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Throughout the tour, the cops keep going back to the missing teenager, wondering if they’ve missed some obvious place where she could have fled. Conway admits to being haunted by an earlier experience with teenage girls diagnosed as severely depressed. “There were three of them, and they’d made a suicide pact. All three of them were 13. The first one got as far as cutting her wrists, but somebody walking by saw it and called the precinct. We got to them before anything fatal happened. But what was so creepy was how normal they were talking. Taking one of them over to the psychiatric ward, I could have been taking her on a shopping trip.”

The tour winds down with a few more routine groundballs — checking out a Medistat where a child fainted during an examination, keeping an eye on dozens of raucous St. Francis Prep students waiting for the bus home, babysitting a driver until the arrival of a tow truck following his crash into a parked car. But then, just when the cops are about to return to the 7-11 to see how their one-eyed vagrant is doing, a call comes in reporting the possible discovery of the missing teenager. Flippen and Conway beat it over to a car dealership at 240th and Northern Boulevard, and sure enough, the teenager has been found by showroom employees in the ladies room. She appears physically spent as she recounts having locked herself in the toilet after telling her parents she had no intention of returning to the hospital for another session with a shrink.

Conway looks as relieved as the arriving father does. “Tell him this is all just Candyland around here,” he says.

Donald Dewey’s most recent books are The 10th Man: The Fan in Baseball History and The Black Prince of Baseball: Hal Chase and the Mythology of the Game.