Toward evening, Nick and Hancock hurried into the downtown postal center and showed a search warrant to a postal employee wearing a supervisor's badge around his neck.
Although there was no such "unfree" thing as household registration, in the beacon of the world, even homeless people needed a fixed mailing address to stay connected to the social system and maintain their basic status as citizens.
This was because America's entire social administration and public service system relied heavily on mailing addresses for identity verification and the distribution of information.
Whether someone was applying for social benefits such as food stamps, Medicaid, or disability payments, or receiving court summonses and legal documents, everything had to be delivered through the mail.
It could be said that without a valid mailing address, a person would find it impossible to get anywhere in this country, and might even be "disappeared" in a legal sense.
That address could be a shelter, a refuge, or a daytime assistance center. It could also be a commercial mailbox provided by a company such as UPS, or the General Delivery service offered by the postal service.
The deceased, Steven Bamford, had been an orphan in the legal sense. After leaving his foster home, he had become homeless-or a street kid, as Hancock put it. Aside from a pile of misdemeanor convictions, there was little in his past worth investigating.
The people listed in his file as having committed offenses with him were now either dead or in prison, and a call to his foster family yielded no answers either.
Nick asked the postal employee to open Steven's mailbox for them, but unfortunately, it contained nothing except a few pieces of advertising mail.
"He opened this mailbox about six months ago and picked up his mail every two or three