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underwear?”
    “Thought there might be a boyfriend she keeps photos of. Girls often do.”
    “Really?”
    “Well, if you were a girl, where’s the last place you’d expect your parents to look?”
    “Oh.” She blanched for a second, as if the notion that her daughter might have a boyfriend made her distinctly uncomfortable. Odd, since she’d been the first one to tell me about Nya’s rep. Did I mention I hate things that don’t fit? “Are you finished?”
    “Yes. Do you see anything missing in here? An overnight bag, maybe?” I pointed to the shelf above the clothes. When she looked up I pocketed the bag of cannabis and closed the lingerie drawer.
    “No…no her luggage is all right there.” She waved a pearl-braceletted hand at the shelf. Tremors in the hand again. That was more than worry.
    “All right. Thank you, Mrs. Thales. I’ll be in touch.” I scooted around her and down the stairs. Shortly after I got into my car, the garage door opened to accept a green Mercedes sedan.
    Mr. Thales, presumably, arriving home in time for his outing with his wife. How long until she told him?
    I, on the other hand, needed some dinner.
     
     

7:00 PM, Saturday
     
    Blackhawk Plaza is one of those shopping centers that desperately tries to convince you that it’s a cultural experience. In early evening it overflows with folks who are there either for the last tour of the auto museum, a posh dinner out, or who have a desperate need to make their consumerism look sophisticated.
    Me? I was abusing my client’s trust by paying twice as much as what my “gourmet” pizza was worth. I needed some brain fuel, and the fountains made for a pleasant mid-evening background in the perpetual magic hour of the Bay Area’s midsummer.
    This morning, I’d had a hysterical client to placate and a very strange girl to find. Now I had what was looking more and more like a smart nineteen-year-old underachiever taking her parents for a ride while she rode all the available roller coasters in the chemical playground.
    It wasn’t an uncommon story in this area. When I worked detective in Oakland, the guys at the Emeryville crime lab we contracted with always had some story of the latest drug or booze scandal from over the hills. One of them insisted that the higher your income got, the more of it your wife and kids wasted in smoke, toke, coke, speed, and China White.
    By those standards, Danville and Blackhawk were some of the most loaded places on the planet. It certainly would explain the placid, disinterested expressions on the middle-age faces.
    But I wasn’t just here for the pizza. High class neighborhoods are the best places to pore over evidence, because the culture sustains itself on polite disinterest.
    If you’re doing something out of the ordinary—for example, examining a teenage girl’s heroin injection kit—you’re less likely to be noticed. Anyone who bothers to look at you will be embarrassed to admit they know what you’re doing. The rest are more likely to presume, out of habit, that you’re a diabetic with a rock candy habit.
    At my wire table in the rotunda, with the hundred-yard-long water feature stretching past (I know, I’m sorry, I can hear the English language whimpering from its corner from the pretension, but there just isn’t another word that describes it), I had a good view of both people and mallards from one end of the complex to another.
    Sometimes, a little people-watching is just what the bartender ordered. In my case, getting grounded in the local subculture helped, ever so slightly, to separate what was unusual about Nya from what was “normal”—assuming a very flexible definition of the word allowing for local conditions.
    With a little food in me I was less inclined to be paranoid than I had been at the Thales house. Between the drugs, the sex, and the fact that her room looked like she never intended to leave, I was tempted to write the whole thing off as a woman who skipped town