He hands the pad back.

“Now, Mr. March, on account of all this cooperation here, you gotta do something for me, right?”

I stand and head for the door. “I can put in a good word – ”

He laughs. “Whatever. That ain’t what I mean. Listen here. My grandma, every Saturday morning she walks over to Emancipation Park and sits on a bench there. She reads her psalm and she prays, probably for me. She can’t come up here, and me… well, I don’t like to call from here, neither. But you could tell her a message for me.”

“What message?”

“That everything’s all right,” he says. “Tell her it’s okay. Tell her I go to church every Sunday and sing in the choir.”

“Do you?” I ask.

He rolls his eyes. “You can tell her that, man. I helped you out.”

“Fine,” I say, tapping the edge of the pad against the table. “I’ll tell her.”

Cavallo waits outside, arms crossed, still steaming from Coleman’s earlier baiting. She asks what I got out of him and I tell her. When she hears I’m supposed to assure the grandmother that he’s a choirboy, she snorts in derision.

“There must be a different definition inside.”

While detectives from my squad work Coleman’s list, trying to bring Frank Rios to heel, and Lieutenant Bascombe sweats Jiménez personally in Interview Room 1, I pay a visit to the crime lab garage, where the white panel van has been carefully gone over, every surface scrutinized, every fascia removed for testing. The technician walks me through the results. The dried specks we saw through the window are indeed blood, and Luminol tests show smears all over the interior, especially under the plywood.

“He scrubbed it out pretty good,” the tech says, “but when I shined the black light on it, the floor just lit up.”

Removing the plywood, he also recovered a single spent shell, a tiny, crimped.22 caliber casing. Rios knew to collect them, but missed one in the rush.

“When we unloaded the painting supplies, we also found rolls of plastic they use as drop cloths. We’re seeing if we can match the ragged edge up with the sheet her body was rolled in. Might not work, but it’s worth a try.”

I nod in agreement. “What about the gun?”

“No sign of it.”

Back upstairs, a group of spectators is camped out in the monitor room, watching Bascombe’s performance.

“How’s he doing?” I ask.

Ordway sits up front, paws folded over his belly. “He’s just staring at the poor man. It’s unbelievable. Tito talks and the lieutenant just stares him down, so Tito talks some more.”

“Anything good?”

“He’s admitted to keeping a Ruger.22 under the seat of the van.”

“It’s not there now.”

He nods. “He says it’s got to be Rios who took it.”

“Does he know where Rios is staying?”

“Naw, but he offered to go undercover and find him.”

“For real?”

“The man’s desperate at this point. He also says Rios might have hightailed it back to Old Mexico.”

“I doubt that. Remember, I spoke to him. The kid’s got no accent. If he wasn’t born here, he definitely grew up here. It’s not like he just crossed the border. I saw his driver’s license.”

“And illegals can’t get those.” Ordway smiles at my naiveté.

“Well, if he is south of the border, Mack, we’re sending you down to get him.”

“Be my guest. I’m overdue for a vacation.”

Back at my desk, I stare at the computer awhile, then find myself flipping through Joe Thomson’s sketchbook, tracing the lines of the now-familiar face with my fingertip. While I’m daydreaming, Aguilar taps me on the shoulder and says the captain wants to see me. I knock on the boss’s door and he summons me inside.

“March, we’ve had our differences. You haven’t always made things easy for yourself around here, not recently. But I’ve had a good feeling about you the past couple of weeks. Kicking you down to the task force was probably the best thing I ever did.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’ve talked to Bascombe about this, and we’re on the same page.”

I nod uncertainly.

“To make a long story short,” he says, “I’m putting you back on the board. Starting tomorrow, you’re on rotation like everybody else. No more special assignments. No more loaning you out. You’ve proven yourself.”

He reaches across the desk to shake my hand.

“No more suicide cop?” I ask.

He hesitates at first, then smiles. “Right. No more.”

The heavens haven’t exactly opened up and no choirs of angels sing, but the firm pressure of the captain’s handshake goes a long way. Light-headed, I turn toward the door.

“Sir,” I say, pausing on the threshold. “My cases aren’t down yet. We don’t have Keller. We don’t have Rios. The way Wilcox is handing out immunity, Salazar will walk.”

“It’s a matter of time, that’s all. Your work on this… everything before pales in comparison.” He glances around, retrieving his copy of The Kingwood Killing from the shelf behind him. “This pales in comparison. Really. Good work.”

“Thank you.”

The door closes behind me. The farther I get from it, the less his confidence reassures me. We know what happened and we can pretty much prove it, and by some standards that’s enough, even if no one spends a day behind bars. The detective work is the same, either way. But there are things you can live with and things you can’t.

If Rios left his girlfriend behind as part of a payment to Octavio Morales, and then he put three bullets into Hannah Mayhew for trying to help her friend, the idea of him walking away, growing old somewhere in Mexico or under another name here in the States, in this very city where a man can walk in plain sight for decades without being recognized for who he is, that concept is unacceptable. If the world works that way, I want no part of it.

But it does work that way.

The guilty walk, it happens all the time, either because people like me can’t make the charges stick, or we can’t even find the suspect to stick them to.

Cavallo comes through the squad room door, flicking a strand of hair behind her ear, not yet noticing me. I fall in behind her, overtaking, prompting a surprised smile.

“I’ve just been patted on the back,” I say, “but I don’t feel like a good boy.”

“Maybe this will make you feel better. I just saw Wilcox in the elevator. The case against Keller lost one of its legs. The hospital called. Salazar flatlined this morning.”

“He’s dead?”

“Some kind of blood clot,” she says. “It got in the lungs.”

“I need to sit down.” I slump into the nearest chair, pulling my tie loose.

“Are you all right?”

“Let’s see. I’ve been shot. I got a bad cop with a conscience murdered. I killed a rent-a-cop and just found out I killed a real one, too, even if he was dirty. And I’m still missing both of my murder suspects. But I’m doing a great job, and they’re putting me back on rotation – ”

“Which is what you wanted, right?”

“What I wanted,” I say, “though I was never foolish enough to think it could happen, what I wanted was to find that girl alive. And instead I’ve found two of them dead.”

But that’s not right. I know it’s not. I never wanted to find her alive. All along I wanted her dead, I wanted to be the one who made the connection, the one to point the finger and say, The girl you’re looking for? She was here all along. And in a way, that’s exactly what I’ve gotten. I’m only whining because, having gotten it, I find I don’t want it anymore.

“Hollow victories are still victories, at least on paper, but I find them a little hard to celebrate.”

“You were almost killed,” she says, pointing to my leg. “And if you hadn’t shot the rent-a-cop, he’d have killed you – or worse, me. The same goes for Salazar. He dealt the hand, not you. Tonight you’re going home alive, and you get to sleep in your own bed. Tomorrow, you can get up and hunt the bad guys again. In my book, there’s nothing hollow about any of that. So if you’re done feeling sorry for yourself, why don’t we get back to work?”