Mel drove past the opera house intentionally and pulled her pickup truck into the parking area of the old auto body shop next door. It was an empty building, sometimes used for storage, by Kent Gross, the developer that owned it. If the bum was in the opera house, she didn’t want to spook him and flush him out before she could catch him.
She approached the building carefully on foot. The right side was less than a yard from the left side of the old shop building. She could see down between the two buildings pretty easily, even in the dimness of the early morning. There was nothing and nobody there, just a gravel track separating the two structures where weeds poked through here and there.
As she passed along the front slowly, she looked at the big sliding door. It was fully closed. A hea
