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newspapers were relying more on wire stories and less on their own journalists. The past five years had been especially difficult. The Record was slowly creeping toward a more homogenized product that emphasized the brand over the individual writer.
    As far as the suits were concerned, news columnists didn’t sell papers anymore. Less than two decades into the only career he had ever wanted, Chapa sometimes felt like a dinosaur in an industry facing extinction.
    Still, he knew how to conduct a one-on-one with the best of them. Understanding that the key to being a skilled interviewer is knowing how to become an active part of a one-way conversation. As he exited onto Route 59, Chapa anticipated that those skills would soon be put to the test.
    Dominic Delacruz’s business had grown into a chain of six convenience stores. They spanned a thirty-mile stretch of sprawl along DuPage County’s southern edge. Chapa was certain he could find Dominic’s original store, anything else was a wild card.
    In the weeks following Grubb’s capture, Chapa had done a couple of feel good follow-up stories about Dominic, his store, and his family. But as much as Chapa had tried to build up that part of the story, Dominic always refused to take credit for having done anything exceptional, and wouldn’t tolerate being called a hero.
    Dominic was four years old when his family came to the United States from central Mexico. His father worked at a manufacturing plant in the Chicago suburbs, and his mother was employed as a seamstress. Unable to get a job delivering papers, or stocking shelves at the nearby shopping center, like a lot of the other kids in his neighborhood did, Dominic started mowing lawns in the summer and shoveling snow in winter by the age of twelve.
    He didn’t play Little League, or go to movies, or become a Scout. Dominic spent his free time at a nearby branch of the library. With dreams of becoming an engineer, he read every book he could find on the subject. Still, he knew deep down that the money to send him to college would never be there. When his father died at the age of fifty-two, it was time to set his dreams aside and go to work.
    But Dominic and his brother, Antonio, were determined to have a better life than the one they’d seen their father struggle through. So they saved their money and started figuring out what it would take to open a Mexican restaurant in the western suburbs of Chicago.
    Those plans changed the day they drove past a recently closed convenience store on the way to a friend’s house on the far east end of the city’s Pilsen neighborhood. Delacruz Brothers opened three months later, and was an immediate success.
    The brothers made a good deal of money, much of it from selling cigarettes and lottery tickets. But they eventually got tired of being held up late at night and chasing away gangbangers all day long.
    Antonio took his money and moved to Tucson where he opened that restaurant they had always planned. Dominic, usually the more conservative of the two, believed that the convenience store business had been too good to risk trying something else.
    After he had prayed for guidance and believed in his heart that he’d received an answer, Dominic sold the store and began looking for a new location in the suburbs, the sort of area where he wanted his kids to grow up. He found it in rural DuPage County, at the far end of a new subdivision.
    Initially, business was slow at The Late Stop, but things began to pick up as the surrounding woods started giving way to new homes. Soon, what was once a thick forest would be just a memory as more shopping strips followed the construction of half-million dollar homes.
    Dominic and his wife were happy in their new home, and he settled into a nice routine. He had five employees, including his eldest son, and worked four days, plus just one night a week at the store. But as the owner, he would have to step in on nights when one of his regular workers