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them for a while, but they didn’t seem to be causing trouble, so…”
    Kyra crossed to the counter and taped the photo to her cash register. “I’ll ask customers about him. This Sunday’s the last bout of the season. Are you coming?”
    Kyra, an Olympic-medal-winning track star, had taken up roller derby a couple years ago in an effort to stave off middle-age weight gain (she was barely thirty) and keep in shape via a routine less boring than running on a treadmill during northern Virginia’s cold winter months. She kept trying to get me into skates, insisting it’d be easier on my knee than I suspected.
    “Wouldn’t miss it,” I said.
    She fiddled with a rack of chains, clinking the crystal pendants together. Fiddling was so un-Kyra-like that I stared at her.“My brother Bobby almost got sucked into a gang,” she said finally, looking at me with eyes darkened by the memory of something ugly.
    “Really? I didn’t know that.” I’d known Kyra since I was eleven; we’d met when my family came east to vacation with Grandpa Atherton, and our friendship had grown during subsequent visits and phone calls. Bobby was several years older than Kyra, so I hadn’t been around him much, but last time Kyra had mentioned him he was a CPA in Boise with three teenage daughters.
    “It happened before I met you. I was little, so I don’t remember all the details—I’m sure I never knew them—but I remember Mama crying, and Daddy and Bobby fighting, and the police coming a couple of times. I do know that Bobby stole Daddy’s car and crashed it, putting himself and a couple of his homeys in the hospital. He was only fifteen. As soon as it was safe to move him, Mama and Daddy sent him off to Boise to recuperate with my aunt Connie and her husband. A couple of scary dudes came around looking for him once or twice—one of them tried to bribe me with a candy bar to tell him where my brother was—but then they went away.”
    “Thank goodness.”
    “Yeah. Did I mention Aunt Connie’s husband was a prison guard?” Kyra smiled.
    We said good-bye, and I returned to showing Celio’s photo to mall shopkeepers and their employees. I did it on autopilot, mentally contrasting my own privileged upbringing in a gated community in Malibu with Kyra’s. If there’d been gangs in our high school, my friends and I had been unaware of them, buffered as we were by our parents’ wealth. Despite high-profile divorces and families as dysfunctional as any you’d see on reality TV, the kids I hung with weren’t drawn to gangs. One girl I knew slightly hadrun away our sophomore year to join a religious cult, which, now that I thought about it, was essentially a gang minus the emphasis on guns and killing.
    A couple of clerks thought they might have seen Celio in the mall the day before, but they wouldn’t swear to it. The male assistant manager of a cell phone kiosk was more certain.
    “Yeah,” he said, studying the picture. “He was here, hanging around in the early afternoon yesterday. With a buddy and a hot chick. She had on a pair of stretch jeans and a tee shirt that didn’t leave much to the imagination.” He licked his lips. “Hot.”
    Since he was clearly in his midtwenties and the girl had been no more than fifteen or sixteen, I found his fascination with her distasteful. “Did you hear them talking?”
    “Not really.” He shrugged skinny shoulders under a button-down shirt that gaped at the neck, a size too large. “They seemed to be arguing about something, at least the babe and this guy”—he pinged the page—“were getting into it. I wasn’t really paying attention—I had a customer, you know?”
    I thanked him, told him to call the security office if he saw either of the two again, and turned into the cameraless hall. I hit pay dirt in the Pete’s Sporting Goods.
    “He was in here yesterday,” the owner said. His name was Colin Garver, not Pete. In his late fifties, he was only a couple of inches taller