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when I said goodbye to Calli, but I did get a long, heartfelt hug—and a promise that she would call me the next day. Having learned a long time earlier that a relationship had to proceed at its own pace or not at all, I told her I looked forward to hearing from her.
    It didn’t take me long to get back to the office. It turned out I wasn’t the only one working late.
    “Anything?” asked Quetzalli, whose desk was next to mine.
    “I wish,” I said.
    “Takun finally spoke to that doorman,” she said. “He left you a message.”
    I retrieved it and put it up on my screen. It said, “He ate at a mixiotes place down the block—and he wasn’t the only one who got the runs that night. Nothing to pursue.”
    Takun was a slob but I trusted his judgement. Forgetting the doorman, I sat down and plied the Mirror for clues.
    I doubted I’d find much about Coyotl that I didn’t know already. After all, I was as big a fan of the game as anybody, and Coyotl had been heralded as a great prospect even before he hit the Sun League.
    But there might have been some tidbit of which I was unaware, some innocent piece of information that would help me solve the puzzle of Coyotl’s abduction.
    An hour and a half later, I was still searching for it. I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes.
    Enough of the Mirror, I told myself.
    I figured I would go back to Coyotl’s apartment and give it another look—you know, see if there was anything I missed. But as I got up to go, I saw Izel walk over with his ever-present cup of tea.
    Izel was another of my fellow Investigators, though you’d never have known it from looking at him. When they made up all those beanpole jokes, they must have had him in mind. I’d seen skeletons with more meat on their bones.
    The guy was a wealth of stories, though, and even the gods couldn’t touch his honeyed maize cakes. So what he lacked in brawn, he made up for in other ways. He just wasn’t the colleague I would have picked to guard my back in a street fight.
    “Making progress?” he asked me.
    “Not yet,” I said. “You?”
    Izel had been assigned a murder in District Six—the result of a domestic dispute, from all appearances. Nothing nearly as exciting as the disappearance of a ball court star.
    “It’s all over but the sentencing,” he said.
    “That’s good.”
    “It’s great. If I could get a halfway decent cup of tea, life would be perfect. Anyway, I had a thought. Did you by any chance check Coyotl’s Mirror log?”
    “Mirror log?” I repeated. It was something the Emperor had ordered built into all new monitors, but the decree didn’t go into effect for nearly half a cycle.
    “I haven’t seen Coyotl’s apartment,” Izel said, “but I’m guessing he had an advanced system—the kind that lets you pull in premier content. Some of those systems have the log built in already.”
    Izel would know. He was almost as savvy about Mirror tech as he was about maize cakes.
    I nodded. “I’ll check. Thanks for the tip.”
    He smiled. “You want to return the favor?”
    “What did you have in mind?”
    “Seems to me that with Coyotl out, there’s an opportunity. Aztlan fans bet on Aztlan, right? I mean always . They don’t even think about it.”
    I saw where he was going. “So as long as Coyotl’s missing, you’re going to bet on the opposition.”
    Izel shrugged. “As I said, it’s an opportunity.”
    “And when Coyotl comes back . . ."
    “That’s an even bigger opportunity.”
    “Which is why you want me to give you a heads up before Coyotl’s likely to take the court again. Then you can turn around and bet big on Aztlan, and get yourself a premier content system of your own.”
    “No law against it, right?”
    That was true. But it went against my grain to give Izel—or anyone else—an unfair advantage in a betting den.
    “It’s not going to happen,” I said. “But thanks again for the tip.”
    Izel tilted his head. Then he said, “Any time,” and walked