As she got to her feet, my light played over her hand. She was holding something.

“What is that in your hand?” I asked.

Wordlessly she held it into the light and tilted it. Something flashed: the holographic seal of the State of Minnesota. It was a driver’s license. Michael David Shiloh’s driver’s license.

I’d been sure, but I hadn’t been ready to face it, not really. I don’t know how long I would have stared at his license if she hadn’t spoken again.

“What the hell is going on?” she demanded.

“Where’d you find this?”

Genevieve pointed. I followed her hand with the flashlight’s beam.

There was a backpack on the floor. Also Shiloh’s. He’d used it sometimes when he’d had to go to the library for research and bring home a lot of books. He’d taken it out infrequently enough that I hadn’t even missed it in my search of the closet.

I walked over to it and knelt. Inside was a railroad atlas and a bruised, cidery apple. And the billfold, empty of money.

“Shorty,” I whispered. “That son of a bitch.”

“Yeah,” Genevieve agreed. “But what happened? How’d you know to look here?”

I pointed the flashlight up at the white ceiling, so we’d both have ambient light to see each other in.

“You were wrong,” I said quietly, and my voice was steady enough. “Shorty didn’t steal that truck. Shiloh did.”

“Shiloh?” She was incredulous.

“He came down last week, while I was visiting you. As soon as I was out of town, he jumped a freight.”

“A train?”

“He and his brothers used to ride freights over short distances, for kicks. He knew how. And that’s why he didn’t leave a trail: Greyhound, Amtrak, nothing. Nobody saw him, nobody picked him up hitchhiking. The train took him right to the Amtrak station, where he could steal a vehicle that no one would miss for a while. Afterward he could ditch it and get a freight back home.”

“But why?”

“Kamareia,” I said, and was about to go on when noises from outside distracted me, the creak and slam of a gate very like the one between this property and the road. Genevieve heard it, too, and went to the dirty, unshuttered window, pressing her face close to the glass to see what could be made out in the dim night.

“Looks like Shorty’s done drinking for the night,” she said rather mildly.

I got to my feet. “We can’t be here,” I said. “Legally.”

“I’m not going to run from that murdering prick. Are you?” she challenged me.

“No,” I said. “Hold the flashlight. Point it down low.”

Genevieve did, sitting on her heels to get it close to the ground. I moved to the door. Gravel crunched underneath footsteps, and we both watched as the doorknob turned counterclockwise.

As soon as Shorty was through the door, I sent my fist as hard as I could into his solar plexus. As he doubled over, I grabbed his hair and pulled his face down into my rising knee. He hit the floor with a hiss of painful breath.

“How they hanging, Shorty?” I said. “I felt a little unsatisfied with where we left things at the bar.”

Genevieve was still holding the flashlight down. “Why don’t you turn on the overhead light?” I suggested.

She pulled the string and we had light.

It was a shitty little place. A bare bulb overhead, a narrow cot. A card table, a folding chair, a cheap dresser. A bathroom through the doorway; I caught a glimpse of an old freestanding tub, an ancient sink on one porcelain leg. The kitchen was a sink and a hot plate.

But Shorty had his skills. He was obviously converting the place into a residence. I saw plumber’s tools on the bathroom floor, a wrench and some pipes. In the main room were things he most likely used in his day job: housepainter’s things, coveralls, a wallpaper shaver with a foot-long handle and a sharp, asymmetrical blade.

Shorty rolled onto his side to look at Genevieve. When he saw her, he looked like a man getting a visit from the harpies.

“Tell me about Mike Shiloh,” I said, as if we’d never left the bar.

“Fuck you,” he muttered. He’d been afraid to say that to a cop earlier, but clearly he saw that things had changed.

“You’ve got his backpack, his very empty billfold, and his driver’s license. That looks bad,” I said.

Shorty sat up. “I found them. In a ditch.”

“A ditch where?”

“On the county road.”

“Pretty near where you put your fingerprints all over that pickup?”

“This is illegal,” he said. “You broke into my place. What do you think a judge is gonna do with anything you find here? This is a fucking illegal search.”

Shorty knew a little about the system, like a guy with his rap sheet should have. And in his face I saw cunning that can, for a while, substitute for true brains.

I pulled out my gun again and pointed it at him. “Nobody in this room is thinking about the courts,” I told him. “Except you.”

Shorty stood up and faced me. He looked pretty tough for a guy with blood all over the lower half of his face. He said nothing. Somehow he’d seen the truth in my face: that even after everything he’d done, I wouldn’t pull the trigger. Just a little bit of the bar smirk came up to his lips.

Then he turned to Genevieve and said, “Your daughter loved fucking me.”

His eyes went back to me, to see how I was taking his little joke. That was his mistake. He was mostly paying attention to me. He hadn’t searched Genevieve’s face to see what could be read there.

“Gen, don’t!” I yelled, but I was too late. Her arm was a blur as she embedded Shorty’s own wallpaper shaver deep into the arteries of his neck.

Shorty made a sound like a cough, and I couldn’t jump back in time to keep his blood from splashing me. He stumbled backward, eyes rolling toward Genevieve. She lunged again, digging the blade yet deeper into his neck.

“Gen!” I caught her arm. Shorty fell away from both of us, his hands on his throat. They were already red, arterial blood coursing from underneath them.

“Call 911,” I said.

Genevieve looked at me and I knew what she was thinking. If Shorty died and we covered our tracks, we were all right. If not, both our careers were over. Our freedom as well. All for a rapist and murderer. I didn’t expect her to do it.

She said, “There doesn’t seem to be a phone in here.”

Shorty, on the floor, made a gurgle that didn’t seem promising.

“The front house, then. Wake them up,” I said.

Genevieve looked at Shorty, looked at me, and then she turned and went out the door.

The blood on the floor of Shorty’s sad home was truly amazing. There was a lake of it. From the floor, Shorty’s eyes met mine.

“Keep pressure on your neck,” I said.

“There’s nobody home,” he said, his voice raspy.

“In the front house?” I asked.

He couldn’t nod, afraid of opening the wound in his throat any more than he already had. But assent was in his eyes.

I knelt, despite the blood that soaked my legs from knees to feet.

“Then this is probably the ball game for you,” I said. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I just want to know how it happened,” I said. The blood was soaking through to the skin of my legs, unpleasantly warm. “If I can, I want to bring him home and bury him. But even if I can’t, I need to know what really happened.”

A bubble of blood appeared at the corner of Royce Stewart’s mouth. He coughed.

“Please,” I said.

He was silent so long I thought his heart was hardened against me. Then he spoke.

“I was walking home, it was late,” he said with effort. “This truck drove by me. A big Ford. A lot of the guys I work with drive trucks just like it.”

I nodded. A big pickup, with a strong engine, a solid body, and a high grille. The kind of vehicle in which you could-if you were angry enough, and fearless enough-run down another human being and not be seriously injured yourself.

Royce took a shuddery breath. “Maybe five minutes later I heard the engine again, getting louder, like the truck’s coming back. But I couldn’t see it anywhere. Then the lights came on, out of nowhere. He’d been driving with the lights off and he was goin’ real fuckin’ fast on the wrong side of the road. My side.