Cavallo leans forward. “You told Carter this guy was dangerous. Why was that?”

“He talked a lot of nonsense, but I started thinking maybe it wasn’t nonsense after all. Because he presented himself so well, I kind of assumed he was… normal. Like everybody else, you know? A little stuck up, but basically a decent guy. But some people in the neighborhood told me he’d offered to sell them drugs, and once he got in a fight out on the street and pulled a knife on somebody. Said he was gonna come back that night and shoot the guy. Around here, you’ve got yuppies living next door to dealers, you’ve got people walking designer dogs past muggers. Frank kind of fit the vibe, I guess, but when I heard one of those girls was running around with him, well…”

I lean over to Cavallo. “I know that name.”

She keeps asking questions and Murray keeps talking, but I tune it all out, focusing on those syllables, picturing the letters in my mind. I write them out in my notebook, underlining the words. Why is Francisco Rios so familiar?

And then it comes to me.

“Where are you going?” Cavallo asks.

But I’m off the couch and halfway through the door, leaving her to make apologies to Robb and come running after me. She catches up in the atrium – I make a point of not glancing toward the auditorium doors, where the coffin of Hannah Mayhew so recently stood – grabbing at my arm to slow me down.

“Come on,” I say.

“What’s the rush?”

“That guy, Francisco Rios? I know him. We scooped him up at the George R. Brown, and he handed me Salazar’s business card. He’s a confidential informant. I called to check, then cut him loose.”

“If he was Salazar’s snitch – ”

“It’s him. He’s the one we want.”

“So maybe Salazar will give him up.”

Out in the parking lot, the sun blazing overhead, I stop in my tracks, one hand on my hip, the other pressed to my forehead, trying to pull the memories free. “There was somebody with him. A guy named Coleman who had a warrant out. When we let Rios go, he blew up. He kept yelling he was going to tell everybody, that Rios was going to be dead.”

“Tell them he was an informant?”

I nod. “We need to talk to Coleman. I got the feeling they knew each other pretty well.”

Robb wasn’t wrong, not about the pattern. You stare long enough and nothing’s random anymore. The pieces fit.

Sometimes all too well.

I’d had him. Zip-tied and all to myself, alone in the restroom at the end of the corridor, Saturday morning on Labor Day weekend, within forty-eight hours of Hannah’s disappearance and Evey Dyer’s death. I’d had him and I let him go, not realizing who it was I was letting walk out into the sunlight. All I wanted was to get out of there, to bag the assignment and move on to real police work, to get my teetering career back on two feet. His fear comes back to me, how desperate he was not to be locked up, to the point he’d even out himself as an informant in front of Coleman. I’d even given him advice, telling him to play it cool next time, never wondering why he panicked in the first place.

And Salazar, when I’d offered to take the kid downtown, had suddenly changed his tune about wanting to see him. Neither one of them wanted Rios in custody. Now it made sense. Rios knew he had blood on his hands. Salazar didn’t want his informant, who’d been tipping him to the location of stash houses, to spend a moment inside, either, afraid he’d start talking.

“I didn’t see it.”

“See what?” Cavallo asks.

But I don’t answer. All the mistakes of the past couple of weeks come back to me. Getting kicked out of Homicide for ditching Lorenz. Spooking Thomson’s wife to the point that she outed him to his killers. Cutting Tommy slack when I should have come down on him, when for all I knew Charlotte was right and something bad had happened to Marta, the girl who spent the night in the garage apartment. It all pales in comparison to letting Frank Rios walk. The trouble is, in a case like mine, mistakes are irreversible. You can’t always work your way back. You can’t bring the dead back to life. And the man you let go might never be caught again.

There’s nothing left but the guilty knowledge of what you might have done, how brave or selfless or good you could have been, if only you’d known then what you do now.

Salazar’s willing to talk, but not with me in the room, the guy who put him in the hospital. His attorney does the complaining, and before Wilcox can lodge a halfhearted protest I throw my hands up and head for the door. Glancing back, I take little comfort in Salazar’s condition, the wheezing pumps and dripping tubes, the oxygen feed, the inert lump of flesh beneath the sheets. Partial paralysis, the doctors told us, the loss of control on his right side. In spite of the successful surgery, Salazar is anything but okay. I reached out and touched him all right, with a hand that’s never going to let up.

I wait in the hallway awhile, until Cavallo comes out to report.

“He’s putting it all on Keller,” she says. “He dragged the others into the business, he orchestrated the raids. It was him who killed Thomson and forced Salazar to cover it up.”

“And Evangeline Dyer?”

“He had no idea she’d be there. When they looked through the window and saw her, Keller wanted to abort, but Thomson insisted on going in. He says it was Keller who shot her, accidentally, firing blind through the door. They were taking her to the emergency room, he says, and then she died.”

“What was she doing there in the first place?”

“Says he doesn’t know. Rios told him it was another stash house, and afterward the informant disappeared, so he never got a chance to ask.”

“What about Rafael Ortiz, the gangbanger who shot me?”

“Says he’s never heard of the guy.” She shakes her head. “He’s not going to cop to that, March.”

I take off down the corridor in a rage. “So basically, he’s not giving us anything we don’t already have?”

“He’ll testify against Keller.”

“In case you didn’t notice, we don’t have Keller. At this rate, there’s not going to be a trial for Salazar to testify at.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

“Not by much.” My frustration is the sort that only grows when it gets an airing. A host of dead-end possibilities flood my mind. “Think about it: he’s been trying to find Rios since day one. When I let the kid go, he was already gunning for him. Why? Because he wanted to put a bullet in him. Believe me, he wasn’t going to ask what went wrong, why the informant suddenly sent them to the wrong house. If he’d have been able to find Rios, somebody like Ortiz would have finished the kid off, like he almost did me. Or maybe Salazar would have done it himself and dumped the body alongside the Dyer girl’s.” I slap the wall, drawing a glare from a passing nurse. “You know what? Maybe he did. That would be perfect. The Rios kid might already be at the bottom of the Gulf. We’ll never find him because there’s nothing left to find.”

“Calm down, March,” she says. “It’s not your fault you didn’t arrest Rios when you had him. You had no way of knowing…”

“I’m not stupid. I realize that.”

“Then stop beating yourself up and get on with the job.”

That’s good advice, and I decide to take it. Leaving Cavallo to hold Wilcox’s hand for the remainder of the interview, I bug out, heading back to Montrose with my list of construction workers in hand. Nobody by the name of Rios, but that doesn’t mean the cousin isn’t on the list. I park in front of the site, where some damaged framing is being slowly repaired by a skeleton crew of helmeted workers, stripping my jacket off and leaving it in the car, not a concession to the heat but a psychological tactic. I want these men to notice that the approaching hombre wears a gleaming shield, and more than that, a dull black, well-worn gun.

“Francisco Rios,” I say, motioning them over. “Which one of you knows the guy? He’s got a cousin here, right?”