“How are you, Sarah?” he asked.

“I’m all right.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said. “Where were you coming back from?”

“Wisconsin.”

“The prison?”

I nodded.

Kilander did not ask after Shiloh. Instead he sat on the fountain’s edge and gestured to the space next to him. The dark, speckled surface was not only devoid of snow, it appeared dry. I accepted his invitation to sit, waited for him to speak.

Kilander’s eyes went to the crowd of office workers at the bus stop, then he looked back at me. “No one in the department has suggested to you that you shouldn’t be back on the job, have they?”

“No,” I said.

Kilander nodded thoughtfully, one of his courtroom temporizing gestures. “Shiloh’s confession of attempted murder raised a lot of interest in how Royce Stewart actually did die.”

“Really? How did he die?” I said, trying for his brand of archness.

“They’re still figuring that out,” Kilander said. “Arson investigators sifted through that jumped-up kennel he lived in. They’re saying now the fire doesn’t look like natural origins.”

“Yeah?”

“And there were apparently a lot of tire tracks around that place, the main house and the outbuilding, considering that the homeowners were away and Shorty had one car that didn’t run. They’re looking closely at those tire prints.”

My tracks. And Genevieve’s. Genevieve was leaving in two days for Paris. She was wasting no time in pulling up her roots here, and now I was happy about that.

“And Stewart’s friends say that the night he died, a woman cop came to the bar in Blue Earth to talk to him. A very tall woman cop in a Kalispell Search and Rescue T-shirt. She doesn’t fit the description of anyone in that jurisdiction.”

I had not done a good job of covering my tracks, and neither had Genevieve. We would have been more careful, had we known we were going to kill Royce Stewart. But we hadn’t gone to Blue Earth with the intent to kill. Royce Stewart’s death was unplanned, very nearly an accident. I had to think of it that way; I couldn’t stand to think of my partner as a murderer.

And that wasn’t the way the world would likely view her, either, I realized. The evidence did not point to Genevieve as Shorty’s killer. Nobody had seen Genevieve in Blue Earth. They had seen me.

And further, Genevieve was a very well-liked veteran who’d left the job and gone somewhere that would require extradition, which in turn called for paperwork, negotiation, international cooperation.

Of course, these things shouldn’t matter, but I knew the reality. They would matter. I, meanwhile, wasn’t as well-known as Genevieve. While I had no enemies that I knew of in the department, mostly I counted as friends patrol officers and working detectives. To those in higher places, the administrative jurymen, I was just a name, a young detective tainted by my marriage to a man who’d proven himself a rogue cop.

And I wouldn’t be in Paris. I would be in Minneapolis, not within arm’s reach of the system but in its very heart, working right under the watchful and suspicious eyes of my superiors as the investigation went forward.

“I see,” I said quietly.

He laid a gentle hand on my arm. I did not object. In the past I’d seen Kilander as a pleasant lothario, to be enjoyed at arm’s length but not trusted. It surprised me now to realize that I thought of him as a friend.

“Have you ever heard the saying ‘The mills of the gods grind exceedingly slow, but they grind exceedingly fine’?” Kilander asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I hadn’t, but I knew what he meant.

He stood, and I followed his example. As close as we were standing, I keenly felt every one of the six inches he had on me. He laid one hand on my shoulder, and with his other hand, Kilander tipped my face up toward his and gently kissed me on the mouth. A chain of streetlights flickered on, like lightning in the periphery of my vision.

Kilander released me and stepped back. “The mills of the gods are grinding, Sarah,” he said. There was no irony in the words, just like there had been no sex in the kiss.

Two buses had come along and vacuumed up the waiting people at the curb, so the crowd was gone. There were a few people still on the plaza, coming and going, ghosts and abstractions in the gathering dark. I stood and watched Kilander as he walked back to the Government Center, the hem of his long coat swirling slightly in a gust of wind that made the jets of the fountain flinch. He did not look back, and I watched until he disappeared into the lighted atrium of the Hennepin County Government Center, the tower of light and order where he worked.

Jodi Compton