” he mumbled. “But in this case-what I wouldn’t give to break the door in and get down there with a good old-fashioned bloodhound, to smell the baby out.”

Everyone fell silent for a minute or two. I just sat there in my windowsill, knees tucked up under my chin, waiting for one of them to come up with a more practical idea. In such a state of mind, it took a few minutes for me to notice a small noise: Cyrus, gently clearing his throat in, it seemed, my direction. I looked over to find him staring at me, raising his eyebrows in an expression that appeared to say, “Well …?” I had no idea what he meant by the look, and I wrinkled my eyebrows and hunched my shoulders to tell him so. At that point he looked to the others, making sure they were still staring at the diagram, and then wandered over to me, leaning on the window frame and looking outside so that what he said couldn’t be seen or overheard.

“You still know that boy downtown?” he mumbled, casually putting an arm on the window frame and a hand across his mouth. “The one with the animal?”

For a minute I was bewildered, and even when I realized who he was talking about, it didn’t clear much up for me. “Hickie the Hun?” I said. “Sure, I still know him, but-”

“And you’ve seen the woman’s house,” Cyrus said. “Figure you could crack it?”

It was a little shocking to be asked such a thing-I mean, I was supposed to have forgotten all about such matters. “That joint?” I finally answered. “Yeah, of course, but-”

Cyrus finally looked dead at me. “This is your play, Stevie. If you want to make it…”

He wandered away again, leaving me a little stunned. I whispered, “But, Cyrus-” after him urgently; urgently enough to cause the Doctor to turn around.

“Stevie?” he said. “Do you have something to contribute?”

Turning quickly, I shook my head innocently. “No, sir.”

Cyrus mumbled, “Yes, you do,” toward the wall.

“No, I don’t,” I said out of the side of my mouth.

“Okay,” he answered. “If that’s how you want it…”

“What is it?” the Doctor asked, perplexed. “Stevie, if you have some notion of how to break this deadlock, then please…” He held his hand toward the diagram.

I didn’t move right away, just sat there and ran the thing through my head. Then I groaned and stood up. There wasn’t much else to do. After all, I’d played a part in talking the Doctor into trying to save the Linares baby; and I figured, as I dragged myself across the room, that if I did know a way to take the next step, I owed it to the man to come across. So, shooting Cyrus a little look that said “Thanks for nothing”-to which he only smiled wide-I joined the other three at the diagram.

“Uhh,” I noised, not sure just where to start. “You-uh-might not have to do it the way Detective Sergeant Lucius says. I mean, you might be able to get the same job done without all the noise.” I pointed to the diagram. “If what you’re saying is that the baby’s scent oughtta be detectable in the basement, even if we don’t know just where the Hunter woman’s got her locked up-well, then, you might not have to bust in with cops and a bloodhound to find out. Did anybody notice what was on the back windows of the house?”

“Yes,” Lucius said. “I made a special note. They’ve had bars installed. Not too thick, but spaced at narrow intervals.”

“So you’d need a spreader,” I answered.

Lucius nodded. “Yes, but even if you had one, it’d be hard to create an opening big enough for a person.”

“You mean, for an adult person,” I said. “That’s how they generally set them bars. But…”

The Doctor looked at me, and it seemed like he couldn’t decide whether to be excited or stern. “Stevie-are you suggesting that you could get inside?”

I nodded with what you might call extreme reluctance. “There’s some stables right next door to the house. I noticed that much. Good place to hide out and then move from. Spread the bars, get inside, and go check out the basement. If we find the kid, I can bring her out.”

“And what would you find her with?”Lucius asked.

Shrugging, I answered, “I got a friend-” I felt the Doctor’s eyes on me. “I had a friend, anyway. Kid who does second-story jobs, like I used to. We call him Hickie the Hun, ’cause he claims his family were German aristocrats, way back. They weren’t, though-Dutch, something like that. Anyways, he’s got this trained ferret. Name’s Mike. Hickie keeps him in a sack on jobs. Mike can get through all kinds of narrow openings.” I pointed at the diagram again. “And I could get him in there. Got a hell of a nose, does that animal.”

“But how does it know what it’s looking for?” Miss Howard asked.

“Hickie’s got this trick,” I told her. “He puts something that either looks or smells like what he’s trying to lift into Mike’s cage and don’t feed him until he learns to fetch it. It don’t take too long, generally. A few days.”

Lucius pondered the matter for a minute, then looked to Dr. Kreizler. “Doctor,” he said, his voice making it clear that he understood the risk but was excited, anyway. “This could work.”

“Wouldn’t we have to find a way to get the Hunters out of the house, though?” Miss Howard asked.

“Just the wife,” I answered. “And if she’s spending time with Goo Goo Knox, well… all we gotta do is wait for her to leave some night. I don’t guess her husband takes care of the kid, if he’s as bad off as you all say. So she probably stows the baby while she’s out. I’d go in through the ground floor-the kitchen, probably. After that, straight to the basement. They sleep on the top floor, right? We heard the husband while we were outside.”

“That’s right,” Lucius said quickly.

“So it’d be pretty simple to pull it off while he was there. I done that kind of thing plenty of times. Not with a kid, maybe, but how much different than a sack of goods can a kid be?”

There wasn’t much more to say about the actual job, so I knew what was coming next: the Doctor said, “Would you both excuse us, please?” and took me by the shoulder toward the back of the room. There he folded his arms and looked at me for a second; then he turned away and stared out the window.

“Stevie, there is a great deal about this plan that makes me uncomfortable.”

“Me, too,” I said. “You got another idea, I’m all for it.”

“That’s just the problem,” he answered. “We don’t. And you know that.”

“Yeah. But I didn’t think of it to start with, Cyrus did. Anyway, it don’t-it doesn’t have to be such a big deal. You give me one of the detective sergeants to keep watch, and if we’ve got the calash ready in the stable, we oughtta be fine. A gun and a badge’ll take care of anybody but the Dusters, and by the time they find out what’s going on, if they ever do, we’ll be long gone.”

There wasn’t any way, of course, that the Doctor was ever going to be happy about me either putting myself in danger or going back to my old thieving ways; but he knew, to judge from the look on his face, that we didn’t have any choice. The fact that Miss Howard and Detective Sergeant Lucius were all for the idea only put the icing on the thing. And so by two o’clock I found myself once again heading down into my old neighborhood, to try to locate Hickie the Hun and his ferret, Mike.