The room was filling up as the other engineers arrived. The architects came, with changes to the design. The senior engineer left us, giving Aliana a master key so I could look in Sebastian’s locker.

“Take her back to the hoist as soon as she’s seen it, then meet me on thirteen. We have a problem with the soffits on the first recess.”

The engineers all had lockers where they mostly kept extra socks or earmuffs, Aliana explained, opening Sebastian’s. He’d left behind a gym bag with running shoes, shorts and a cup. I riffled through the bag and found wadded-up receipts for food or toiletries.

“Sebastian had to save money,” Aliana said, looking over the receipts with me. “He told us his mother left him and his sister with a humongous debt to pay off, so we weren’t surprised when he wouldn’t go out drinking with us. He didn’t really drink, anyway. And he tried to take care of his sister—it’s one of the good things about him. He isn’t a very good engineer, but he’s not a bad person.”

Among the receipts was a scrap of paper with “11 P.M., 131” written on it in a black felt-tip. Aliana couldn’t say whether it was Sebastian’s writing or not.

“We do everything by text, so I never see his handwriting, and anyway, it’s just a few numbers.”

She also couldn’t explain whether the 131 referred to anything in the Virejas job site. A building involved so many numbers, so many calculations, this could refer to almost anything, but not to anything that jumped out at her.

Her phone trilled—the senior engineer, texting her to wrap things up with the detective. She steered me to the hoist gate, then trotted to a rough-poured stairwell in a far corner to climb up to thirteen. A couple of the steelworkers catcalled at her; she laughed and bantered back, her beaded braids dancing under her gold Brentback hard hat.

The worksite had filled while I was talking to the project manager and the engineers. From twelve stories up, I felt as though I was looking at a movie set, something like the pyramid-building scene in The Ten Commandments. Lots of miniature figures crawled across the landscape hauling steel, mixing concrete, loading dump trucks.

While I was staring, the hoist passed me going up, carrying three men along with the operator. They all turned to look at me, the lone figure in the foreground. I’d seen one of them before, walking down Clark next to a frightened Jerry Fugher. I hoped my hard hat put my face in enough shadow that he wouldn’t recognize me.

When the hoist came back down to collect me, I asked the operator who he’d been taking up just now. “More engineers?”

“Nah, they’re with the cement contractor. You guys ought to join a dating service,” he said. “They wanted to know about you, too.”

“‘Engineers Measure Up,’ that’d be a good dating site for geeks,” I said, but my stomach tightened: the gravel-faced man had recognized me.

“Nah, if you want to meet them, you need to go to ‘Cementing Relations.’”

I laughed obligingly. “Who’s pouring for you? Ozinga?”

“This crew is with Sturlese. Brentback usually subcontracts with them on their big jobs. What dating site do you detectives use?”

“I don’t know. ‘Caught Flatfooted’ doesn’t sound attractive, does it?”

We stopped at the sixth floor to pick up another couple of guys and the conversation switched to the weather and the White Sox.

“The Mesaline kid was a Cubs fan,” I said. “Any of you see him at Wrigley Field?”

“Yeah, he would be a Cubs fan,” the hoist operator said. “He didn’t have the balls for this kind of work.”

When we got to the bottom, before he let the next upward-bound group onboard, I pulled out my cell phone and showed him the blurry shot I’d taken of Jerry Fugher at Wrigley Field. “You ever see this guy with your Sturlese Cement crew?”

“What, with Danny DeVito? Don’t tell me Nabiyev is making movies in his spare time—a dead carp on the sand has more emotion than he does.”

Nabiyev. At least I had the gravel guy’s name now. “Maybe deep down Nabiyev is a boiling pot of feeling and the hitman façade is just that—a cover to keep us from seeing his profound emotions.”

“Hitman façade? It wouldn’t surprise me if he was a hit man all the way to the bone. If you can’t detect that, better find a new line of work.”

ROACH MOTEL

All the way back across the job site to the gate, I felt as though I had a bull’s-eye painted on the back of my hard hat. It wasn’t until I’d gotten the Mustang safely up the gravel track to Illinois Street that I breathed normally.

Instead of going to my office, I drove the thirty miles down to Lansing, to the address I’d gotten for Jerry Fugher. As the map app had suggested, it was, in fact, a garage behind a single-story frame house. I parked around the corner and walked up the alley to the garage. I had my picklocks out, but the door opened easily—someone had been ahead of me with a crowbar.

Jerry Fugher hadn’t been a warm and cozy guy, and a garage, even one where someone has added insulation, a stove, a toilet and a skylight, is still a garage and not a warm and cozy place to live. This one was made particularly repellent by the level of chaos. Whoever had pried open the door had emptied drawers, the little refrigerator under the countertop and even the garbage can.

I tried to poke through the papers and garbage, using a barbecue fork that I found on the bed. Cockroaches flicked their whiskers at me contemptuously as I upended a sardine tin. When I backed away, more roaches crawled out from under the papers and sauntered to cover under the kitchenette counter. The backs of my legs tingled: I’m not afraid of bugs, exactly, but cockroaches always seem as oily and arrogant as rats.

If seven maids with seven mops swept the place for half a year they might find something of value, but I couldn’t hunt when I couldn’t even guess what I was looking for. Among the papers I turned over were wadded-up printouts from online bets on horses. In the pages I looked at, Uncle Jerry had won twenty-seven hundred dollars but lost over twelve thousand. No wonder he was putting the screws to his niece and nephew over the loan he’d set up for them.

I probably could track the betting losses to dates when he showed up at St. Eloy’s to exchange electrical work for cash, but the gambling seemed irrelevant. It might explain Fugher’s behavior, but it didn’t seem to be a reason for taking his place apart.

Footsteps in the alley made me stiffen and back up to the room’s only exit. A gray-haired man in jeans and a Bears jacket loomed in the doorway.

“What the fuck? Did you do this?”

“Nope. You the owner?”

He nodded toward the frame house. “Yeah, I rent to Fugher. Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“You know Fugher is dead, right? I’m a detective. I’m investigating, but this is too much for one person. When did this happen?”

“I don’t know. My tenants pay me on time, I leave them alone.”

“Then why are you here now?” I asked.

“Lady who lives back of me, she called to say she saw you go in here. We don’t have much crime here in Lansing, but I never heard of Fugher bringing any females home with him before.”

“Who did he bring home—besides every cockroach in Chicago, I mean?” I pulled out my phone and showed him my shot of Fugher and Nabiyev. “This guy? He one of the regular visitors?”

The man looked at the screen. “Never saw him before. You with the Lansing police?”

“I’m from Chicago,” I said. “Fugher died in Chicago. If Nabiyev comes around, call the Chicago PD Fourth District. That’s where the investigation is based.”

“Nothing here for the police to care about.” He stomped across the yard into the back entrance to his house. I followed him, wanting to ask him how long he’d rented to Fugher, and how he knew Fugher. He refused to open the door, crying at me, “Go away! I don’t need to talk to Chicago cops, I live in Lansing, I don’t know anything.”