She raised an eyebrow at me while simultaneously taking a deep drag.

"Are you a cop or something?"

"I'm remodeling my kitchen. Randy was going to hook me up with some cool wood for my cabinets."

She gave me a quick glance up and down. Yep, I could read her mind, he looks like Mr. Suburban House-Fixer-Upper.

"As good a friends as a waitress and customer can be without ever hooking up outside of here," she said, her tawny mane nodding toward the back of the Ram's Horn.

I paused. Not much here, I thought. Then I asked, "Did Nevada ever bring his girlfriend in here?"

She nodded. "Cute girl."

Okay, not much accomplished.

"Randy cracks me up," I said. "I can't believe he still drives around that piece of c.r.a.p yellow Cadillac. What is it, like, a 1965?"

She shrugged her thin shoulders. "I only seen him in that black Nova. I used to drive one just like it in high school. Mine was gold, though. With huge rust spots all over. If I hit a pothole, little chunks would fall off."

"Did you know Nova in Spanish means 'It won't go?'" I said. I was chock full of interesting tidbits like that. It was a big reason waitresses found me so fascinating.

"No s.h.i.t?" she said. "That's funny."

Our bonding over and with a description of Randy's car, I thanked Mich.e.l.le, resisted the urge to run my hands through her hair and see if my dog Biffy, who ran away when I was three years old, was hidden in there. He wasn't. I walked back to my Taurus. Well, I had a description of a car. But little else.

I looked at St. Clair Salvage across the street. I wondered if I could just peek in the window and get a look at Hornsby's desk. That wouldn't be a crime, would it? Window shopping? People do it all the time.

They wouldn't send me to Jackson for that, would they?

Nineteen.

The direct approach seemed the best. I crossed the street, went around behind the main building and pressed my face up against the nearest window. Through a thin layer of grime I saw a lot of open s.p.a.ce with a bunch of gear on the floor. Clearly not the office, although I figured Nevada Hornsby's corporate decor wasn't exactly Architectural Digest caliber. I walked down to the next set of windows. I saw an old desk with a telephone. Okay, now that could possibly pa.s.s as an office. Now what? I really didn't feel like breaking a window and the law at the same time. I tried to get a better look but couldn't see directly beneath the window. I gave the window a hard nudge but it was locked into place. Probably more from years and years of paint as opposed to an actual lock.

I reconsidered the wisdom of trying to get inside. What were my odds, realistically, of finding a link to the missing employee? I figured the big wooden drawers in Hornsby's desk would be crammed with loose papers, receipts, important doc.u.ments imprinted with coffee stains- "What the f.u.c.k are you doing?" The voice shot out from behind me and I jumped so hard I felt the Ram's Horn coffee threaten to slosh its way out of my belly.

"Oh, Christ," I said.

My sister smiled at me. "You have the right to remain silent, although with that giant maw of a mouth you have I've never actually heard you be silent-"

"Jesus Christ, you scared me," I said.

"You were always such a Nervous Nellie," Ellen said. "What are you doing?" Again, she knew exactly what I was doing. My sister was the Queen of Rhetorical Questions.

"All right, I admit," I said. "I'm a peeping Tom. It started with your friend Sue Rogers. She had those giant eukanubas and her slumber party you went to-"

"Shut up John."

"Close my giant maw?"

"Please."

We stood there in awkward silence for a moment. Then Ellen stepped up to the window through which I'd been looking and took her time looking things over. She turned to me with a raised eyebrow.

"I thought I told you to stay away from this case."

"I am. I just had my daily Ram's Horn breakfast and was walking off the biscuits and sausages..."

"Shut up."

I shrugged my shoulders, deciding to obey her command to keep quiet. I could be a good doggie. Who's a good boy?

"So let me guess," she said. "You were trying to be good and not find a way to sneak in and snoop around the deceased's office. Which, of course, would be a severe violation of the law. You'd probably told yourself you'd just peek, deep down knowing it wouldn't satisfy you and that you would have to figure out a clever way to get inside. Spontaneity would take over and you'd find yourself inside, rummaging around. You might find something, you might not. And then you'd leave and feel terribly guilty, go home, and forget about it the minute you walked through the door and the girls descended on you and made you feel like your coming home was rivaled only by the return of Moses from the mountaintop."

I both admired her and hated her.

I decided to quit being defensive and take the sisterly bull by the horns.

"So I guess you decided to come out here on your own," I said. "Without the a.s.sistance of your new friends from St. Clair Sh.o.r.es law enforcement because you wanted to take a good look around yourself, form your own judgments and keep any discoveries that might impact your case to yourself. And when you saw me, you were secretly relieved because you realized you'd benefit from both my keen insight and my warm companionability."

"It's warm all right," she said. "Like a steaming pile of bullsh-"

"Thank you, I get the idea."

I thought I saw the beginning of a smile play across her face so I said, "Come on, you know what we need to do."

"No," she said. "Run along, go get a piece of coconut creme pie across the street."

She turned her back on me and walked to the back door of St. Clair Salvage, produced a key and unlocked the door. She stepped inside, started to close the door on me, but I caught it just before it shut and pushed it back open.

"Come on, don't shut me out," I said. "This is your little brother talking."

She snorted and turned around, ignoring me.

I followed Ellen inside and shut the door behind me.

"Reminds me of your room," Ellen said, surveying the piles of junk, empty beer cans and dartboard hanging askew on the wall. It was funny how even as adults, childhood is never far behind.

I inhaled deeply and said, "Smells like your closet."

The office, if you could call it that, was divided into three rooms. The doorway led into the biggest room where traditionally, the receptionist would sit. Instead of filling the s.p.a.ce with a chubby middle-aged woman with a telephone headset, Nevada Hornsby had chosen instead to furnish the area with a giant rusty anchor. Complete with dried seaweed.

"Very corporate-y," Ellen said.

"Shabby chic, taken to a whole new level," I said.

There were two more rooms, one of them Hornsby's office, the other empty save for a wastebasket stuck in the corner.

Not surprisingly, the rest of the s.p.a.ce was filled with giant logs, blocks and oddly shaped pieces of wood. Most of the wood had at least one side of it finished, in the sense that it had been sanded and varnished. Hornsby's display samples, I a.s.sumed.

The wood was beautiful.

"Look at this," I said to Ellen. We both looked at a block of wood that was a dark honey color with some of the most intense grain I'd ever seen before. In fact, it was more than grain. It was swirly almost. It was absolutely beautiful.

All the pieces were unique. Some were dark, almost black. Others were blonde. There were huge grain patterns, others small and incredibly complex.

"Amazing," Ellen said. "This stuff sat on the bottom of the lake for hundreds of years."

"I wonder if mob informants look this good."

"Why, you wanna make a desk out of one?" Ellen said.

She had stopped just outside the door to Hornsby's office. I could see a few black-and-white photographs hung on the wall. I stepped up next to her and looked. They were archival type photos of early loggers on Lake St. Clair. They showed burly looking guys in dark wool pants and plaid shirts walking on top of logs with big black boots.

I left Ellen there and went into Hornsby's office. The place had been thoroughly gone over by a forensics team. His desk was old and ready to fall apart. The chair was old with a smoothly polished seat, made so by years and years of b.u.t.t cheeks sliding on and off. I sat down and looked around. There was no computer or anything. Just a phone and piles of folders, invoices and coffee cups, soda cans and beer bottles.

It was weird to be sitting in a dead guy's chair, not that Hornsby was the kind of guy who spent a lot of time here. I pictured him on the boat or in the shop.

I used my handkerchief to pull open the drawers. As I suspected, they were chock full of paperwork. I spied a date on one. 1993. If Jessie Barre loved Hornsby, it probably wasn't because of his filing ability.

Ellen had walked into the office and was looking out the small window, which gave a view of the lake. Next to the phone was a pile of yellow Post-it notes, which was interesting because I knew Post-it notes were invented sometime in the 1980s and it surprised me that Hornsby had purchased office supplies that recently. In any event, there were a few Post-its and I gently pulled them toward me. I peeled off the first one, which was nearly indecipherable. The second was a string of dimensions. The third had a scrawled name and a phone number.

The name was Randy.

I slipped the note into my pocket just as Ellen turned toward me.

"Anything interesting?" she said.

My heart was beating a little quicker than usual. Like I said, I don't like deceiving my big sister, but sometimes I have to.

"Not to me. Maybe to the Society of Mold and Fungus Collectors."

I wanted to follow up the Randy lead by myself because I figured that it was probably nothing. And even if it were something, I didn't want to put Ellen in harm's way because of some half-c.o.c.ked idea of mine. Even though she was probably better equipped to handle it. I remember one time I spilled a bunch of milk at the dinner table and she waited outside for me afterward and kicked my a.s.s. And that was Thanksgiving. Last year.

Ellen took my spot in the desk chair while I looked out the window. The lake was cold and gray, like it so often is at this time of year. I wondered if Nevada Hornsby had ever stood here and contemplated the water. Probably not. He didn't seem like the philosophical type.

I wandered back out into the main room and looked at the different pieces of wood. They were truly spectacular. I'd heard Bill Gates had used this stuff to make the kitchen cabinets in his 40 million dollar house. I knew that only a guy like Gates could afford the wood.

"All done?" Ellen said when she emerged from Hornsby's office. "Satiated your insufferable curiosity?"

"I guess," I said.

We left and Ellen locked the door behind us.

"What are you up to now?" she asked. "Going to try to sweet talk a few more waitresses?"

I shrugged my shoulders.

"Why do I get the feeling that you know more than you're telling me?" she said.

"Why do I get the same feeling about you?" I said. "In fact, it seems terribly coincidental that you would just happen to drop by a the same time as me. Are you sure you weren't following me?"

By now we were at her cruiser and I could see my Taurus across the street.

She climbed behind the wheel and rolled down the window.

"Maybe the next time you thoroughly charm a waitress, you should make sure she doesn't see you cross the street and snoop around a place where a guy worked that you were asking questions about. She might call the cops."

Ellen smiled at me, rolled up the window and drove off.

I couldn't believe it. Mich.e.l.le hadn't believed my story. She hadn't trusted me.

I was slipping.

Big time.

Twenty.

To a resourceful private investigator, and after a few cups of strong coffee I had no problem putting myself into that category, there are many ways to take a phone number and match an address to it. If you have a computer handy, there's the Department of Motor Vehicle database, there's the Nexus database, there's even the good old phone directory database. Now, if you're not at a computer, there are still ways to do it. For instance, you call the operator and say you're looking for Randy Can't Remember-His-Last-Name, but you've only got his phone number and you know he used to live on Whatever Street. Most operators will call up the number and say Randy Jones? You say, yep, that's him. And she'll say, oh, he's not on Whatever Street now, the address listed to that number is 334 Bourbon Street. You say, great, thanks and hang up.

The problem is, it doesn't work every time. Some operators are more cynical than others. In fact, they seem to be getting more and more leery. So when I'm in a pinch and I've got a phone number but no real name or address, I go to the quickest, most dependable resource I have.

"Nate, I need an address." I could hear the usual hubbub of the Grosse Pointe News office in the background. People talking. A copier banging out sheets of stories on the school board, and my overweight friend's heavy breathing.

"How soon and what's it worth?" he said.

"Let me put it this way, I'll wait for it."

He snickered, the sound of a fisherman who's just sunk his treble hook into the lips of a trophy. "It's worth that much?"

I paused. He knew he had me.