“Come on,” I said. “Let’s talk outside. I’ve had enough of this place.”

Hank nodded around another smile. “You don’t have to tell me twice. Place gives me the screamin’ willies.”

Outside, the air was a tonic, and we leaned against the chest-high concrete wall and watched the traffic crawl along Main Street. It was late afternoon, the sun low and golden in the sky. Two of the district criminal courts were still in session and there were a few defendants lingering about, waiting for their cases to be disposed of. I’d seen two attorneys in the hall as we left, but there were none outside, a fact for which I was grateful.

“You don’t have a cigarette, do you?” I asked.

“No, sorry. But hang on a sec.” Before I could tell him not to worry about it, Hank had approached one of the few people scattered along the wall. When he returned, he had a crumpled pack of Marlboros and a book of matches. He handed them to me.

“Guy over there,” he said and gestured with his thumb, “he was in court today, same as you. He said, ‘Give ’em hell.’ ”

I lit a cigarette and wondered briefly what the guy’s crime had been. I tucked the pack in my shirt pocket.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Hank. But you’re not the person I expected to see.”

He leaned against the wall, back to the passing traffic, and crossed his arms. He didn’t look at me right away.

“I was in court this morning, too,” he finally said. “Came up to talk to you and caught your performance. I figured somebody ought to call your wife, seeing as how she wasn’t there. Thought somebody should tell her to arrange for bail.”

“I tried to call her.”

Hank nodded, looked at me with something like pity. “Me, too. No answer. But I wasn’t in stir, so I went to see her.” Hank looked up at the roofline of the jail, where it connected to the courthouse. “She didn’t answer when I rang the doorbell, so I went around back. I found her on the patio, sipping iced tea and reading Cosmo.”

A silence fell between us, and I knew that telling me this made Hank uncomfortable. “Maybe she didn’t know,” I said, meaning my court appearance.

“She knew,” Hank said. “She looked guilty as hell when she saw me.”

“She knew, and she wasn’t going to bail me out?”

“Not as bad as all that. She’d made some calls, she said, and was waiting for the money to be put together.”

“What calls?” I asked. Hank shrugged.

“Didn’t ask. Don’t know. But she asked me if I would meet you.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

Hank twitched and then patted his pocket. “I almost forgot. She asked me to give you this.” He handed me a note, folded twice. I recognized her stationery. She used to spray perfume on it. Because she loved me, she said. I opened the note and read it. It was brief and unscented.

“She wants me to know that she still loves me, very much, and that some dirty bum stole my dog.”

“I know,” Hank said. “I read it.”

I refolded the note and put it in my pocket.

“I’m sorry, man,” Hank said. “Life’s a bitch.”

I nodded.

“So is your wife.”

“Why are you here, Hank?” I asked again.

“Maybe to save your ass,” he said, and I looked up from my shoes, searching his face for the punch line. “I’m serious,” he said. “Look. I had my doubts, okay? I mean, who wouldn’t? Fifteen million dollars is a lot of jack. So, sure, I thought you might have popped him. But I told you I’d check up on Alex, and I did.”

Had I been walking, I would have stumbled. Driving, I would have wrecked. “What does Alex have to do with any of this?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe something. That’s what we’re going to find out.”

“Let’s back this up, Hank. What the hell are you talking about?”

Hank took my arm, turned me toward the wide, shallow stairs that led off the concrete platform. “Not here, okay? In the car.”

“Are we going somewhere?”

“Raleigh,” he said.

“Raleigh,” I repeated.

“To ask a few questions.”

“Of whom?” I asked. We reached the top of the stairs. Beneath us, the sidewalk beckoned. I hesitated, wanting answers. Hank’s hand settled on my shoulder, seeming to urge me down the stairs.

“Just keep walking,” he said, and something in his voice made me turn. He was looking back over his shoulder, and I followed his gaze to the courthouse door. Sunlight gilded the glass, and I did not understand. I almost missed it. Then a thin tissue of cloud blotted the sun’s face, and I saw him there, behind the glass: Douglas, watching us, a frown of concentration on his heavy features.

“Forget about him,” Hank told me. “He’s tomorrow’s problem.”

I turned away, let the private investigator lead me down the stairs. “I’m parked over here,” Hank told me. We walked down the hill, past three parked sheriff’s cars, the secure judge’s entrance, and a street crew that worked with loud, foul-smelling equipment that ripped at a small section of asphalt. Hank gestured down the narrow side street that ran along the unmarked cemetery where free blacks had been buried almost two hundred years earlier. We turned left, and the noise dwindled behind us. I started to feel like myself again, less like a punch-drunk fighter. We separated at his car, a dark green Buick sedan, and I stepped off the curb and walked to the passenger door. He unlocked the doors, but I caught his eye over the roof before I got in.

“Alex?” I asked, but he ignored me, and I felt his door slam shut. The car rocked, as if agitated; so I got in, and took my question with me.

“It’s not her real name,” Hank told me five seconds later. “That’s why I couldn’t find a record of her at the hospital in Charlotte. Jean was in the system, plain as day, but no Alex Shiften. To me, that stank of something, but I couldn’t tell what. Not until I went back with that picture you gave me.”

“So you got the picture?” I asked numbly, dealing with the little detail because I could not focus on the great big one that sat like an elephant on my lap.

“Early,” Hank responded. “A little after five, and then I drove back to Charlotte in time for the shift change at the hospital. I flashed the photo, asked my questions, and eventually found the right guy, an orderly with a deep appreciation for Benjamin Franklin.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He knew Alex all right, but not by that name. According to him, her name is Virginia Temple. She’d been at Charter Hills for three months before Jean showed up. Apparently, they hit it off pretty quick. For a couple months there, your sister spoke to no one but her.”

“Virginia,” I repeated. The name felt made up. Alex Shiften was too hard to be a Virginia, too sharp, like calling a razor blade a butter knife.

“It gets worse,” Hank said. “She transferred in from Dorothea Dix.”

“The hospital in Raleigh?”

“The state hospital in Raleigh. The place where they keep the criminally insane.”

“Not everybody there is a criminal,” I said. “Just some.”

“That’s right. Just some. But some of those eventually get out, and usually they’re transferred to a place like Charter Hills. A stepping-stone to normal living, like a halfway house.”

“And you think that may be the case with Alex?”

Hank shrugged.

“Well shit,” I said.

“Exactly,” Hank replied, and started the car. “That’s exactly what I thought.”

He dropped the transmission into drive.

“I’m not supposed to leave the county,” I said. “It’s part of the standard bail arrangement.”

He put the car back into park and turned to face me. “Your call, Work. I can drive you home if you want and check it out myself. No sweat at all.”

I didn’t want the judge to regret her kindness, but this was too important to play by the rules; and rules, I had recently decided, weren’t necessarily good. I’d played my whole life by the book, and that life wasn’t looking very pretty right now. “Screw it. Let’s go.”