Gregor went to the two departments where she was supposed to work, but saw nobody answering to her description, and nobody wearing a name tag with her name on it. In toys, a very small boy was sitting on the floor, having a screaming fit over something his mother would not let him have. In house-wares, a rickety old woman was pawing through box after box of blue ceramic dinner plates, as if the next box she found would be something else, like a dinner plate. The longer he stayed, the more depressed he became. The very air in the store was depressing. The saleswomen were all wearing dirty aprons. The cashiers all looked bored.
He went back out onto the street to look for another cab. It took him four blocks to find one, by which time he was in another neighborhood entirely. He gave the second address on the list Walker Canfield had given him and sat back to think. He didn’t recognize the street, but that wasn’t necessarily significant. He didn’t know much about Philadelphia anymore. Since he’d come back from Washington to live, he’d restricted himself to Cavanaugh Street, a few neighborhoods in the center of the city where there were restaurants he liked and things he liked to do, and crime scenes. With crime scenes, he was never 100 percent sure where he was. Streets full of brick and stone houses went by, the kind of places that had either been cut up to make cramped apartments or renovated and restored by rich people who didn’t want to live in the suburbs. Those turned into streets full of clattering industrial equipment, doing Gregor did not know what.
The street Kathi Mittendorf lived on might have been in the city of Philadelphia proper, or it might not have. It was in that grey area of small wooden frame houses and small stores and strip shopping centers that made the transition between the city and its suburbs, so that there was never a place where the city actually stopped. It just petered out. Gregor looked at the meter and winced. He’d have to find a cash machine after this was over. Either that, or call Bennis to rescue him. The cab pulled up to the curb in front of a small grey house with a porch that sagged slightly in the middle. The porch had a glider on it, but the glider was pushed into a corner, out of the way. There was a driveway, of sorts. Two thin strips of concrete vanished out of sight between this house and the one next door. No car was visible. Gregor got out, took the fare from the money in his wallet and added a very generous tip, and looked around. No children were playing in the yards. No housewives were washing their front windows. This was a neighborhood where people worked. In the daytime, it would tend to be deserted.
Gregor climbed the porch steps and crossed the porch. He rang the bell and waited. He didn’t expect Kathi Mittendorf to be home. Just because he hadn’t found her at Price Heaven didn’t mean she hadn’t been there, on her break, or in the back inventorying stock or putting away boxes. Even if she hadn’t been there, it made sense that she would use her day off to do errands. He only wanted to make sure he had done everything he could to find her.
Behind the narrow front door, locks came undone. There were a number of them, including one bolt. Gregor knew the sound of a bolt being drawn back. He straightened up automatically. The door opened and a middle-aged woman stood framed in the doorway, her too-blond hair pulled back in elastic so tightly her hair looked ready to scream. The skin on her face sagged. There were frown lines around the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were heavy and had too many bags under them. Her body was shapeless in the way the bodies of women in their fifties got if they hadn’t been very diligent about working out.
“Yes?” she said.
“I’m looking for Kathi Mittendorf,” Gregor said.
Kathi Mittendorf stared back at him, placid but suspicious. Gregor was sure she was Kathi Mittendorf, even though she hadn’t said so. She fit the description perfectly. What he would do if she decided to say she was somebody else, Gregor didn’t know.
“Who are you?” she said instead.
“My name is Gregor Demarkian. I work, sometimes, as a consultant to police departments.”
“Are you working as a consultant to police departments now?”
“Not officially, no. Unofficially, yes.”
“And is that what this is about? Something to do with police departments?”
“Something, yes,” Gregor said. “But mostly I’m here on my own. Nobody knows I came. This is not official. I’m trying to find a man named Michael Harridan.”
“I don’t know anybody named Michael Harridan.”
“You told someone that you did.”
“Who?”
“A friend of a friend of mine. It’s not important. I know you’re a member of America on Alert. That’s Michael Harridan’s organization.”