The workers shrug and exchange glances, one of them asking me to repeat the name. I do better, whipping out the driver’s license photo off the system, along with the picture Salazar took when he registered Rios as a confidential informant. They gather round, squinting and shaking their heads. One of them leans forward, though, tapping a hard brown finger on the page, his eyes drifting upward in recollection.

“Yeah,” he says. “I seen him. You know who this is?” He turns to one of the others. “That’s Tito’s cousin, the one with the big attitude.”

The man next to him looks again, then nods. “I think you right.”

“Who’s this Tito?” I ask.

“Tito the Painter.” He brushes his hand back and forth in the air, like I might not be familiar with the term. “He don’t work here. We got nothing to paint yet. But he’s always around, you know, at the various sites, ’cause he’s working so cheap.”

“What’s his last name?”

He scratches his chin, then murmurs something in Spanish to the other man, who shrugs. “Everybody just call him Tito the Painter. But I can tell you where he stays.” He rattles off an address over on the West side, an apartment complex off Hammerly.

I thank him, then turn to go. Instead of heading straight to the address, I drive around the area looking for other sites, asking workers and foremen alike whether they’ve seen Tito the Painter around, or know his full name. Everybody seems to be familiar with the guy, some even recognize the photo of Rios, but no one can add to what I already know.

Passing by the outreach center, I see Abernathy out on the front steps talking to two slender white guys in retro sunglasses and snap-front shirts. He comes out to the curb for a quick chat, but he’s already told me everything he knows about Rios.

“What about the van?” I ask. “You said his cousin would pick him up in a van.”

“It was white. It had ladders on the side, I remember that.”

“He’s a painter, apparently.”

“Makes sense. It was that kind without windows, you know? Sliding door on the side. I can’t remember if there was a company name. I don’t think so.”

“You didn’t write down the license number or anything?”

He smiles. “I’ll remember for next time.”

Back downtown I go through the boxes of task force paperwork, hunting for the Willowbrook Mall surveillance footage, or at least some stills. Aguilar, sensing my excitement, wanders over and dives in. A minute later, Lorenz joins him, and then Bascombe and Ordway walk by wondering what’s going on. Before long, we’re all digging through boxes side by side, stacking the contents on the floor, my chair, and any empty space we can find.

“Got it,” Bascombe says, lifting a sheaf of paper from the bottom of his box.

We spread the stills out on the conference table, scrutinizing the grainy images.

“Does that look like a ladder to you?” I ask, pointing to a pixely shadow alongside the van.

They all take turns looking. The consensus is that it might be, though Ordway has to spoil the moment by pointing out it could also be a long dent, a streak of paint, or even a missile – basically anything. Look long enough and you see what you want to.

“You have the address,” Bascombe says. “Why don’t we go check it out?”

“All of us?” I ask.

He smiles. “Why not? You want to keep the glory all to yourself?”

“Let’s roll.”

On the drive over, convoying in three cars, I can’t help remembering my last outing in force, the pointless kick-down of Keller’s door. Hopefully this one will turn out better. We pass the apartment complex and then circle around, cruising slowly through the parking lot. At the front of the line, Bascombe sticks his arm out the driver’s window, pointing up ahead. I crane my neck, gazing along the length of vehicles parked under the complex’s corrugated shelter. At the end of the row, a white van sits, with a long, paint-spattered ladder knotted to the roof rack. The lieutenant parks right behind it, leaving me to pull ahead while Aguilar takes up a spot behind. We all get out at once, donning sunglasses, adjusting gear.

“You know what to do, ladies,” Bascombe calls out.

We’re detectives, so we do what we always do. Knock on doors. Ask questions. Throw our weight around. It’s not hard to find out which door belongs to Tito the Painter, or that his real name is Tito Jiménez, and he has a little cousin who sometimes stays with him. We congregate in front of his door, ready for anything.

“March,” the lieutenant says. “You do the honors.”

Jiménez opens right away, throwing the door wide, no apprehension. He shields his eyes from the sunlight, confused by the sudden appearance of so many hpd detectives on his doorstep, but he doesn’t panic or run, doesn’t try to slam the door on our faces. He’s older than I expected, in his early forties, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, a belly that strains against his white T-shirt, and skin the same shade of yellow-tan as a shade-grown Connecticut cigar wrapper.

“Is this your van out here?” I ask.

He nods.

“Is your cousin here?”

“Frank? He don’t stay here no more.”

“No?”

He pushes his bottom lip out. “I told him to leave. He had this girl here living with him, and I said, ‘If you’re man enough for a live-in girlfriend, you’re man enough to pay your own rent.’ I didn’t like her here, always messing everything up.”

A glance over his shoulder suggests the standards of tidiness haven’t improved. I flip through my notebook, pulling a photo of Evangeline Dyer – not the postmortem snap Thomson took, but one Robb provided, Evey and Hannah in happier times, before the Dyers returned to Louisiana. It’s folded over so only Evangeline’s face shows, the part not obscured by her hair.

“Is that the girlfriend?” I ask.

He pauses to study the picture. The silence is so intense over my shoulder I know I’m not the only one holding his breath. Jiménez hands the photo back, nostrils flaring.

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s her.”

I ask him where Rios and the girl went after he kicked them out, but he claims to have no idea. According to him, they aren’t that close, him and his cousin. Rios showed up one day saying some dudes he owed money to had taken his car and ransacked his old apartment, stealing a lot of his stuff. Before that, they hadn’t had anything to do with each other.

“Who did he owe money to?” I ask.

He shrugs, not because he doesn’t know, but because he doesn’t want to say the name, afraid of getting involved. I push him, and when that doesn’t focus the man’s attention, Bascombe steps forward, all six foot four of him, lowering his sunglasses in slow motion.

“Dude by the name of Octavio Morales,” Jiménez says. “Bad dude, but not anymore.”

“He’s dead now.”

Jiménez nods uncomfortably.

“What do you know about that?”

Up to now, he’s been forthcoming, but the painter suddenly loses all interest in talking. I can’t tell if he knows something and doesn’t want to say, or if he’s just afraid of being dragged into a court case, running the risk of having to testify. Either way, he’s obstinate, so Bascombe decides to wrap things up.

“Mr. Jiménez, we’re gonna have to ask you to come downtown. We’re seizing the van, too. Detective Lorenz, you wanna call us a tow truck, son?”

“On it, sir.”

Before he knows what hit him, Jiménez is cuffed for his own safety and baking in the back seat of my parked car. We take a quick look inside – we’ll be back soon enough with a warrant for a more thorough search – and then gather at the van, not opening the doors or even touching the handles, leaving everything for the forensics team to go over in detail. But we can’t help peering through the glass. Ordway goes around back, using his flashlight to peer inside.

“Boys,” he says.

We join him, taking turns glancing through. A sheet of plywood lies in back, a makeshift floor, with ladders and buckets and rollers stacked high. Along the side, though, near the sliding door, there’s a crawl space cleared from front to back. The white metal between the plywood and the door is marked with specks of dried liquid that look black from here.