“The alley runs behind all the buildings?” Sam got out of the car and looked around.

“Yes. But we weren’t able to find anyone who was in the alley that night. There’s not a whole lot going on down here at night, and by the time Mrs. Walker realized her husband was missing, any place that had been open had already closed up.”

Sam followed the detective through the front door. Inside, long tables covered with sheets of white paper lined the room. A man in late middle age came out of the kitchen. He was tall and thin with sparse white hair atop a broad forehead and a bland round face.

He stopped halfway across the room, a smile spreading slowly. “Hey, Detective Coutinho. How are you?”

“Good, good, Bob. How’s everything?”

“We’re okay.” The man’s face clouded. “You here to give us some news about Ross?”

Coutinho shook his head. “Sorry. There’s been nothing new.” He gestured in Sam’s direction and said, “Bob, this is Sam. He’s a private detective who’s working for Mrs. Walker. Sam, this is Bob Taylor. He runs Pilgrim’s Place.”

“You think you can find the guy who did Ross when the police couldn’t?” Bob asked somewhat skeptically.

“I’m only going to be working on this one case,” Sam explained. “Detective Coutinho doesn’t have that luxury. So no promises, but I’m going to give it a go.”

“Anything we can do to help. Ross was a good man.” Bob’s head nodded up and down. “A damned good man. Didn’t miss a Tuesday night in over three years.”

“Ross volunteered here for the past three years?” Sam tried for a conversational tone.

“He was one of the first to sign up. Wondered why a guy like him-good family, lived in one of those nice areas outside of town, had a real good job-why he would leave that nice house and that pretty family to drive down here.”

“You ever ask him?”

“Said he’d been really lucky in his life, that any one of these guys, that could be him. Never wanted to take his good fortune for granted.” Bob nodded again. “Like I said, he was a good man.”

Sam glanced around the room. “This is where you feed everyone?”

“Yeah. Anyone who comes in, we’ll feed. No one is ever turned away from Pilgrim’s Place.”

“You have a pretty regular crowd?”

“Oh, yeah. Times have been tough here for the past few years for some folks. We do have some who have been coming steadily, practically since we opened. Others have been able to move on.”

“So you know most of the people who come in?” Sam asked.

“Most of them, sure. Sometimes we get someone who’s just passing through, but for the most part, we recognize or know the names of just about everyone who shows up.”

“How many each day?”

“Maybe forty for breakfast-we got families bringing their kids in every morning-then about the same for lunch. The older kids are in school but the adults who show up for lunch often aren’t here earlier in the morning. Dinner time, we can feed sixty to eighty on any given night. Sometimes last winter, we’d run close to one hundred on the weekends.”

“Do you have anyone on the door, checking IDs, for example?”

“We do have someone at the door, but no one checks IDs. What would be the point in that?” Bob frowned, the idea clearly foreign to him.

Sam didn’t bother to explain. “What does the person on the door do?”

“Just makes sure there’s seating for everyone. If we’re filled, he’ll chat up the next person in line for a while until there’s an opening. We don’t turn anyone away, Sam.”

“So your doorman would know if someone had come in the night Ross Walker was killed who hadn’t been there before? Anyone who stood out, maybe a stranger?”

“We already talked about that, me and Arnie. He works the door. He said there wasn’t nobody he didn’t recognize. As a matter of fact, we were down in numbers that night. Anyone odd would have stood out.” Bob turned to Coutinho, who stood by quietly. “You talked to Arnie yourself. He tell you anything different?”

“No.” The detective shook his head. “I spoke at length with him about who was here and who came in when, when they left. It’s all in the report, Sam. There’s a copy in the file I gave you.”

“Appreciate it.” Sam turned back to Bob. “Mind if I take a look at the kitchen?”

“Right this way.”

Bob led them through an open doorway into the back room, where two large stainless steel stoves stood side by side. Two refrigerators and one upright freezer took up most of the space on the opposite wall, and down the center of the room was a stainless steel counter. The room was, as Coutinho had told Sam, L-shaped, with oversized double sinks in the short leg of the L.

“What was Walker’s job?” Sam asked.

“Everyone’s job changes from night to night. The volunteers arrive, they look at the menu, see what has to be done, they’ll just start to work. You come in first, you start the thing that takes the longest, see?”

“What did Walker work on that night?”

“He and Lynne were a little late that night, only maybe by ten minutes, but most of the entrée and dessert work had already been taken up by someone else. Ross started on the salad, washed up some veggies. I think we had squash that night. Someone brought in a basket of yellow and green from their garden. In the summer and late fall, we get a lot of donations from private gardens,” Bob explained. “Lynne didn’t cook that night. She served.”

“Anyone working back here with him?”

“No. He worked pretty fast on his own.”

“So no one noticed exactly when he went missing?” Sam continued.

“Everyone was doing their own thing. The best we can figure out, when he finished with the salad prep, he put it out on the counter here for the servers to take, and then he must have taken the bag of scraps out to the Dumpster.”

“He always take out the trash?”

“No,” Bob told Sam. “Everyone cleans up after themselves. If you have scraps or garbage, you take it out yourself. At the end of the night, everyone helps out with the general cleanup.”

“The bag of scraps was found in the Dumpster,” Coutinho added, “so we know he made it that far. We’re thinking the killer was hidden behind it, waiting.”

A flicker of a frown crossed Sam’s face as he gestured to the back door. “I’m assuming this is the way?”

“Yeah. He would have gone out here…” Sam and the detective followed Bob through the door. “There’s the Dumpster out there by the fence.”

“That’s where it was that night?”

“That’s not the same Dumpster, but it’s always in the same place, yeah.”

“And the light there over the back door is the only light there is out here at night?”

“Yeah. It’s only about seventy-five watts, I think.” Bob pointed to the brass socket with the bare bulb.

“And nothing at all back there, by the Dumpster?”

“Nothing. It’s really pretty dark out here at night. I mean, you can see the Dumpster, and make out where to toss stuff, but if someone was back there hiding, you wouldn’t see them.”

A worn dirt path ran through the yard of straggly grass dotted with dandelions and chickweed and led straight to the Dumpster, and Sam followed it. He turned to the detective and said, “Show me where you found Walker.”

Coutinho walked around the back of the Dumpster and pointed to a section of fence. “He was here. Back against the fence, legs straight out in front of him. You saw the photos, so you know how he was posed.”

Sam bit the inside of his cheek and scratched the back of his neck, looked back toward the house, then back at the Dumpster again.

“We might be wrong about something,” he told the detective.

“What’s that?”

“I’m not sure the killer came here looking for Walker. How could he have known that Walker would be coming out to the Dumpster that night, or that he’d be alone?”

“I thought we agreed that the nature of the attack, the preparedness of the killer, all indicated that this was personal, a revenge killing.”