The smart thing to do would probably be to snap a picture of her to prove she was still alive, text it to her manager with the address and time, and give the rest of it up as a lost cause. He'd been out here walking for hours. Surely it wasn't still his job to look out for her!
But –
But.
The lick of jealousy at the base of Parry's spine meant, apparently, that he couldn't quite let himself do that.
(Maybe, in part, it was that this neighborhood reminded him so much of that in which his first love, Jolie, had so suddenly lost her life, the victim of stray and meaningless violence.)
He set himself in the middle of the sidewalk, open-stanced, not quite challenging. And he called out: