It took a while to tell her the whole story. By the time I finished, the coffee shop was nearly deserted. Outside, the afternoon had faded to grudging twilight, a greasy grey pall slowly congealing into evening.

“So you think your son might be working with these loan sharks.” May made another note on her legal pad. She had exquisitely terrible handwriting.

“Working for them. He said he’d done a favor for them. When they took him, there were no ransom demands, no extortion, nothing. They just disappeared. The police didn’t know why. I wish to God that I knew.”

May shrugged. She reminded me of a professional organizer on one of those clean-your-house shows, dispassionately sorting my words, discarding the emotional, filing the rest. “And do you have any evidence besides a fake name and a trail that goes cold in Chicago?”

“No.” I cupped my hands around my lukewarm coffee. “That’s all I have left.” I watched her discard those words, too.

She capped her pen and looked up at me. “Then let’s get to work.”