She sits there glumly in her chair, shaking her head at the pain her husband’s death will cause Tony Salazar, and I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. I want to slap the frown off her face. You did this. It was you. He’s dead because of you. But I might as well slap myself. It’s not Stephanie Thomson’s fault. What she did made perfect sense, just trying to protect her man against himself. I’m the idiot. Yet again. If I’d just been patient, everything would have turned out right. If I’d let Thomson come to me, given him time to be discreet. Instead, desperate to make something happen, I’d blundered into the lair of Keller and Salazar, fatally tipping my hand.

I hadn’t just missed my last chance. I’d gotten him killed.

Stephanie hands over the keys to Thomson’s studio, along with the address and a hand-drawn map, just as her sister arrives, prompting a new outpouring of grief. I find Bascombe outside on the landing, sheltering from a percussive bout of rain.

“Give me sunshine any day,” he says.

In the car, I can tell he’s got something on his mind, but asking what would be the equivalent of sticking my finger in a trap. No thanks. I’d like to go straight over to the studio – given how clean the apartment was, I can’t help thinking the studio is where Thomson kept his personal files, and maybe that duffel bag his wife mentioned – only the first order of business is unloading the lieutenant. I don’t want him over my shoulder for every step of the investigation.

At this point, Thomson’s suicide looks perfectly straightforward. If I suggest otherwise to Bascombe or anyone else before I can actually prove it, the only thing I can be sure of is my removal from the case. Once I’m alone, the first order of business will be a call to Wilcox. The longer I can keep him quiet, the more likely it’ll be to make headway.

“So what did she have to say?” Bascombe asks.

I give him a rundown, omitting my call and the note now residing in my pocket. I also downplay the studio, omitting reference to the keys now in my possession.

“He had cocaine in his bag?”

“It might have been coke. She couldn’t be sure.”

“How much?”

“One package, she said.”

The news makes him restless. He shifts in the seat, fiddles with the air-conditioning vents, raps his knuckles in rhythm against the window. Whatever information he’s holding, it’s clearly dying to get out.

“What?” I ask, knowing I’ll regret it.

He jumps on the question. “That call I just took? That was from a friend of mine over in IAD. You know what he told me?”

My heart takes a break, leaving the blood to settle in my veins. Yes, I know what he told you. He said I’d been wrangling for a deal, using my ex-partner as a go-between, trying to get a blanket immunity to open Thomson’s lips. He said whatever was going on here, I’m hip-deep in it and the first thing for the lieutenant to do is pull me off the case.

But Bascombe volunteers nothing. He wants me to earn it.

“What did he tell you, sir?”

“That our victim has been the subject of a number of internal investigations, including an incident a couple of years ago when some evidence went missing from a drug bust. He was dirty, in other words. And when I told the captain, he called up Thomson’s boss, Big Reg Keller, and you know what he said?”

“Tell me.”

“He said the other officers in the unit had been concerned about Thomson. He was a loose cannon apparently, and was suspected of having a substance problem.”

Sure he was. Keller is wasting no time insulating himself, doing the necessary damage control, just as Salazar had done when he called me after my own shooting, making sure I couldn’t connect the dots between my request for help and the subsequent attack.

“Does that sit right with you?” Bascombe asks.

“Sit right? In what sense?”

“In the sense that when a brother officer eats his gun, you don’t trash his memory.”

“The blue wall of silence, you mean?”

“Common decency. What good does it do anybody for them to say he had a drug problem, or was a dirty cop or whatever? Whether it’s true or not, the man’s dead. He shot himself, right? So if he deserves anything, it’s pity. Instead, his own people are throwing him under the bus, when they ought to be sticking up for him.”

This isn’t what I expected from Bascombe, not by a long shot. The problem is, when you’ve singled someone out as a nemesis, it’s hard to get an accurate read on character. The lieutenant, since I know he’s never much cared for me, has always lacked psychological depth. He’s a one-note, a foot soldier in the anti-March crusade, without any nuance necessary. Suddenly I find myself agreeing with his instinct, if not his reasoning. Like Wilcox, whose move to Internal Affairs simply externalized a cherished principle, I think the dirty cops should go down. But then I know firsthand what it’s like to suffer for their benefit. If a cop snorts white lady from the evidence locker, plants a drop piece on an unarmed suspect, or takes money on the side for looking the other way, I don’t think a self-inflicted bullet to the brain should whitewash the record.

Call me naive, but I still subscribe to the “few bad apples” theory. We might be cut from the same cloth as the people we lock up, we might have a tendency to jackknife our relationships or channel the violent impulses that go hand in hand with what we witness into unprofitable avenues, but for the most part, we’re clean. Not squeaky clean, because no one is, but relatively unspotted. Because we didn’t get into this for the cheap thrill of packing a gun, or to work out our inferiority complexes, or because we couldn’t find a better line of work. Carter Robb has it right, in a way. We could have kept things safe, chosen decent occupations that make for polite dinner conversation, better pay and better hours and a far reduced probability of being shot or beat down. But we didn’t choose to be the safe guys. We chose to be the good guys, hard as that is when the world is bad.

And maybe Thomson was bad; maybe he was the sort like Wilcox said who should have been screened out by the personality tests. Even so, the man had changed. He’d changed enough to get his wife back. Enough to turn on his former friends. He’d changed enough that they had to put a bullet in him, which in my book made him one of us, not them.

The dates aren’t lost on me, either. The change in Thomson, his dark relapse, dates back a week or so, roughly the same time as the Octavio Morales death. That’s what shook Thomson up. That’s what made him seek me out. Something happened in that house. Either he was there or he found out about it secondhand. Whatever it was, he couldn’t live with it. Thinking of that girl tied to the bed, her blood on the sheets, her body now missing, I can imagine what was eating away at him, because it’s eating away at me, too.

Does Bascombe see any of this? Is he giving me some kind of unspoken license? That’s what I can’t figure out.

“What are you saying?” I ask him. “That I should take a harder look at his unit?”

He shakes his head, waves a dismissive hand, his eyes scrunching up at the excess of my misreading. “No, man, that’s not what I’m saying. But if you ask me, when you talk to his colleagues – as you no doubt will under the circumstances – nobody on my squad is gonna be upset if you omit the common courtesies, if you know what I mean.”

“Yessir,” I say, almost liking the guy. “I think I do.”