One games console, with its serial number.

Nine titles.

One hundred and eighty dollars, outright purchase.

Seller: a thirty-three-year-old woman named Charlene Otsuka, with a driver’s licence number, a date of birth, an address on the north side, and a thumbprint.

And the console’s serial number, when a detective on the property crimes detail ran the Monday batch late on Thursday night, came back against a warranty registration in the name of a household on our street.

Which is a coincidence so tidy that I did not believe it when I was first told it, and which is simply what happens in a city of two hundred thousand people where everybody works in the same building.