The label on the beer bottle had gone soft in the icy water, and she began to pick at it.

“You get called out on a case and you never know what you’re going to find. Last year we arrested a guy who liked to collect thumbs. He had a whole shoe box full of them in his refrigerator. A few months back, we caught a case, two men, nineteen and twenty-one, stopped by a deputy sheriff for speeding. The cop thought they were acting strange, so he called for backup. Walked around the back of the car while he was waiting and noticed the blanket on the backseat seemed to be moving. The backup arrived, they looked under the blanket, and find a nine-year-old girl who’d been missing for five days. In the trunk was the body of another little girl. I probably don’t have to tell you the rest.”

“Jesus,” Andrew swore and put down the pizza, his appetite gone that fast.

“The first thing the mother of the twenty-one-year-old said when she found out what sonny-boy’d been up to? ‘He’s a good boy, my Jon. It was that Rodriguez boy that put him up to it.’ They’re all good boys, though, right?” Dorsey made a ball out of the paper shreds from the label and tossed it at the wastebasket five feet away. It missed the rim and she got up, retrieved it, and tried again. This time she hit her mark. “Shit happens every day. We just deal with it.”

“It’s still easier to deal with someone else’s shit than with your own.”

She started back toward the bed when Andrew reached out and grabbed her by the arm.

His eyes on her face, he removed the wide silver bracelet that was always wrapped around her right wrist and exposed the lines that were etched into her skin.

“What was it you were dealing with?” he asked. “What did you tell me a few days ago, that you cut so that you can control the pain? What hurt you so much that you had to do this to yourself? What was it you had to take control of it?”

“Not what you’re probably thinking.” She made no effort to pull away.

“So you’re telling me your father didn’t have anything to do with this?” He tugged lightly on her hand.

“I didn’t say he didn’t have anything to do with it. I meant he didn’t molest me, because that’s the obvious.”

“Then what did he do?”

“He abandoned me,” she said simply.

“He…” He let her hand drop.

“Abandoned me.” She nodded without emotion. “After my mother died he just”-she shrugged-“pretty much forgot about me.”

“How can you forget about your child?”

“He was in shock for a long time, I think.”

“What happened?”

“Short version? My mom was hit by a car as she crossed the street.” She spoke calmly, but melancholy settled into the lines around her eyes and her mouth. “One of the neighbors saw it happen, and he ran to our house to tell us. When we got to the scene of the accident, someone held onto me so that I couldn’t see, but I saw.” The control began to crack ever so slightly. “There was a mound in the street with a blanket over it, blood seeping out from under the blanket. I knew it was her. They put her on a gurney and carried it into the ambulance, and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t hurry more, why they weren’t rushing. Years later I realized it was because she was already dead.”

“How old were you?” He thought she might have told him once but he didn’t remember.

“Nine,” she said matter-of-factly. “I was nine.”

“Where was your father?”

“He was with her. There on the street, then in the ambulance. He went with her. He stayed with her that night, or most of it, stayed with her body. At least I’m guessing that’s what he did.”

“He didn’t make arrangements for a neighbor to stay with you?”

“I kept waiting for him to tell me to come with him, that I could stay with her, too. Or to tell me to go home. But he never even turned around to look at me. He forgot I was there.”

“Did he know you were there? You said he left the house after the neighbor came to tell him about the accident.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered. He never gave me a second thought.”

“So what did you do? Did you go home alone? To a friend’s?”

“I went to the church, and I hid in the choir loft. I stayed there for the rest of the day, and through that night. It was so cold in there…” She bit her bottom lip, which had begun to tremble. Andrew wondered how long it had been since she’d last talked about it, if she ever had. “Anyway, I went home when the sun came up. He was home, but he never noticed I wasn’t there.”

“Didn’t any of your neighbors-?”

She waved him off. “Not their fault. No one knew where I was. I think everyone thought I was with someone else. But to me, it was as if I’d become invisible. No one could see me. It was like I wasn’t there at all.”

“Don’t you think your dad probably thought you were at a friend’s house?”

“No, Andrew. That’s the point. He never even thought about me at all.”

He started to say something and she stopped him. “He admitted it, years later. He admitted he never gave me a second thought that night. He was embarrassed by it, and humiliated and apologetic as hell. At least he didn’t lie.”

“Who took care of you?”

“My Aunt Betsy-my dad’s sister-came to stay with me, because he left.”

“Where did he go?”

“I had no idea at the time. He just said he had to leave, and he did.”

“How long did he stay away?”

“I don’t know. It seemd like six months, maybe. A long time. He took a leave from the Bureau, went…wherever it was he went-I still don’t know-and when he came home, he went right back to work.”

“And your aunt stayed with you? Took care of you?”

“She did, yes. She was very good to me, very kind, very loving. I was a huge pain in the ass, but she stuck with me anyway.”

“I’m guessing you and your father worked things out.”

“Over time, we did, yeah. A few years later, he was wounded-shot in the leg-and he was home for a while.” She finished off the beer in one long swallow. “I understood how hard it was for him to be in that house, because I saw it on his face. He seemed to be in pain all the time, and not from the wound. I guess it was then I realized just how much he had loved my mother. I finally began to understand how much he’d lost.”

“But you’d lost, too.”

“That hadn’t occurred to him until he was off on medical leave.”

“You forgave him, though. You worked things out with him.”

“He’s my father. He’s the only parent I have.”

“And you began cutting after your mother died?”

“No. After my father came back.” She looked at him with eyes that suddenly seemed old. “I was so afraid, I kept waiting for him to leave again. Every day I’d wake up holding my breath. Was he still there, in the room at the end of the hall? And every afternoon when I came home from school, I’d have pains in my stomach. Had he left while I was gone? Would I ever see him again?”

“How did you know how to do that?” He pointed to her wrist. “I mean, what made you think it would help?”

“I saw another girl doing it. I walked into the girls’ room at school and she was in one of the stalls, but hadn’t locked the door. She was standing over the toilet with a razor in her hand, and the blood was streaming into the toilet.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t run screaming from the room.”

“I was mesmerized,” she admitted. “I asked her what she was doing, and she told me. A few days later, I tried it. It helped.”

“How long did you cut?”

“Five, six years.” She smiled sheepishly. “Not so long, by some standards.”

“Why did you stop?”

“I just didn’t need to do it anymore.”

“Did you ever talk to anyone? Your aunt, a school counselor, a therapist?”

“I was in therapy for three years, starting when I got to college.” She hastened to add, “Of course, that’s not on my official record. I didn’t put that on my app when I went to the Bureau.”

“You really think they couldn’t have found out if they wanted to?”