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life.
    “So what do you make of that?”
    Hendricks swore. “Not much. I think we track down these girls. Maybe one tells us something.”
    I held up my hands. “Let’s do it.”

CHAPTER TWELVE
    We took to the streets to canvass the girls, found them using connections I’d made working vice and from volunteer work I did at a battered women’s shelter in the Tenderloin.
    We started on the corners they usually worked, but it was too early in the day for them to be out on the job. I knew a couple of coffee shops they frequented, found a handful of them talking over breakfasts, coffee, having just woken up from a night’s work. It was just past noon.
    Three girls I recognized sat in a back booth at It’s Tops, hair unkempt and makeup-free, not yet ready to work or even dress for the job.
    “Hey, Shane,” I said, walking over to them. I nodded at Hendricks for him to hang back, grab a stool at the bar, and enjoy a cup of the diner’s weak black joe.
    “Here’s Clara Donner,” Shania said, “our avenging angel.” She seemed underwhelmed.
    The girl sitting across from Shania, who had a side of the booth to herself, didn’t make room for me to join, so I slid into the booth adjacent.
    “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    “Same old same old. Just the work, the life. Makes me tired.”
    “Mmm-hmmm.” Her friends nodded.
    “I could say the same,” I said.
    She went on. “Even now, waking up at noon getting harder. Shit, we out till five last night. Girl needs her full eight hours.”
    “We caught a bad one last night, kept me out until three thirty. Then I’m back at my desk at nine.”
    The girl closest to me turned to regard my makeup and to see how I held up. I passed some kind of test. She went back to eating her eggs.
    “So what’s up?” Shania asked.
    I reached into my blazer for the pictures of Piper and Farrow, flopped them onto their table. Farrow’s was a shot of him blown up from his driver’s license—I wouldn’t ruin their meal with a pic of him from last night. “Know these guys? Any of you ever trick for them?”
    They spun the pics around to all get a look, checked them out, shook their heads.
    “No, ma’am. Honestly, I don’t think we his type.”
    Shania was Latina, but her two friends were African American. “You can tell just like that?”
    They nodded. “Just like that. They looking for something else.”
    “What?”
    The girl next to Shania smiled. “I could tell you that, I’d be working some other line, girl.”
    “What about girls? You hear of anyone disappearing? Leaving the life?”
    “Happens all the time here. What can you do?”
    “People move on.”
    Shania leveled a hard look at me. “Now what you gone do about helping us with this dickhead coming around from vice?”
    I sighed. “Give me a name.”
    “Owens. Steve Owens. He the one. Get him off our ass, girl.”
    I reached to their table for the pictures. “You sure? Nothing?”
    Same response.
    I reached inside my jacket for my pad to make a note. “Owens,” I said. “Will do my best.”
    “Better, girl.” Shania raised her coffee in a form of toast. “Or next time we won’t be so forthcoming with you.” She winked.
    Getting up, I slid two twenties onto their table, enough to cover the breakfasts and a nice tip, told them the meal was on me. I’d get nowhere with Owens in vice, if I could even get time with him, so this was some consolation to that, a fact we all knew too well.
    I walked back to Hendricks just as a BLT with a side of fries arrived in front of him. “Any luck there?” he said.
    “No knowledge of our johns whatsoever.” I stole a fry and ate it. This wasn’t the place to worry about it being too hot. Here the oil and salt had already soaked in. For better or worse.
    He poured ketchup onto the side of the plate farthest from me, so I moved around to his other side once I’d stolen another fry. I dipped it in ketchup.
    “You know anyone in vice who owes you a favor? They got