“Can I have the address of the neighbor?”

“No, but here is the address of the gig.” Clerk wrote it down on a piece of paper. “Just this once.”

“I promise.”

“Was he a friend of yours?” Clerk asked.

I didn’t like the sound of that “was.” “He still is.”

“I hope you find him.”

“So do I.”

I needed Derek. It would be dark soon and I had to talk to Mitchell, because he was still my best bet to figure out if something was influencing the ghouls in the Atlanta area. I couldn’t miss that date.

I glanced up and saw Ascanio picking his way across the floor. A middle-aged African American man in a suit walked next to him.

Ascanio saw me and made a course correction.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“This is Mr. Oswald,” Ascanio said. “He came by the office, so I thought it would be better if you talked to him yourself.”

Mr. Oswald. The woman whose family we saved from the wind scorpion had the last name of Oswald.

I held out my hand. “Mr. Oswald?”

“Thank you for saving my wife and my kids,” he said.

Normally I would offer to take him to one of the side rooms, but right now everything was filthy, so we might as well stand. “No problem, sir. Sorry about the accommodations. We had some trouble the last magic wave. How is your family doing?”

“They’re doing well,” he said. “We’ve hired movers and put the house on the market. We don’t want to take any chances.”

“That’s understandable.” Keep him talking . . .

“Pamela mentioned that you asked if anybody had a problem with us or our cats.”

Please tell me that someone had a problem with you and that you know his name and address. Please, Universe, do me this one favor.

“A couple of weeks ago I was doing some yard work after that storm we had. I was in the front yard and this man came up to me and started ranting about how our cats get on his car.”

“Have you ever seen him before?”

Mr. Oswald shook his head. Of course not. That would be too easy.

“I told him that he must have me confused with someone else, because Sherlock and Watson are inside cats. It makes no sense, if you ask me. A cat is a predator. He must go out and hunt to be fulfilled, but the kids are scared that something will eat them, so we keep them inside.”

“What did the man say?”

“He became very agitated.” Mr. Oswald frowned. “He raised his voice, waved his arms around, and proceeded to what I can only describe as ranting. I thought he might be intoxicated. Eventually he got to the part where he told me that everything was fine until ‘you people’ moved into the neighborhood with ‘your spoiled brats.’ At that point I told him to get off my property.”

“Did he?”

“He told me that now his hands were tied and walked off.”

I pulled my small notebook out. “What did he look like?”

“Late fifties, dark hair, balding, average build.”

“White, Hispanic . . . ?”

“White. He wore a suit and tie. Glasses.”

Too generic. “Anything else? Anything you can remember?” I asked. “Tattoos, scars, anything out of the ordinary?”

“He wore an earring.” Mr. Oswald thought about it and nodded. “Yes, I remember. He wore an earring in his left ear, one of those dangling earrings with a very large glass gem in it. I thought it was strange because it didn’t fit him at all.”

“How do you know it was glass?”

“It was bright red and the size of an almond in a shell, almost an inch long. I thought it looked ridiculous.”

Alarms went off in my head.

“Can you draw the earring?” I passed the notebook to him.

He sketched a quick shape and passed it back to me. It looked like a cluster of large grape berries fused together and covered by a metal cork with the gem in its center.

“It was obviously a very bad imitation,” he said. “The gold looked too pale, like one of those metallic paints, and the earring was old and dented.”

Crap. Old was bad. A simple design was also bad.

“Was the gem faceted?” I asked.

“No, it was smooth. What is it called?” He grimaced.

“Cabochon cut,” Ascanio said.

“Yes.”

And we just went from bad to worse. “Thank you so much, Mr. Oswald. You were of great help.”