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thermos of water, and a bag of Cheetos in the cooler, plus a packet of NoDoz in the back pocket of my shorts.
    “Maybe Mrs. Defonte is out of town,” Julia said.
    “Maybe.” I happened to know that was unlikely, since she’d had rehearsal the night before and had it again tomorrow.
    We waited through the night, and when the sun rose behind us, it brought a heat that was painful. We put on big sunglasses and baseball caps and draped towels over our shoulders. I’d taken too many NoDoz and my hands were shaky, my mouth dry. All the water was gone. We had not taken our eyes off the building since he went inside, not for one single moment.
    Julia searched around with the binoculars. I rested my elbows on the edge of the roof. It was unusual for a target to change the pattern so rapidly, to go from one-hour stretches to all-nighters. Maybe Mrs. Defonte really was out of town. Or maybe he had decided to up and leave her.
    “Keep looking,” she said, passing me the binoculars. “I’ll go get us coffee.”
    “Water,” I said. “I feel like I’m being roasted.”
    A lot of PI-ing was about waiting. Knowing how to wait, being prepared to wait, not giving up on waiting even when it felt like God was one of those assholey kids who hold a magnifying glass over ants until they explode, only He’s using the sun. What we didn’t know was that sometimes all the waiting in the world won’t give you what you need.
    *   *   *
    After twenty-four hours, we decided something had to be done. It felt like we had been on the roof for years. We’d been trading off for bathroom breaks. Julia had made two runs to the convenience store down the street for water, Nutri-Grain bars, and coffee (while she was at it, she had checked to make sure Mr. Defonte’s car was still parked in the same spot; it was). Still, we couldn’t stay up there forever. My stomach gurgled. The back of my neck and my legs were sunburned. My eyes itched. Birds had shit on our camera bag and on Julia’s wrist. Mr. Defonte had to come out of there eventually, we figured. It was a Wednesday. He had a wife, a job. But the blazing afternoon stretched on and on until finally it was night again.
    “We should call Mrs. Defonte,” Julia said. “See if she’s heard from him.” She tossed me the cell phone and said she was going out for more coffee. She liked to do the talking until we had to tell clients something they might not want to hear.
    I kneeled on the roof, facing the building Mr. Defonte had vanished into. I’d never had a conversation with Mrs. Defonte alone.
    “Do you have any news?” she asked when I called. I closed my eyes for a moment and imagined what her words would sound like if she were singing them.
    “Sort of,” I said. “Have you heard from your husband lately?”
    She said that she hadn’t. He was on a business trip in Memphis.
    “That can’t be true. We photographed him going into an apartment building on Royal Palm yesterday afternoon.”
    “And?”
    “We haven’t seen him since,” I said. “We’ve been watching the building. He hasn’t come out yet.”
    She was silent. I guessed she was considering what her husband had been doing in that building for so long and who he’d been doing it with. I pictured her sitting stiffly on the elegant sofa with the cream-colored cushions and the curved wood legs, a hand resting on her knee.
    Mrs. Defonte said she would call me back and did so a few minutes after we hung up. She reported that she had tried her husband’s cell, twice, but there was no answer. When my husband left, I had wanted to call him very badly, but had gotten drunk instead; at the time I told myself I was washing the urge out of me. I wondered if another postcard had turned up at Julia’s apartment in Opa-locka.
    “I guess we’re not sure what to do,” I said, worried Mrs. Defonte might start losing faith in us. “We’ve been up here a long time.”
    “You’re the detectives,” she