Midnight.
Lew Stevens sat hunched over his desk, consulting the little notebook he’d been using to keep his Finn research notes. He’d hit a brick wall at age thirteen, when Finn first showed up in Southern California. When he’d seemed to appear out of nowhere.
He knew, or could at least surmise based on the evidence thus far, that a thirteen-year-old boy named Finn Something had first appeared in Southern California without any evident family or family history, most likely from somewhere nearby. He decided to broaden his search radius to include western Arizona and western Nevada. He considered the northern tip of Mexico, from Tijuana to Ensenada, but he thought it more likely that they were dealing with an American boy from a contiguous American state.
And with some sort of traumatic past.
Car accident? Too enormous a data sector to search, and anyway, he had a hunch that what he was looking for involved trauma from some sort of violent crime. Home invasion. Shooting. Domestic violence.
He began combing through news archives for stories of violent crime whose victims or witnesses included boys age ten to thirteen.
After a fruitless half hour, he widened his search area to all of Arizona and all of Nevada. Nothing. He pushed the boundaries out to include western Oregon. Still nothing. Then all of Oregon.
And, bang. He found something.