Let It Burn

CHAPTER ONE

Summers die hard in Paradise.

The first time you live through it, and because this place still has the “MI” as part of the address, you might actually expect the summer to fade away slowly like it does below the bridge. Down there, on a crystal blue day in September, the sun shining hot and bright until it starts to go down, you might feel a slight note of coolness in the air, a note that makes you think of football and back-to-school and leaves turning and all those other bittersweet signs that the season is changing. Something so subtle you might even be forgiven for missing it the first time it happened. Especially if you didn’t want the summer to end.

Up here, on the shores of Lake Superior, there’s a cold wind that gathers from the north and picks up weight as it builds its way across two hundred miles of open water, and then, on a late afternoon in August-hell, sometimes in July-that wind hits you square in the face and makes its intention quite clear, no matter how much you might not like the message. Summer may not be one hundred percent done, not just yet, but it’s been mortally gutshot, and it’s only a matter of days until it’s gone.

It was late August this time around. Actual late August, meaning an absurdly long summer. I’ve got six cabins stretched along an old logging road, built by my father, and in the summer I rent them out to a particular brand of tourist who wants to get away from everything without actually going to Canada or Alaska. They’re mostly repeat customers, because there’s something about this place. While they’re here, they might go around the corner to Tahquamenon Falls, or all the way up to the Shipwreck Museum on Whitefish Point, stand there and look out at the vast expanse of water, maybe think about the Edmund Fitzgerald resting just a few miles out there, five hundred feet below the surface. Come back and spend some time at the Glasgow Inn. That’s summer in Paradise.

I was at that very same Glasgow Inn that night. I was sitting at the bar, instead of my usual place in front of the fire, having given up my chair and the chair opposite to a couple from Wyandotte. They were staying in one of my cabins, and when they asked me where they should go to eat, I directed them here for Jackie’s famous beef stew. After that and a couple of cocktails, they looked to be quite content, just sitting by the fire and looking at each other.

As for me, well… There was nobody for me to look at. I had just felt the northern wind and had come in to inform Jackie that summer was on its last legs, something he never enjoyed hearing. Which might be why I always made a point of being the one to tell him. We have that kind of relationship, I guess. I bother him on a nightly basis, and in return he complains to me about everything in the world, including my own presence in his bar.

Oh, and once a week, he drives across the Internationl Bridge to bring me back a case of real Canadian Molson.

“I don’t think I can take another winter,” he said to me, as he banged down one of those Molsons on the bar top.

“You say that every year.”

“This time, I mean it.” He’d been here in Paradise, Michigan going on thirty years now, and yet he still had that Scottish accent. He’d tell you that he’d lost it, of course, that he sounded just as American as I did. Just one more thing he was wrong about.

There was a television above the bar. The sound was off, but I was watching the Tigers play the Rangers. It was a home game, in what I still thought of as their brand-new ballpark, even though it had been a few years now. Comerica Park, one of those new-style parks that opened up into the city, showing off all of the downtown buildings I had once known so well. Three hundred miles from where I was sitting, and what felt like a thousand years ago.

“I hear Arizona’s nice,” Jackie said. “I hear it’s real nice.”

“They have rattlesnakes there,” I said, not taking my eyes off the television. “And scorpions.”

Jackie scoffed at that, but I could tell the idea had gotten to him. There weren’t any rattlesnakes or scorpions crawling around when he was growing up in Glasgow, and as for Paradise… Well, they might have a few eastern massasauga rattlesnakes downstate, but you’d probably never find one in your bed up here.

“Summer’s supposed to last more than a goddamned month,” he said. “That’s the part I just don’t know if I can live with anymore.”

“I think we had double that this year. Besides, you love the winters up here.”

He just stood there looking at me, bar towel in hand, like he was ready to smack me with it.

“It’s cold as hell,” I said, “it snows every day, and it lasts forever. What’s not to like?”

He shook his head, looking tired, like winter had already begun.

“Seriously,” I said. “You love winter because you know this becomes the best place on earth. This bar, right over there by that fireplace.”

“With your sorry backside parked in front of it every night, ordering me around. You’re right, it doesn’t get any better.”

He looked over at the couple by the fireplace.

“How old do you think those two are, anyway?”

“Hell if I know.” I turned to give them a quick once-over. “Forty, maybe?”

“Forty years old and they’re sitting there looking at each other like they’re on their honeymoon.”

“Second honeymoon,” I said. “That’s what they told me. They wanted to go to the most out-of-the-way place they could find without having to fly.”

“Which cabin do you have them in?”

“The last one. Now that I finally have it finished.” Meaning rebuilt and refurnished, after somebody burned it down for me.

“End of the line,” he said, nodding his approval. “Won’t be a soul bothering them there.”

“You’re sounding almost romantic, Jackie. Did you hit your head today?”

“Smartass.” He turned away from me and started cleaning some glasses. This was the man who had survived the worst marriage in the history of mankind, to hear him tell it. Yet here he was, getting downright wistful at the sight of a man and a woman who were obviously married and didn’t seem to hate each other.

Then it occurred to me. This was a bar in a town that saw its fair share of hunters in the fall, snowmobilers in the winter. Which means lots of men. Bird-watching had become the big thing in the spring lately, meaning mostly women. Then families in the summertime. A mom and a dad, yes, but also a couple of kids along to complain about how their cell phones don’t work up here. The one sight you don’t see too often in Paradise, Michigan is a moony-eyed couple, whether on their first honeymoon or their second.

The man caught my eye and raised his glass to me. I raised my bottle of Molson in return.

I’d been married myself once. A long time ago, to a woman I met when I went to college after baseball. A woman I didn’t have much in common with, aside from the “Mc” in our last names. Jeannie McDonald, who became Jeannie McKnight, who went back to being Jeannie McDonald again. Who may have then remarried and changed her name yet again. I’m ashamed to say I don’t even know if she did, or if she still lives in Michigan. If we had had children together, the story would be different, I’m sure. Or if I ever paid a cent of alimony. At least that way I would have had an address to send checks to. As it was, she just left. Just walked away. I got the divorce papers in the mail, I signed them, I sent them back to her lawyer, and then we were done.

I wonder if she feels guilty. Wherever she is now, whoever she’s with, I wonder if she looks back at the way she bailed out on me a few weeks after I got shot and has any regrets.

Hell, I wonder if I’d even hold it against her now. I think I knew, way back when, that we’d never last, shooting or no shooting. I think we both knew.

I sat there at the bar, looking at my bottle as the Tigers played in silence above my head. There’d been a few women in that lost year after I left the force. Then I’d come up to Paradise thinking I’d sell off my father’s cabins and had ended up staying here. Something about the place had spoken to me. Like this is where you really belong, mister. In the midst of these trees bending in the wind. On the shores of this cold lake. This stark lonely place on the edge of the world, which also turns into the most beautiful place on earth for the few days they call summer.

Then there was Sylvia, the wife of a rich man who thought I was his friend. Then Natalie, a cop from Ontario, someone who’d lost her partner, just as I had. Someone who may or may not have turned out to be the right person for me, if I had ever gotten the chance to find out.

No. God damn it. No.

I put the bottle down. This is not where you want to be going tonight, I said to myself. This is not going to make you feel one little bit better about going back to that cabin alone.

“What’s with you?” Jackie said.

“I’m fine.”

He narrowed his eyes at me like he wasn’t buying it. Which made it feel like the right time to leave. A minute later I was outside in the cold night air, looking up at the stars and listening to the soft waves just behind the tree line.

I got in the truck and took the left turn down that old logging road, deep into the woods, passing my one neighbor’s cabin. Vinnie Red Sky Leblanc, a blackjack dealer over at the Bay Mills Casino. He’d gotten into some trouble, and I’d been watching out for him. The lights were on at his place, and everything looked normal, so I gave him a honk and kept driving. My cabin was the first, the one I’d helped my old man build back when I was eighteen years old and on my way to play Single-A ball. Back when I was young, stupid, and full of energy, and I didn’t have a nine-millimeter slug sitting half a centimeter from my heart.

When I got inside, I saw the light flashing on the answering machine. I don’t get a hell of a lot of calls. I hit the play button and listened to a voice from my distant past.

“Hey, Alex McKnight! This is Tony Grimaldi. Remember me? I was a sergeant in the First Precinct, way the hell back when. I hope you’re doing okay, and I hope you don’t mind me calling you out of the blue. But I’m really just making a courtesy call, and I’d appreciate it if you could give me a call back.”

He gave me his number. Then he signed off.

I stood there looking down at the machine, wondering why in God’s name a desk sergeant from the old precinct would be calling me. I checked the time. I was in early, thanks to Jackie being an extra pain in the ass that night. So I figured what the hell, give the sergeant a call back.

I dialed the number, making note of the 734 area code. That was one of the new codes split off from the original 313. If you still had a 313, that meant you were either in Detroit or close enough to see it from your front door.

“Alex, is that you?”

“Sergeant Grimaldi,” I said. “How have you been, sir?”

“You can call me Tony now. I don’t wear a badge anymore.”

A half beat of silence then, as we skipped over my comeback. I wasn’t wearing a badge anymore, either. I hadn’t worn one in many years.

“How long have you been out?” I said.

“It’s over ten years now. Hard to imagine. But most days I don’t miss it much, to tell you the truth.”

“I hear ya.”

“Nothing like it, of course. You know what I mean.”

Another half beat.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “You’re absolutely right. But how did you ever think to get hold of me after all this time?”

“Well, like I said in the message, it’s just a courtesy call. I play golf with a few of the actives, and one of them happened to mention you. He was going to call you himself, but I told him I’d love to catch up with you.”

“Okay. Glad you did.” That’s what I said, but it still wasn’t making any sense.

“I understand you’re still drawing the disability, so obviously they had all of your contact information.”

Disability. Not exactly my favorite word in the world, but I guess that’s what you had to call it officially. When an officer gets shot on the job, he’s eligible for two-thirds of his salary for the rest of his life. I don’t make a point of telling most people that, because they’ll inevitably look at me and try to see how it is I’m supposedly disabled now. I mean, I can’t raise my right arm all the way anymore. I can’t throw a ball, which would have been more of a big deal back when I was a catcher, I realize, but not so much now. If you really pressed me, I’d just have to tell you that I took three bullets and only two came out, and I’m supposed to go get periodic X-rays to make sure that third bullet isn’t migrating closer to my heart, at which point it could kill me.

I’m supposed to go get those X-rays every year, but I don’t. I’m supposed to feel guilt or gratitude or a mixture of both every time I get one of those checks in the mail, but I don’t feel that, either. Mostly I just try to forget it ever happened.

“So what did you have to tell me, Sergeant? I’ve never gotten a courtesy call before.”

“I told you, call me Tony, please. But here’s the deal. You remember a case you worked on, that last year you were on the force, where you ended up putting away a guy named Darryl King?”

I was confused for exactly one second, because I never made detective and so technically I never really worked on a “case.” But as soon as I connected the name to the crime, it all came back to me. You don’t see a crime scene like that without remembering it for the rest of your life.

“Darryl King,” I said. “In the train station.”

“You forgot ‘With the knife.’”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, bad joke. You know, like in that game? Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the lead pipe?”

That’s cop humor for you. A way to distance yourself from the most horrible crimes of all. A way to keep your sanity.

“I’ve been away too long,” I said. “But seriously, why are we talking about Darryl King? Don’t tell me he’s getting out.”

“He is. Believe it or not.”

“That makes no sense. He drew a lot more time than that, didn’t he?”

“Tell me about it. But remember how he was, what, sixteen years old?”

“I don’t remember exactly, but that sounds about right.”

“Yeah, sixteen. Tried as an adult. It’s been a real thing in the court lately, going back over those cases with youthful offenders.”

“Like what, we were supposed to just send him home with a warning because he was a minor? Stop killing people or we’ll take away your allowance?”

“Hey, I’m just the messenger here, Alex. You’re preaching to the choir.”

“Sorry, it’s just…”

“I know, I know. Believe me. I’ve seen a few other cases like that. Maybe not as bad as this one. Bottom line, the kid’s spent his whole adult life in prison. I don’t know where he’s going to live, what he’s gonna do, but I do know he’ll be out in a few days. Not that I expect him to come looking for you or anything.”

“No, probably not. Good luck finding me, even if he wanted to.”

The sergeant laughed at that. “Yeah, what, you’re where, in Paradise? I gotta be honest, I had to look up where that is before I called you.”

“It’s a long way from Detroit,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll have to watch my back.”

“No, like I said, I don’t expect this kid to do anything. I keep calling him a kid, I realize, and he’s not a kid now. But you know what I mean. You just need to let people know.”

“I understand. So you called me…”

“And Detective Bateman, yes.”

“Wow, Arnie Bateman,” I said. “Another name I haven’t heard in a long time.”

“Yeah, he’s off the force now, too. Left right around the same time I did. Things were just getting a little too crazy in the department. More and more politics every year.”

“Okay, so me and the detective. I assume you’re letting the victim’s family know, too?”

“The court system does that. Certainly won’t be me, and no thank you, anyway. That would be a whole different thing.”

“I can’t even imagine,” I said. “I remember talking to the husband. It’s been a long time, and maybe he’s moved on with his life. Gotten married again, I don’t know. But in a way it probably feels like it just happened, you know?”

“Exactly. Now they’re telling you the guy who killed your wife is going to walk free.”

“I still can’t believe it,” I said. “Was it first degree murder in the end?”

I wasn’t there for that part. I was in the hospital when the trial took place, or maybe I was already out of the hospital and off the force and living through my lost year.

“Second degree, I think. After they cut that deal or whatever they did. But still. It’s not right.”

“Well, I appreciate the call, Sergeant. It was good to hear from you.”

“Tony, damn it. And you know what? We have to have a drink sometime. You ever get down this way? I live in Plymouth now.”

“Plymouth? Really?” Last I saw it, Plymouth was a little town in the middle of a cornfield or something, twenty miles west of Detroit on the way to nowhere.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t recognize the place now. Look who’s talking, anyway. At least you don’t have to look up Plymouth on the map.”

“Fair point.”

“But I mean it, Alex, I should have called you a long time ago. It’s not right to lose touch like that. You gotta get down here so we can catch up for real. We’ll have that drink, and your money’s no good down here.”

“Next time I’m downstate. I promise.”

“You’d better, Officer. That’s an order. You take care of yourself, all right?”

I promised him I would. Then we both hung up, and I’m not sure either of us really thought we’d ever see each other again.

An hour later, I was still thinking about the call. That name, Darryl King, which had been so important to me, so long ago. To the whole city of Detroit, really, in that one hot month of June. I had done my small part to bring him to justice, and then my own life had gotten turned upside down, just a matter of days later. I had had no reason to ever think about him again. Until now.

I was in my truck, rolling down to the end of the logging road, past four empty cabins. The family in the second cabin had just left that morning. That left only the couple in the last cabin, the same couple I had seen that evening, down at the Glasgow. The lights were on when I pulled up. I could see that they were inside.

I took an armload of firewood from the bed of my truck and stacked it next to the front door. Then the door opened and the man was standing there, looking out at me.

“Don’t mean to disturb you,” I said. “It’s just getting a little cold tonight, so I thought I’d leave some wood.”

“It’s August,” he said, with some kind of fake outrage. “It’s not supposed to get cold.”

He thought that was pretty funny. When he was done laughing, he thanked me for the wood.

“This has been such a great week,” he said. “We really love it up here.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear that.”

“It’s not even that cold in here, but I think I’ll start a fire anyway. It really gets Gloria in the mood, if you know what I mean.”

I just nodded at that one. Definitely more than I needed to hear, but what the hell. You’re lucky enough to be alone with someone who loves you, in a nice cozy cabin at the end of the road in the most remote place you could ever find yourself in. Your real lives, all of your responsibilities and all of the demands, they’re all back home, three hundred miles away. Why not pretend you’re newlyweds again?

“You have a good night.” I got in my truck and drove back down that lonely road to my lonely cabin. I had already made the decision by the time I got back inside.

I called back my old sergeant, surprising the hell out of him, I’m sure. I told him I’d be coming back downstate to take him up on his offer of a drink.

Then I made one more call.

CHAPTER TWO

Another summer, the one that would turn out to be my last wearing a uniform. Half my life ago. Detroit, back when Detroit was still on its feet. It was a wobbling prizefighter, holding on to the ropes with one hand, but nobody was counting it out yet.

Seven thirty in the morning, on the first day of June. I remember that part because the first day of any month was hell for most Detroit police officers, on account of something they called MAD. It was a three-shift system for patrol officers, M for midnight, A for afternoon, D for day. You did one month on one shift, then you switched over to another. If you were lucky, you got a day off on the switch day, but of course you can’t give everyone the same day off, so most of the time you had to do a quick turnaround. Day-shifters going home and grabbing a few hours of sleep before reporting back at midnight, midnight-shifters going home in the morning and then coming back for the afternoon shift, which started at 4:00 p.m. Or on that particular day for me and my partner, coming off the afternoon shift at midnight, stumbling home, and trying to get as much real sleep as possible before that alarm went off and you had to be right back for morning roll call. The smarter criminals in Detroit had a rule-never mess with a cop on the first day of the month.

Sergeant Tony Grimaldi was doing the roll call that day. He was about as Italian as the name would suggest, an eastsider from Warren, where a lot of the Italians seemed to come from. He had been a high school baseball star who went on to play for a small college, so he took a natural interest in my minor league career, and it was obvious he thought both of us had come one inch from making it to the majors, even though he never even got a tryout. It was harmless, of course, and he was a sergeant. So I let it slide.

“All right, listen up,” he said, standing up there by the chalkboard. “Welcome back to the daylight, Officers. Hope you all have some coffee in you. Before we get to the announcements for the day, I’ve got a special guest star who wants to say something to you.”

Sometimes we’d actually get a genuine celebrity stopping by the precinct to say hello. One of the Red Wings, maybe, because we were the precinct closest to Joe Louis Arena. I think I remember Bob Seger stopping by one morning when I wasn’t there to meet him. But no, today we weren’t getting anybody like that at all. The door opened and in walked Detective Arnie Bateman.

“I thought you said we had a special guest star,” my partner Franklin said. It was the kind of thing he could say, being all of six foot four and a few pounds over his two-forty playing weight.

“Just give him a minute of your time,” the sergeant said. “He was so gracious to spare some of his, after all.”

The detective nodded at this, with a smile on his face like he really was giving up some of his valuable time just to favor us with his wonderfulness.

“Thank you, Sergeant. Good morning, men.”

He was dressed just so, as always, still sporting a Detroit version of the Miami Vice look, including the stubble on his chin. His eyes were bright, and he was practically humming with energy, unlike the rest of us overcaffeinated short-shifters, because homicide detectives almost always work regular hours. His gold badge was displayed prominently on his alligator belt. I’m pretty sure he polished that badge at least three times a day.

“As you know,” the detective said, “we’ve got the big annual basketball game against the Thirteenth coming up. They’ve been taking it to us the last few years, but this is the year we turn it around.”

The Thirteenth Precinct was our big rival. The First Precinct extended up Woodward Avenue from downtown, and the Thirteenth was just up the street from us. That left the precincts sitting right on the dividing line in this city, separating the east side from the west side, and it also meant that the infamous “Cass Corridor,” where much of the drug activity in the city was concentrated, ran from one precinct to the other. We’d take turns being the precinct with the highest homicide rate. Once a year we’d try to forget that with a basketball game.

The Thirteenth had the nice indoor gym, so it was always an away game for whoever played for us. I’d never taken part myself, but I’d seen my fellow officers limping around the next day, some of them with loose teeth.

“So we really need some help this year,” he said, his hands on his hips, jacket open, that gold badge blinding everyone in the room. “Some height, some athleticism…”

“Some black guys,” Franklin said. “Tall black guys. Is that what you’re saying?”

Everybody laughed. There were thirty of us in the room, maybe twenty white, ten black, my partner among them. But we were all pretty tight. As a Detroit cop you get over that kind of thing pretty fast. In fact, if you can’t deal with the realities of race, talk about it in the open, joke about it, laugh about it, then you’re on the wrong police force. For that matter, you’re in the wrong city.

The detective laughed along with us. He was one of those guys who had probably never been the butt of a joke, going back to his glorious three-sport high school career, and wasn’t about to acknowledge such a possibility now.

“You can say it that way if you want to,” he said. “But I didn’t, okay? Just see me after roll call if you’re interested. We really need some guys with game this year.”

Thereby insulting everyone who played last year, I thought, but again, guys like Arnie Bateman get away with that kind of stuff all their lives.

“All right, back to the announcements,” Sergeant Grimaldi said. “Thank you, Detective Bateman.”

He waited for the detective to show himself out, then he continued.

“We’re keeping a focus on Roosevelt Park and MCS this month,” he said, MCS meaning Michigan Central Station. “We continue to see some daytime drug activity, both in the park and in the lots by the station itself.”

It was a familiar story. A dealer sets up shop, word gets around, the police crack down on it, and maybe a few low-level runners get arrested. Then it all starts over somewhere else. In this case, though, you’ve got train commuters coming and going, maybe taking a little walk in the park on a nice summer afternoon. Maybe some of them are buyers, but the rest are just people trying to get on with their day. A lot of them don’t live in the city. They live in one of the suburbs, and they come downtown to go to work or to see a ball game at Tiger Stadium. It’s one of the unspoken rules around here that if people like that turn into crime victims, then it’s doubly bad for everyone involved.

And for the city itself.

“We’ll be putting together a buy-and-bust later this month,” the sergeant went on, “maybe even by next week.”

There were a few not-so-subtle groans on that one. Buy-and-busts mean more kids in handcuffs, while the real culprits live to sell another day. Sometimes they ask patrol officers to help out, too-which means you get to dress in street clothes, be bored out of your mind, and then risk your life for a few minutes, all in the same day.

“This is all taking place above and beyond the usual Roosevelt Park activity,” the sergeant said. “The solicitation, both male and female. Now that the candy store has moved to the same location, well… As you can imagine, it’s gonna be a hot spot for a while.”

“One-stop shopping,” somebody said. “Get high and get off.”

“You’ve summarized the point well,” the sergeant said, not looking up from his day sheet. “So just keep an eye on the area whenever you drive by, okay?”

There were a few other announcements that didn’t have anything to do with me or my partner, so I tuned out. A few minutes later the sergeant gave us our ten-eight, meaning “officers on duty” and kind of an inside joke because Detroit cops never use ten codes. Then we were on our feet and heading to the locker room for a last pit stop before hitting the road.

My partner was yet another ex-jock on a squad full of them. An ex-football player, once a promising walk-on at the University of Michigan before he blew out his left knee. He still wore a brace, and he took a moment to adjust it while I waited for him. I was just about to ask why the detective hadn’t come up to us personally when Franklin slammed his locker shut and there, in a perfect movie moment, was the smiling detective himself.

“You gotta be what, six-three?”

“Six-four,” Franklin said. “But I don’t hoop anymore.”

“I understand you might not move like you used to,” the detective said, “but I’d like to see one of those guys at the Thirteenth move you out from under the basket.”

“I’d love to help you out, Detective, but the ligaments in my left knee have their own agenda. Why don’t you ask Alex? He’s the only ex-professional athlete around here.”

I was already composing my thank-you note to Franklin when the detective stepped over to look me up and down. “I thought you never made it to the majors,” he said.

On a morning when I had a little more sleep under my belt, and a little more patience, I might have taken the time to explain it to him. You get paid to play ball in the minors. You can even make a decent living in Triple-A. Which makes you a professional, by any definition.

“No, you’re right,” I ended up saying. “I played four years for free. Now if you’ll excuse us…”

“All right, we’ll talk later,” he said. “You don’t look very fast, but I’m sure you could help us.”

With those words of encouragement ringing in my ears, I grabbed my partner and we rolled out into the day.

CHAPTER THREE

I got an early start the next morning and saw the sun coming up as I crossed the Mackinac Bridge. I grabbed a quick breakfast in Gaylord, got back on the road, and kept going. I can drive as fast as anyone, partly because my old Ford F-150 truck still rides smooth going eighty or over, partly because I’m an ex-cop who took three bullets on the job and nobody’s going to write me a ticket. Not in Michigan, anyway.

I still wasn’t exactly sure that this was a good idea, but I knew if I didn’t do it I’d be sitting in front of the fire at the Glasgow that night, telling myself I should have gone. So what the hell.

I rolled through Bay City and Saginaw. Then Flint. The traffic started getting heavier. You forget how empty the Upper Peninsula is, how you can drive for twenty minutes and see one car going the other way. Then you come down here and you realize there are too many people in the rest of the world, and too many cars.

I got off on I-96 and headed southeast, toward Detroit. I remember this road being ripped up and under construction all the time, even way back when. It was nice to see that one thing hadn’t changed, at least. A few more miles down a single lane marked with orange cones and I was in Oakland County. I was running a little early, so I pulled off at Kent Lake and parked the truck for a while. I closed my eyes to recharge my batteries. When I opened my eyes again I was looking out over the lake. It hadn’t been a conscious plan, just something I gravitated to without giving it a thought. If I ever had reason to move down here again, I’d have to live on a lake for sure, or else I’d probably end up going insane.

It was kind of strange to get an actual good cell phone signal down here, so I took the opportunity to give the sergeant a call while I was sitting there, just to let him know I was closing in. He seemed a little surprised I had gotten down here so fast, but he gave me the address of a sports bar on Haggerty Road and told me he’d meet me there.

I made the mistake of taking the secondary roads to get over to Haggerty, ending up in Novi. There’s a huge mall there, plus a million other stores all over the place, and as I sat in the traffic I couldn’t help remembering what the corner of Novi Road and Twelve Mile once looked like. Two roads crossing, fields on all four corners. A traffic light. Now that one corner had more retail shopping than the entire city of Detroit put together.

More memories hit me when I finally got over to Haggerty Road. It was two lanes through the countryside back in the day, with a mom-and-pop store and a gas station every mile or so. More old-timer’s talk, I know, but damn it all, I swear it wasn’t that long ago. A place shouldn’t be able to change this much, this quickly. There was another strip of retail on every corner now, and every straightaway with enough dry land was lined with new housing developments. I didn’t ask myself where all of these people had come from. I already knew the answer. The people who lived in Detroit were moving out to the first line of suburbs, and the people who lived in those old suburbs were moving out here, in a great second wave. Or hell, maybe it was the third wave by now. Another few years and people would be moving to the moon, just to get away from Detroit.

I found the sports bar. It was right on Haggerty, between a couple of restaurants and a movie multiplex. It was one of those places with seventy television screens. In the men’s room there were three more screens above the urinals. When I came back out, I saw my old sergeant standing at the door, looking for me.

“Sergeant Grimaldi,” I said. “I would have recognized you anywhere.”

I was being kind, I guess. He had lost most of his hair, put on a few pounds. He’d spent too much time outside without putting on his sunscreen. But I did truly believe I would have recognized him, even out of context.

“Alex McKnight,” he said, looking me over. “What the hell, you don’t look any different at all.”

“That means I wasn’t much to begin with.”

“No, I’m serious. Do they have the Fountain of Youth up there in Paradise or something?”

“Okay, enough flattery. Let’s sit down, okay?”

We grabbed one of the high tables, with the high stools you have to be careful not to fall off of. There was an afternoon baseball game on over one of his shoulders. Not the Tigers. On another screen there was a soccer game. On another screen there was a news show. Just two guys talking with a running closed caption at the bottom if you really felt like sitting there and reading it. I ordered a beer, and the sergeant did likewise. I was already preparing myself for the fact that it would not be brewed and bottled in Canada.

“I can’t believe you really came all the way down here,” he said, looking at me and shaking his head. “I mean, I know I offered to buy…”

“I appreciated the call,” I said, “and it’s been a while.”

“It’s what, a six-hour drive?”

“Closer to five.”

“Okay, so there’s another reason you’re here,” he said. “Me, I’d only drive five hours for one of two things. Money, or a woman.”

“Well, there is somebody I’m going to see later…”

“Aha. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Who is she?”

The beers came then. I took a long drink. It tasted good after so many hours on the road, Canadian or no Canadian.

“She’s an FBI agent,” I said. “I met her when she came up to the UP to investigate a string of murders.”

“That does sound romantic.”

I had to laugh at that one. “She’s a good cop,” I said. “Even if she’s a feeb.”

“God, do you remember how much we used to hate those guys?”

“I do.”

“Don’t even get me started,” he said. “The number of times I had to actively go out of my way just to get something done before those clowns came in to mess everything up.”

I smiled and shook my head. It was a topic every local cop could speak to, all over the country. It would probably never change.

“But you say she’s one of the good ones,” he said. “So okay, I guess that means you’re not breaking a code or anything. She’s good-looking, too?”

“Matter of fact, she is.”

“Okay, then. You may proceed.”

He took a hit off his beer. Then he reached behind him and pulled out a little notebook from his back pocket. A real cop move, no matter how long he’d been off the force.

“So, speaking of murder,” he said. “I gotta say, I feel really bad about the way I handled this.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I called you up, out of the blue, and I had everything right there in front of me. Darryl King, getting out on parole, in about a week. I’ve got his address, too. Or his mother’s address, I guess. Over on Ash Street.”

“The same house where we made the arrest?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“So what’s the problem?” I said. “Looks like you’ve got it all covered.”

“No, I sure as hell don’t, Alex. When I got off the phone with you, it occurred to me that I didn’t say one word about the woman he murdered.”

“You didn’t have to, Sergeant. I know what he went away for.”

“I told you, I’m Tony now. You see a badge on me?”

“No, but-”

“But nothing. If I was still a good sergeant, I would have remembered the most important thing. Even if you know it and I know it and everybody in the world knows it, the most important thing about Darryl King is the woman he murdered in cold blood.”

“Elana Paige,” I said. “That was her name.”

“Yes,” he said. “Elana Paige. You remembered.”

“Of course. I was the one who…”

“That’s right. Not something you’re ever going to forget.”

We both sat there for a while, thinking about it, while the baseball and soccer games went on over our heads.

“Here’s to Elana Paige,” the sergeant said, raising his glass. We toasted her, and then we both went silent again.

“The kid who did this,” I finally said. “I know you’ve already told me, but I want to hear it one more time. Maybe it’ll make sense.”

“He’s getting out. Doesn’t make any more sense, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“I used to know a parole officer,” he said. “Going way back. I remember he once told me, when murderers get out of prison, they’re statistically the least likely to ever get in trouble again.”

“Is that right?”

“Sex criminals, child molesters, those guys are almost guaranteed to end up arrested again, but plain old murderers? They usually stay straight.”

“Does that make you feel any better now?” I said.

“No, actually not. How ’bout you?”

I shook my head and took another long drink.

“It’s funny,” he said. “I called you because theoretically somebody you helped put away for a long time might come after you. But while I’m sitting here thinking about him, walking free like that…”

“It’s more likely we’d go after him,” I said. “I hear what you’re saying.”

“Okay, good, so it’s not just me thinking that.”

“Something you think about. Not something you actually do.”

“No, I guess not. But if I were her husband? Even after all these years?”

“He’s probably remarried now. Maybe with a family. You don’t destroy that just to kill the man who killed your first wife.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “It wouldn’t bring her back. I’m just saying…”

He waved the whole thing away with one hand. Then he looked up at the screens.

“I never did get the whole soccer thing,” he said. “Did you?”

“I’ve got a friend from Scotland,” I said. “He’ll talk about it like it’s life or death sometimes.”

“You’ve been up there ever since you left the force?”

“Took me about a year. Then I finally wandered up there.”

“I know that must have been rough. And you do realize…”

He hesitated, looking me in the eye.

“I’ll just say it, Alex. You do realize that nobody blamed you for what happened to your partner.”

I waited a few beats before answering.

“I did. I blamed myself.”

He shook his head. There wasn’t much else to say, and he was smart enough not to try.

“So when’s the last time you got back down here?” he finally said.

“It was a few years ago. I saw the new stadium, but I don’t remember if I drove by the old one.”

“You would have remembered, believe me. If you saw Tiger Stadium half torn down… That was just the worst. Of course, now it’s just a field, and the old flagpole.”

“I do remember going by the old precinct,” I said. “The building didn’t look much different, at least.”

“You realize that the First and Thirteenth are combined now.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yep. The old rival precincts are now the Central District. They’ve got six districts now, instead of thirteen precincts.”

“That’s amazing.”

“The city’s lost half its people, Alex. I mean, literally half the people are gone now. The population is back at around what it was in 1900. A couple of those precincts, they became like outposts in the desert. No houses around them. Hardly any people. They’ve even got bears living in some of the old buildings now.”

“Bears? Are you serious?”

“That’s what I’ve heard. They’ve got companies that go around tearing down houses as fast as they can. Whole blocks, just disappearing. When you were down here before, did you drive though any of the neighborhoods?”

“A little bit through Corktown, but not much else.”

“What about the train station? Did you see that?”

“From a distance. I never got too close.”

“Well, you have to go see it, then. The whole city, Alex. Just take some time today and drive around. You have to go see what’s happened to our old Motown.”

So that’s what I did. After I thanked him for the beer and saw him back to his car, I got in my truck and started driving around. FBI Agent Janet Long was still at work, after all, and I had a few hours to kill before meeting her for dinner.

You have to understand, Detroit is a huge city. Not in terms of population-not anymore, at least-but it’s 140 square miles in area. You could fit Boston and San Francisco inside the city borders, and still have room left over for Manhattan. I drove straight east, through Redford, where I lived as a young married cop, just across the border. Then a minute later I was in the city itself. This place I was sworn to serve and protect.

It’s so easy to stay on the freeway and to zoom right through it all. As I crossed over the River Rouge I made myself get off and start driving down those residential streets. I had to see it for myself.

I crossed through the northern reaches of the city, turning down one street after another. I saw the abandoned houses. I saw the garbage and the graffiti and the high weeds. I saw the charred remains of houses that had burned down. This is something Detroit had always been known for, of course. Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween, when people would come from literally all over the world to watch the city burn. Every fireman on the job would be out that night, and just about every cop, too. It always felt like a losing battle, but now…

Now it was like the whole city just said, all together… Let it burn.

An hour later, I was still driving. I finally had to stop for a while. I sat there in my truck and looked at an entire row of empty houses. They would be torn down eventually. The demolition companies just hadn’t gotten to them yet.

Having worked my way through the west side, it was hard to imagine that the east side could be any worse. But I was wrong. By that time I was getting a little numb, but still I’d see something like a beautiful old church turned into a half-collapsed wreck and it would hit me all over again. A park where children once played. A school with every window covered over with plywood.

As I finally worked my way back to the heart of the city, I came down East Grand Boulevard and passed through the old Packard plant. It had already been abandoned when I was a cop here, but at least then it stood out from everything around it. Now it was just one more forty-acre postapocalyptic wasteland in a city filled with them, with yet more decayed buildings, more graffiti, more garbage, more weeds. This plant where they once made the most beautiful automobiles in the world. It was easy to see how much this one wrecked-out old plant could stand for the whole city, the way it was back in the glory days, and the way it was now.

I hit Woodward Avenue, the center of town, the dividing line between east and west. The old Thirteenth Precinct building, with the indoor gym they were so proud of, was closed now. They had put up a fence with razor wire around the whole complex.

I drove south, feeling a tightness in my chest as I got close to that corner. Even though I knew the building was gone now, that apartment building with the broken elevator and those stairs that Franklin had to climb, complaining with every step. Until we finally got to the top and knocked on that door.

It was gone now, replaced with a Burger King. But it didn’t make me feel any better to see it gone, because Franklin was just as much gone himself.

I drove downtown, past the First Precinct building, still open, at least for the moment. Past the new ballpark where the Tigers played now, to Grand Circus Park, where the streets fanned out like spokes on a wheel. It was a weekday. A working day. There were people walking around the place, enjoying the nice day. It was good to see that much. It was good to see that the whole city hadn’t been abandoned yet.

I went down to Michigan Avenue, headed west past where the old Tiger Stadium once stood like a huge gray battleship. It was just a field now, like the sergeant said, with only the old center-field flagpole still standing.

I wasn’t far from Roosevelt Park and the old Michigan Central Station. I looked at my watch. I still had an hour. Plenty of time to go see the station up close, to see what it looked like now. To see that empty parking lot, those tracks, that desecrated building.

And to remember what happened there.

CHAPTER FOUR

We rolled out onto Woodward Avenue. It was a Thursday, the first day of June, which meant a school day. That’s the first box you check when you’re on the morning shift, because a school day means there’s officially no good reason for kids to be out hanging around on the streets at eight thirty in the morning.

Of course, if you do see kids hanging around on the streets of Detroit, at any time of day, there’s a good chance they’re not playing kick the can, or rolling a hoop down the sidewalk with a stick. It’s just a cold hard reality that the frontline soldiers in this city’s drug trade are almost all children. A horribly effective way to run a drug business, when you think about it, because if you ring up a thirteen-year-old for selling, what are you gonna do, put him away for ten years? Even if you did, there’d be another thirteen-year-old to take his place the very next day. The men who are making all the real money, you never touch them.

If they didn’t invent the practice here in Detroit, they sure as hell perfected it. Young Boys Incorporated, or YBI, was formed by three teenagers on a playground. A few years later, they controlled most of the heroin trade in Detroit. They were bringing in close to two million dollars a week. In the wintertime, you could spot their runners from a block away, because they all wore the same kind of coat. That’s how brazen they were, all of them. Like go ahead, pick off a few of the kids. See how far that gets you.

We finally brought down the gang in 1982. I say we, meaning the Detroit cops, the FBI, and the DEA, actually working together for once. One of the three founding members had already been killed, but the other two were put away for good, along with forty-one of their lieutenants. The kids, they all scattered to the wind, but nobody around here was naive enough to believe that new gangs wouldn’t form overnight to take the place of YBI.

Then, on top of everything else this city had to deal with, some genius somewhere figured out how to make a cheap form of freebase cocaine using baking soda. Crack, rock, whatever the hell you want to call it. It hit Detroit just as hard as every other city in America. Maybe a little harder. We still didn’t have enough cops in this town, and now with a new, highly addictive form of coke that could get you high for five or ten bucks? It was starting to feel like a losing battle most days.

Franklin and I got about a block down Woodward Avenue before we saw a half-dozen kids walking slowly down the sidewalk. We came up behind them, and Franklin blipped the siren. He was driving that day. As soon as we came to a stop, I got out and rousted the kids, asked them why they weren’t in school, dismissing with prejudice their claim that summer vacation had already started. Eventually I just sent them on their way, with me holding only their empty promises to wander over to school.

Franklin was finally getting out of the car to come help me. I waved him back inside as the kids walked away.

“Don’t tell me,” he said as he got back behind the wheel. “They were on their way to choir practice.”

“Not quite. But no big deal. Just a bunch of knuckleheads skipping school on a nice summer day.”

“How exactly do you know they weren’t up to something else? Did you take one ID from those kids?”

“Did you see me take an ID? You were sitting right here.”

“It was a leading question, Alex. Just like in the courtroom.”

“I asked them what they were up to,” I said. “They answered me, I asked again, and then the second time I believe they told me the truth. So let’s go find some real problems to solve, all right?”

“Oh, that’s right, I’ve got the all-seeing swami in the car with me. I keep forgetting that.”

“It’s not even nine o’clock,” I said. “How many times are we going to do this today?”

“That’s entirely up to you, Swami. Although I’m surprised you haven’t already divined the number in advance.”

This is how it went with us. All day long. I had this unshakable belief back then, that I could ask a person a question and I could look in their eyes while they answered me and I could tell if they were lying to me. With absolute certainty. No doubt whatsoever. In the years since, I’ve found out that some people are gifted liars, and that my supposedly one hundred percent accurate lie detector can be fooled completely.

Of course, if you think I’ve learned not to put such trust in my own instincts anymore, then you have no idea just how stubborn I am. Or maybe how stupid.

“I need more coffee,” I said.

He drove us down through the Wayne State campus, past the great stone edifices of the art museum on one side of the street and of the library on the other. There was a little coffee shop next to the hospital. I went in and got one with cream for myself, one black for Franklin, waiting for the inevitable joke about how he likes his coffee like he likes his women. He was happily married, but some jokes are still mandatory, I guess. And yes, we both had a doughnut. Two cops with two doughnuts.

“What else can we do to fulfill the stereotype today?” he said as the powdered sugar dusted his nice clean uniform. “Too bad neither of us has a badass mustache.”

“We could both get out and try to chase down some kid. Climb over a fence and throw him into some garbage cans. Then complain about how we’re too old for this stuff.”

“The day is young, Alex. I’ll let you do that one, though, if you don’t mind.”

“You really can’t run anymore, huh?”

I could see him flexing his left knee, just at the thought of it. “If a bear was chasing me, maybe. But then I’m sure I’d end up in the hospital.”

“So I take it you’re not going to play basketball.”

He was taking a drink of coffee then and just about spit it out. “Are you kidding me? With Detective Jackass as the coach?”

“Coach and star player. Don’t forget.”

“Star player, my ass. I would have destroyed that boy, back in the day. In fact, if I hadn’t been a little better at football… I’m just saying. You might have seen me on the hardwood instead of the gridiron.”

“Yeah, yeah. I got it.”

“Now, if I had played baseball…”

“Oh, don’t even start,” I said. One of our other favorite arguments.

“I won’t. My only point is that every sport has its necessary set of physical skills.”

“Okay. You’re right.”

“And then there’s baseball.”

I shook my head and looked out my side window. There was a line of apartments on my side of the street. By lunchtime there’d be people sitting out on their balconies, watching the traffic. Not exactly the best view in the world, but there were far worse places to live. Across the street was another apartment building, much older and taller. A place we knew well, from repeated visits. Thankfully there were no calls to send us there that day. We wouldn’t even set foot in that building for another month.

The downtown buildings were looming in front of us, getting bigger with every block. We passed over the highway, then by the Fox Theater into the canyon formed by the first of the tall buildings. We were downtown now, and there were working people walking around like it was any other city in the world. This one just happened to be built on one thing. The automobile. So as that business went, so went the city. On this particular day, it looked to be holding its own.

That took us past the Opera House and right into Grand Circus Park, with all of the statues and fountains and flowers, and God damn if it didn’t all look beautiful in the morning sunlight. Another few blocks and the road curved around another little gem of a park called Campus Martius. It’s a big jumble as five roads all converge there, a great place for fender benders, and sure enough, we made the turn just in time to see one happen. One car swinging hard to the outside of the circle, another car in its blind spot. The dull hollow sound of a passenger’s-side door being pushed in, then a terrifying moment as the two cars seemed to join together and form a single metal monster that could go just about anywhere, take out other cars or even the people on the sidewalk.

Three wheels jumped the curb. Two front wheels from one car, one from the other. Then everything stopped dead. Franklin flipped on the lights as he pulled up behind. I jumped out and checked on the drivers. Your first priority, of course. Make sure nobody’s seriously hurt.

There was a woman in the car to the right. She was black and heavyset, and there was a cross hanging from her rearview mirror. The car itself was a junker. An old Plymouth Horizon that was once blue, now half Bondo and primer. It was the kind of car you could buy in Detroit for three hundred dollars back then.

Her eyes were closed, her hands folded in front of her. She jumped as I rapped on her window. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

“I’m fine,” she said as she rolled down her window. “That car just came over, Officer. Right on top of me. I didn’t have time to stop.”

“You just relax a minute,” I said. “We’ll be right back to talk to you.”

I went to the other car. It was a gunmetal gray Saab, and I’m pretty sure the floor mats alone were worth more than the Horizon. The driver was pounding the steering wheel with both fists. When he saw me, he threw open his door. I had to jump back to avoid getting hit in the knees.

“Take it easy,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“I never saw her,” the man said. He was wearing a suit, and his tie had been loosened. “She came out of nowhere.”

“Well, no,” I said. “She was right behind you. I wouldn’t call that nowhere.”

“I looked before I switched lanes. Then boom! I don’t know how it happened.”

“You obviously didn’t see her. A turn signal might have been useful there, by the way.”

“I did signal, Officer.”

“We were right behind you. You didn’t signal.”

“I assure you I did.”

Okay, I thought, so this is how it’s going to go. Like the old Marx Brothers line, Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

“Let me just get your license and registration,” I said. “And your insurance information.”

Franklin had called us in as “busy with a property damage accident, no injury.” Now he was taking care of the woman in the other car. It was my luck to have Mr. Happy here. He said a couple of half-audible things about the city of Detroit and then about women drivers, and I admit that made it a little easier to write him a ticket for improper lane change. He took that about as well as I thought he would, taking down my badge number and promising me I hadn’t heard the last of him.

The tow trucks finally came. By the time we had finished up all of the paperwork, most of our morning was done. Just another busy day in downtown Detroit.

When we were back in the car, I sat there shaking my head for a while. Franklin kept looking over at me.

“Nice guy, huh?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Every time somebody acts like that, you take it personally. It’s gonna eat you up, you know that.”

“I’m not taking it personally.”

“You’re just a badge to guys like that. You stand for something they need to get mad at.”

“I know, okay? Can we just move on?”

“Yeah, with you not talking for the next few hours. That’ll be fun.”

“You sound like my wife now.”

Franklin didn’t respond to that. Not at first. We just kept rolling down the street.

“I know we’ve talked about this before,” he finally said. “So there’s no use going over it again.”

Meaning that’s exactly what we were about to do. If the car had been going a little slower, I might have been tempted to jump out.

“Seriously,” he said, “you know this job is hard enough, even if everything is squared away at home.”

“I know. Believe me.”

Franklin and his wife had two young daughters. It all got to be a bit too much sometimes, and I’d hear him complain about it. But I knew he went home a happy man every night. Or day or afternoon, or whenever the hell our rotating shifts would end.

“Is Jeannie still going to school?”

“Yes,” I said. “She’s almost done.”

“So she’ll have her degree. In art history.”

Oh, we’re going to get the full platter today, I thought. Art history being to real areas of study as baseball is to real sports.

“I know I’ve kidded you about that before,” he said, surprising me, “but she’s just getting that paper, right? I get it. She wants to have a degree, finish what she started. Then go on to the next thing. I totally get it.”

“I’ll tell her you’re on board.”

He looked over at me.

“I’m trying to tell you something important,” he said. “Will you just cut it out and listen for a minute?”

“I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

“I know we work crazy schedules. I know we can bring the job home with us sometimes. No way around that. But you gotta work through that every single day and you gotta find each other. You know what I’m saying? Every day, Alex.”

“That’s hard to do when I don’t even see her.”

“So that’s why you call her. You set a time and you make it happen. Just see how her day is going, tell her you’re thinking about her. That’s all it takes.”

This was back before everybody had a cell phone. This was back when you had to find a phone connected to a wall and you maybe even had to drop some change into a slot before you could talk to somebody.

“You stop talking to your woman,” he said, “you’re halfway out the door.”

“She has an hour between classes today,” I said. “She’s usually in a lounge where I’ve called her before. So I’ll do that today, all right?”

“Don’t do it for me. Do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Okay.”

“Do it because I’m a smart man and I know what I’m talking about.”

I didn’t get a chance to answer that one. The sergeant came over the radio and asked if we had cruised by Roosevelt Park and the train station yet.

Franklin picked up the transmitter. “We’re on our way, Sergeant. We had to handle an accident.”

“Copy that.”

We cut west on Michigan Avenue, passing Tiger Stadium. There’d be an early game that day. A getaway Thursday game before a road trip. Some of the other cops from my precinct were already out there on the street, getting ready for the sudden heavy traffic and the crush of pedestrians. I nodded to a couple of them as we rolled past.

Then we turned down through Roosevelt Park, really just a flat open field with a few trees and walking paths around the perimeter. The park looked quiet, making me wonder what all the fuss was about. There were probably five hundred vials of crack changing hands all over the city at that moment, and here we were making sure no dogs were taking a dump on the grass.

We made the loop in front of Michigan Central Station, eighteen stories tall, maybe the most beautiful Beaux Arts building in the city. When I came here as a kid, the main waiting room was still open, with the arcade and the shops and the mezzanine and everything else. I’d look up at the high ceilings and think this was the fanciest place I’d ever seen. My father told me this used to be the heart of the city, people arriving on those trains from all over the country.

Now it was half closed down, with only a few Amtrak trains coming through every day. There was some talk about reopening the whole thing, making it look like it did in the glory days, but for now, it was just left hanging in limbo.

We were about to head back out when I noticed a car parked along a side street, just west of the station, by the redbrick church, almost hidden by the high weeds and sumac trees. We pulled up behind the car and hit our lights. I got out and kept an eye on the two male occupants in the front seat. Franklin looped behind me and took the passenger’s side. I went to the driver’s window and rapped on it.

The driver was white. Thirty-five, forty years old. He looked up at me with a mixture of fear, surprise, and feigned innocence. Like why on earth would you be bothering me when I’m sitting here in my car, minding my own business? It’s an expression I saw seven or eight times a week.

“Can I get some ID from you, sir?”

“What’s the problem, Officer? We’re just sitting here.”

“Did I say there’s a problem? I’d just like to see some ID, if that’s all right.”

The passenger was black. Franklin was asking him the same question, and it was obvious the passenger had been down this road before. He just sat there, shaking his head, like he was the most unlucky man in the city.

We got the two men out of the car and put them in handcuffs. The white man started shaking about then and asked me why he was being arrested.

“You’re not under arrest,” I told him. “We’re just doing this for your safety and ours.”

“But you don’t have probable cause, Officer. You’re violating my rights.”

I looked over at Franklin.

“You’re parked half in the weeds in a known drug-trafficking area,” Franklin said to him. “And I’m pretty sure this young man here isn’t giving you directions back to the suburbs.”

I searched the driver and came up empty, but Franklin started pulling little bags with white rocks out of one of the passenger’s pockets. He pulled a large wad of money out of the other.

“That’s not mine,” the man said. “I don’t know where that came from.”

“What, the crack? Or the money?”

“The money’s mine. I don’t even know what that other stuff is.”

“This is amazing,” Franklin said to me over the roof of the car. “Didn’t we just hear about the same thing happening the other day? Somebody going around slipping drugs into young men’s pockets? It’s like an epidemic around here.”

I asked the driver if I could take a quick look through his car. He said yes, and it came up clean. Nothing on his person, nothing in his car. It was turning out to be a very fortuitous day for him.

“So tell me the truth,” I said to him, getting close and looking him in the eye. “Were you just down here trying to buy some crack? Or was there something else going on?”

“Hey, hey,” the passenger said. “Don’t even be saying that now.”

“I hear this is the place for it,” Franklin said, “and you’re sitting in the man’s car. What else are we supposed to think?”

“I don’t go in for that kind of stuff, man. That’s blasphemy.”

“No, you just sell crack,” Franklin said as he started hauling him back to the car. “Right next to a church. That’s not blasphemy at all.”

“I’m sorry, officer,” the driver said to me. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure we both know exactly what you were thinking,” I said, “but I appreciate the honesty. If I let you drive away, am I ever going to see you back down here?”

“No, you’re not. I swear.”

“All right, get the hell out of here.”

He got back in his car and drove off. I rejoined my partner in our car. The young man in the backseat was smart enough not to say anything else. He just sat there looking out the window while we drove him back to the station. He looked like he was eighteen years old, maybe nineteen. He lived in a world I’d probably never understand. But he didn’t have to be hanging around the train station selling drugs to white men from the suburbs. He had a choice. Or at least, that’s what I had to tell myself to keep doing this job.

It was already past lunchtime when we got through processing our young dealer. I tried giving Jeannie a call, like I had promised Franklin, but I just missed her. Then I saw Detective Bateman walking down the hall, looking like he had a few more things to say about the basketball game. So I got the hell out of there and rejoined my partner in the car. My stomach was rumbling.

Franklin had this thing about “Coneys,” which were Detroit’s version of the Coney Island-style hot dog. There were a dozen different places around town that sold them. Now, I knew all about ex-football players and how they’d often put on too much weight once they stopped playing, but I’d long ago given up. Franklin was going to have his three dogs no matter what I said or did. The diet Faygo Redpop on the side just made the whole meal that much more ridiculous.

“Admit it,” he said. “A Coney sounds pretty damned good today. Am I right?”

“Doesn’t mean I’m going to eat one.”

“You don’t understand, Alex. On these short-shift days, you naturally crave comfort food. It would do you great emotional harm not to take care of yourself today.”

So of course we ended up at one of the stands on Woodward. Franklin had three. I had two. Principles be damned when you’re standing there and you haven’t eaten since an early breakfast and you’re smelling those grilled onions. When we were done we headed back out on the beat. Back by the stadium, where the game had started. We ended up talking to a man who was pretending to be a game-day parking attendant. He was out in the street, waving cars into a closed private lot, taking ten dollars from every car. When I questioned him, he stood his ground and lied to my face and kept lying even after we got the official confirmation from the lot owner. Yet another man telling me the sky was green. Something that would never stop amazing me.

We would have run him off with a warning, but there was real money involved and apparently this wasn’t the first time for him, so we ended up driving him back to the station and processing him. That meant more paperwork, another solid hour and a half in the station, hoping Detective Bateman didn’t find me.

Then finally back on the street. That was the afternoon. That’s every afternoon when you’re on the day shift. A whole lot of whatever happens next, and you never really know. I honestly don’t remember one other thing that happened, until it got close to four o’clock and we could see the end of the shift coming. Home for dinner, maybe a few words with my wife, making an effort. A night of sleep and maybe we’d all feel better the next day.

“Swing by Roosevelt Park one more time,” I said to Franklin. “Just for the hell of it.”

We were already halfway down Woodward Avenue again. Over the freeway and into the heart of the city, one more time before we called it a day. He made that same turn down that same road. The train station loomed above us. Here’s where time slows down for me. It stretches out like a long rubber band, and every single event is stretched out with it.

The whole place was quiet and deserted. Even more so than the first time we had come by. Not unusual, I guess. They see the cops taking someone away in a patrol car, that tends to put a damper on their business. For the rest of that afternoon, at least.

“Swing through the lot,” I said.

“This place is dead.”

“Just humor me.”

With a sigh he pulled hard on the wheel and circled the car back toward the lot. There were maybe thirty or forty cars there. Far from the salad days, but at least there was somebody still taking the trains. There was so much room in the lot, the cars were scattered all over the place. I didn’t see anybody in any of the cars. Franklin made one loop through the lot, taking us closer to the tracks.

That’s when I saw him.

A young man, black, jeans and a gray T-shirt. Black baseball cap. He was walking down the tracks, right at us.

I was out of the car before it even came to a complete stop. He saw me. He turned and ran in the opposite direction.

“Hey, hold up!” I yelled at him. “Stop right there.”

I took off after him. He spun his wheels for a moment in the gravel of the railroad bed, giving me the chance to close the distance. But he found purchase and started moving fast. His stride was ugly, but he stayed ahead of me.

“Stop!” I yelled. “Stop right there! Police!”

He glanced back at me for one quick instant. Then his right arm came out from his body. He threw something away from him. I couldn’t quite see what it was. Something not that big. A slight flash in the sunlight, maybe a clear plastic bag filled with crack. Big surprise, yet another dealer. At least that’s what I was thinking as I chased after him.

I knew that Franklin would be calling it in behind me. Another car would go down Bagley Street to intercept our runner. But then I realized that as we got farther from the station, there’d be fences on both sides of the tracks. Tall fences with razor wire curled along the tops. Meaning there’d be nowhere else for him to run except straight ahead.

“Don’t be an idiot!” I said. “It’s not worth it!”

Possession with intent, not the biggest rap in the world, and yet here he was adding an evading charge on top of it. Meaning I have to keep chasing you, no matter how much it’s killing me.

He was running along the railroad tracks now, somehow managing to hit the ties with each stride. One wrong step and he’d plant his face right on the hard iron of the tracks. I stayed behind him, concentrating on my own footing.

“Stop! Police! I will shoot!”

It was a lie, but worth trying. I was not going to shoot him in the back. If we’d had Tasers back then, I would have pulled mine from my belt and sent those two barbed hooks into him. With a range of thirty-five feet, then fifty thousand volts of electricity, it would have put him on the ground without, as they say, further incident.

But we didn’t have Tasers that year. We had guns and we had batons and we had our own bodies. So I put my head down and I kept chasing him. But I had a few years on him, and even though my old scouting report said, “Runs well,” that praise was quickly qualified with “for a catcher.” You squat down, then stand up a couple hundred times a day, each and every day for an entire season. Then you see how well you run.

The tracks took a slight curve to the right, then went under Bagley Street. I didn’t see any helpful backup sitting up there on the bridge. A siren and some flashing lights, and the knowledge that he couldn’t keep running down those tracks forever-that’s probably all it would have taken. Instead, I saw my suspect disappear into the darkness under the bridge.

When I finally got there myself, I was just about ready to collapse, but I kept moving down the rails, trying to be careful with my footing. Up ahead of me I saw the tracks straighten out and head right for the tunnel that went under the Detroit River, for miles and miles, all the way to Canada. For one horrible second I couldn’t help imagining this kid trying to make his escape that way, and then the single bright light from an oncoming train, suddenly bearing down on him. Or me if I was stupid enough to chase him down the tunnel.

I came out from the shade of the bridge, into the sudden glare of the sunlight. I didn’t see my suspect.

A movement to my left. I reached for my revolver out of pure instinct. But no, he was up against the abutment, where the fence met the bridge. The bottom corner was loose, and he was working himself through the opening.

“Stop!” I said, running to the spot, just in time to see him slip underneath, feet first. The ragged edge of the fence caught against his shirt, scraping his arm, tearing at his right sleeve. He scrambled to his feet, wincing and looking at his arm. There was a thin trickle of blood on his skin. He looked at me. That one second, the two of us seeing each other on opposite sides of a metal fence. He was close enough for me to see the color of his eyes. Close enough to see the Oakland Raiders logo on his black baseball hat. That close, yet a world apart. I pointed my revolver though the fence.

“Get on the ground! Right now! Or I’ll shoot!”

He stood there for another beat, a stone-cold look on his face. Then he turned and ran up the slope, onto Bagley Street. I didn’t shoot him in the back, much as I wanted to. I’ll be damned if anyone’s gonna make me run down the railroad tracks like a maniac, sweating and gasping and generally putting myself into near cardiac arrest. All on the short-shift day, no less.

I crouched down and pulled up the corner of the fence. I couldn’t imagine how he could get through there. I couldn’t imagine myself even trying. So instead I keyed the radio on my shoulder. I was breathing too hard to speak. I had to wait a moment before I finally got it out.

“Unit Forty-one,” I said, by way of identification. “I need two-eleven on a suspected dealer heading east on Bagley Street. Young black male, jeans, gray T-shirt, black Oakland Raiders baseball cap.”

I heard a few responses. Cars in the general area, heading closer for a look. Maybe they’d pick him up. Maybe not. It was up to them now.

I stood there with my hands on my knees for a while. When I was more or less functional again, I started walking back down the tracks. Under the bridge, then out into the daylight. I tried to remember exactly where he had thrown away whatever had been in his hand. I replayed the whole thing in my mind. Hand comes out, object in the air. There were two sets of tracks running parallel. I pictured the trajectory of the object, figuring it probably cleared the tracks closest to him, landing right around the near rail on the other side. So I crossed over and looked at the ground as I continued back to the station. When I got to what I thought was the approximate spot, I crouched down and duckwalked along the track, looking carefully. But I didn’t see anything. No clear Baggie with white rocks inside. Nothing but the gravel and the usual assortment of trash you find anywhere. Gum wrappers, cigarettes, rain-soaked pieces of paper.

Franklin was waiting about fifty yards down the tracks, talking into his radio. He shook his head as I came closer.

“Are you okay?”

“Why did I do that?” I asked him. “Some dumb kid with ten bucks’ worth of crack probably, and I gotta chase him a half mile down the railroad tracks? I could have tripped on one of those railroad ties and killed myself.”

“I’m kinda surprised you didn’t.”

“Nice backup we got there, too. One man standing on the bridge, that’s all we needed.”

Franklin smiled and looked away from me.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Did something funny happen here that I missed?”

“What, besides you running after that boy, like there was any chance in hell of you catching him?”

“So it wasn’t a complete loss, is what you’re saying. Because at least you were entertained.”

“Don’t you remember what we were saying earlier? About how all we needed to make the day complete was you chasing somebody, climbing a fence, throwing them into some garbage cans? Then complaining about how we’re too old for this?”

“Yeah, so? He went under the fence instead of over it. And I sure as hell didn’t catch him and throw him into any garbage cans.”

“Well,” he said, still smiling and shaking his head. “At least you can still say you’re too old for this. Go ahead.”

I didn’t bother. I walked back to the train station, already feeling the pain in my legs. I knew there’d be hell to pay the next morning.

“What was he doing back here?” Franklin said, looking up at the station. Eighteen empty floors, this whole back end of the station not used for anything. Not for years. The one corner of the station still open was on the opposite end. There was no reason to come down this far.

“You tell me,” I said. “Maybe he was meeting somebody back here.”

“I didn’t see anybody else. Did you?”

I shook my head, looking up at the windows high above me.

“I’m sure he wouldn’t be the first guy who broke into this place,” I said. “There’s probably copper wire and other stuff to steal.”

We went inside the door that led to the active part of the building and took a quick look around. There were a few customers waiting on wooden benches, but nobody had seen our suspect. So we went outside again.

We were heading to our car, but then on a whim I walked back down the tracks. There were high-arched windows all along this abandoned section of the station. I couldn’t see anything inside except darkness.

“What are you doing down there?” Franklin said.

“He could have been doing something over here,” I said. “He might have been coming out right around the time we saw him.”

“Why in hell would he do that? It’s deserted back here.”

A good question. The ground between the tracks and the building was nothing but weeds and trash and old train schedules. I walked toward the windows, keeping an eye out for snakes or God knows what.

Then I saw it.

“There’s a door over here!” I said.

“Is it open?”

“One way to find out.”

There was a rough path through the thick brush, leading to the door. I tried the handle. It didn’t turn, but I could see that the door was ajar. Taking one deep breath, I pulled it open and looked inside.

CHAPTER FIVE

All these years later, to see what this place had become. I parked as close I could, got out, and started walking down the sidewalk. Roosevelt Park was devoid of any life, save for a flock of birds roosting in one of the trees. The birds shuffled and murmured but did not fly away as I walked past.

Michigan Central Station loomed in the sky ahead of me. MCS. The MC Depot. Whatever you wanted to call it. It was half empty back in the day, back when it was part of my beat. Now it was gutted. It was violated. It was torn apart from the inside out. Every window was broken. I mean, eighteen stories high, hundreds of windows. Every single one broken.

There was a high Cyclone fence around the building. Through it I could see the graffiti and the litter, and in some places I could even see the sunlight from the other side of the building. It was the first time I had stood this close to the building since that other summer, all those years ago.

“What the hell,” I said out loud. I was looking at the shell of what was once a monument. A palace. And I was thinking of everything else I had seen that day. “How can a whole city come to this?”

There was something more, too. Besides what had happened to this place, this city. Something about the day itself. It was a low-level hum just starting in my head.

I walked down past the station, toward the river. The tracks still looked usable. I was sure the trains still came this way, emerging from under the river and roaring right past the old station. There would be no reason to stop here now. Or even to slow down.

I kept going on the other side of the razor-wire fence, past the big post office building with all the trucks lined up in the parking lot. A sign of life, at least. Some real business still being conducted. I ended up on Rosa Parks Boulevard, looking at yet one more long wreck of a building, a full block of shuttered windows and an old loading dock that hadn’t seen a truck in months or maybe years. The street side of the building was tagged with more graffiti. Already today I had seen so many combinations of spray-painted letters. There was a bridge with a battered rusty wreck of a fence on either side, and then the road curved east as it came up against the Detroit River. I kept walking.

I saw the five great towers of the Renaissance Center up ahead as I walked along the river. I could remember back when they built those towers, and of course I knew what the word “renaissance” meant to this city. If we could have looked forward to right now, would the whole idea have felt like a lie? Or was there still hope?

I looked at my watch. The sun was high, but it was pushing five o’clock. Time to get back to my truck. Maybe I’d have the chance to think about the big questions later, but right now it was time to have dinner with Agent Janet Long.

I met her at the FBI offices on Michigan Avenue. They owned one floor in McNamara Federal Building, along with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Secret Service. The DEA was right across the street.

I waited in the lobby for her. The elevator doors opened, and she came out chatting with another agent. It was her partner, Agent Fleury. I’d met them both at the same time, when they’d come up to my part of the state. Agent Fleury and I had gotten off to a rough start with each other, although I supposed we’d made our peace in the end. Still, there was probably little chance of me inviting him to join Janet and me for dinner.

She saw me and waved to me. She was wearing a dark blue skirt and jacket, with a white blouse. The standard uniform of a female FBI agent. As she came over to me, we both had this moment of sudden bewilderment. Like why are we both standing here as if we’re supposed to have anything to do with each other? She broke the spell by giving me a quick hug.

“You remember my partner,” she said. “Agent Fleury.”

“Nice to see you again,” he said, shaking my hand. He was younger than us. His suit was tailored. His hair was perfect. He reminded me a little of Detective Bateman, back in his prime.

He didn’t stick around for small talk. He wished us both a good evening, and then he left.

“You look good,” she said as soon as he was gone. “But you must be tired. It’s a long way from Paradise to Detroit.”

“In more ways than one.”

“I remember how you drive,” she said. “Still using that ex-cop with a bullet angle, huh?”

“It would be a shame not to.”

“So I thought we’d have dinner in Greektown. Does that sound all right?”

“That sounds perfect. You want me to drive?”

“This is downtown,” she said. “We’ll take the People Mover.”

We walked a block to the station on Cass Avenue. For fifty cents you can get on this raised monorail that makes a three-mile loop around downtown, stopping at Joe Louis Arena, the Renaissance Center, Greektown, a few other destinations. It’s slow as hell, but it gets the job done, and you don’t have to drive your car. Maybe even more importantly, you don’t have to park somewhere you might not feel that good about.

We hopped on the tram and stood there looking down as the streets passed below us. Everybody was getting off work in the financial district, and in the GM headquarters. Men with suits and briefcases were walking down the street, many of them joining us in the People Mover.

“It’s good to see all these people downtown,” I said. “You’d almost think the old city was doing okay.”

“It can feel that way some days,” she said. “Especially in the summer. Especially down here by the river.”

When we finally made it to the eastern side of the loop, we got out at Greektown and walked to the restaurant. We passed right by the Greektown Casino, one of the three casinos in the city now. Hard to even imagine back when I was on the police force, going the Atlantic City route and inviting everything else that comes with the gambling money. Yet here they were. I’m sure they were all doing decent business, but I couldn’t help thinking they were really just huge monuments to the city’s desperation. Once the greatest manufacturing center in the world. Now just a place where you can go to play the slot machines.

“This one was owned by your neighbors,” Janet said as she looked up at the bright lights on the Greektown Casino.

“It was,” I said, shaking my head. After the Bay Mills tribe started the ball rolling with the first Indian-run blackjack casino in the country, the Sault tribe over in Sault Ste. Marie jumped in with both feet, building the huge Kewadin Casino, and then eventually expanding their operations down here when Detroit passed the new gaming law. Not a year later, the Gaming Board took the casino away from them and gave it to a new group of investors. You can still guarantee yourself an interesting conversation by walking into any bar or restaurant in Sault Ste. Marie, finding a Sault member, and asking him what he thinks of the tribal leaders who let that happen.

The restaurant was just down the street from the casino. A Greek place, believe it or not. We got a table upstairs, and Janet ordered us some wine.

“This is on me,” I said.

“Think again, mister. You’re the one who drove all the way down here.”

We put that fight off for later. I sat there and drank my wine and looked at her. There was a calmness to her face that I had found appealing from the first moment I had seen her. She was up in the UP, trying to solve what would turn out to be multiple murders, going back years. Yet there was always this air of self-assurance about her.

I liked her hair, too. The way it framed her face.

“Remind me again,” I said. “How old are you?”

She laughed at that one. “Is that your opening line on all your dates?”

“So this is a date, you’re saying.”

She shook her head, but she was smiling. “God, we really don’t know each other very well, do we?”

“We never got the chance. We were both so preoccupied when you were up there. Then you had to go.”

“Yeah, I made you promise to come down and take me to dinner,” she said. “I have to admit, I was starting to think you never would.”

“I’m sorry. I should have come down sooner.”

“So why now?”

“One of the last collars I made when I was down here,” I said. “Right before… I mean right before I left the force… It was a homicide over in the old train station.”

“You’re the one who caught him?”

“Eventually. I ID’d him, anyway. Was there when he was finally arrested. He’s getting out this week, so I got the courtesy call. Not that I think in a million years that he’ll be coming for me.”

“Then why did you need to come down here?”

“I got talking to the old sergeant,” I said. “He said I should come down and see the place. So I figured what the hell.”

“Ah, so it wasn’t just to see me.” She had a little smile on her face as she said it.

“A few reasons put together,” I said. “Just call it that. Keeping my promise was the best reason of all.”

She looked over her wineglass at me, like she wasn’t quite buying it.

“I spent a few hours driving around today,” I said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

“I know. It’s not like I spend a lot of time in the neighborhoods, but…”

“Why are they all leaving, Janet? It’s turning into a ghost town.”

“Well, I’ve worked on more than a few corruption cases,” she said. “Not that Detroit is the only city where it happens, but you’d be amazed. We seem to have elevated it to an art form.”

“But that can’t be the only reason.”

“The city is broke, Alex. I mean, absolutely flat-out busted. They can’t even keep all the streetlights on anymore. They can’t run the buses. They want everybody to pick up and move closer together, basically cut the size of the city in half.”

“And do what with the rest?”

“Hell if I know. Urban farming? Just let it go wild? Some of the city’s half wild already.”

“Yeah, I heard about the bears living in the abandoned buildings.”

“I think that’s just an urban legend.”

“Oh, really? It seemed like such a good deal for the bears.”

“Just the fact that it sounds almost believable,” she said. “That we’d really have that many empty buildings and so much open space…”

“I can’t believe how many burnt-out houses I saw today. That’s one thing we always had to deal with. But then they’d come through the next week and knock them all down. Sometimes even rebuild.”

“They don’t need people to set fires anymore,” she said, looking out the window, like she could take it all in from where we were sitting. “The city is burning itself down.”

“How do you mean?”

“In the summertime, when it’s dry… Sometimes the power lines will come down and start fires. There was one day a couple of years ago, you couldn’t even walk down the street without choking on it. There were hundreds of houses burning down all at once.”

“All right, we have to stop talking like this,” I said. “There must be something good going on around here.”

“The Tigers have a nice new stadium.”

“Oh, don’t get me started on that. I don’t care how beautiful Comerica Park is…”

“It’s not Tiger Stadium. I know. I grew up here, too, remember?”

We drank a toast to Tiger Stadium. Then to the old Olympia Stadium, the redbrick building where Gordie Howe and the Red Wings once played. We toasted the Bob-Lo Boat that took kids down the Detroit River. We toasted Vernors Ginger Ale, back when it was as strong as rocket fuel. We toasted Greenfield Village and the automobile shows that would bring classic cars and hot rods from all over the world coming back home to the Motor City, to cruise up and down the streets all day long and into the night, while thousands of people gathered along the sidewalks and parking lots to barbecue and drink beer and argue about which cars were the best.

We had our dinner. We eventually got around to talking about our past relationships. It turned out we were both married once, something else I didn’t know about her. We started getting closer to the present, and to the unspoken question about what might still happen between the two of us. Even that very night.

“You live really far away,” she said as we had our dessert. “You’re aware of that, right?”

“Yes, I am.”

“It would be next to impossible to do much else besides what we’re doing right now.”

“If we both stay where we are, yes.”

“This is nice, though. I’m glad you came down.”

“I’m glad, too.”

“But tell me the truth,” she said, looking me in the eye. “Why are you really here?”

I had the same two or three answers I’d already given her. I didn’t have the one single answer that would really satisfy both of us.

In the end, after we battled over the bill and finally ended up splitting it, we got up and walked outside and into the night. We didn’t go into the casino. We just walked down the sidewalk, back to the People Mover. Back to her car and to my truck. She hugged me and gave me a quick kiss. Nobody said a word about us spending the night together, and I have to believe that maybe we were both a little relieved that it never came up. I promised her that I’d see her again soon.

She hesitated as she opened her car door. “Are you sure you’re not thinking about moving back down here? Somewhere we could see each other more than once or twice a year?”

“Well,” I said, “let’s just say I now have one more good reason to do that.”

She came back to me and gave me another kiss.

“You’re damned right you do.”

Then she got in her car and she drove home.

I stood there under the streetlight for a while. Then I got in my truck and drove down Michigan Avenue. A police car cut in front of me, lights and siren going, and for one second my old instincts told me to follow the car so I could help out. It was these same streets, after all. For eight years I had done this.

I turned off into a parking lot next to the first bar I saw. It was just a concrete box, as far away from the Glasgow Inn as you could imagine, but it was all I needed that night. I sat at the bar with a double Scotch and looked at my own face in the mirror.

You will always be alone, I told myself. That’s just the way it is.

When I finally left that place, I knew it had been too long a day, with a little bit too much to drink, for a five-hour drive back home. I’d thrown a toothbrush and a few things into a bag, not making any kind of plan, just being ready for whatever happened. I drove a few blocks down to the little motel on Michigan Avenue where once upon a time you could open the drapes and look down the street at the gray walls of the stadium. The stadium was gone now, as I kept proving to myself every time I drove by it that day, still surprising myself every time. But the little motel was still there and now I suppose it was officially the most forlorn place in the world, with no special view from your window to set it apart.

I checked in for one night. I lay on the bed for exactly two minutes, listening to another police car’s siren in the distance. Then I got back up and went out to the truck. There was no way I’d be able to sleep.

I got in the truck and drove around the city. One more time, just to see it again. What it had become.

I went to the train station. Of course I did. I parked in the same place, got out, and walked down the same sidewalk, stood on the same piece of cracked pavement and looked up at all of the broken windows. How unnatural for there to be no lights on inside at all, not one single light in an eighteen-floor building.

Something horrible happened here, I thought, and I never really got the time to process it. I never understood it or made my peace with it, because just a month later, in that very same summer, something else happened that obliterated my entire life.

So now that I was here again, standing in this very spot where that first thing happened… It was like I finally had the chance to make some sense of it, all these years later.

I was feeling that hum again. Louder this time.

Something is not right. That’s the thing that came to me. Something is not adding up for me. Not then. Not now. Not ever.

This is why you came all the way down here, Alex. This thing that you knew deep down but could only start to put words to when you got the chance to stand here in the dark, in this exact moment.

This is why you’re here.

CHAPTER SIX

The first thing that hit me was the smell of urine mixed with sweat mixed with a dead animal or two mixed with God knows what else. It should have just been the musty stale air of a place locked up tight, but obviously someone had found the way in and a few others had followed.

It was a small vestibule in this empty corner of the train station, with a half-dozen stairs littered with cigarette butts and trash, leading up to an old waiting room. There, the big arched windows looked out over the tracks. The glass was streaked with grime, and as I turned to look around at the rest of the room, I saw all of the chairs pushed together, covered with sheets. There was an elaborate chandelier hanging from the ceiling, ringed with cobwebs. There was enough daylight coming through the windows that I could see halfway into the room, but then it all turned to darkness.

“Anybody in here?”

I took my gun out, because that’s what a cop does when he doesn’t know who might be waiting and watching.

“It’s okay if you are. I’m just looking around. If there’s anybody here, you can come out.”

I felt a low rumbling then. In the floor, coming up through my bones. Then the sound. A train was coming. I looked out the window and watched it go by. A freight train. It wasn’t stopping here at the station for any of the few passengers that were waiting. It was going southeast, toward the long tunnel that ran under the river, to Canada.

I took the flashlight off my belt and turned it on. In the dark side of the room, it showed more furniture covered with sheets. Nothing moved.

My radio squawked, startling the hell out of me. “Alex, what are you doing in there?” My partner.

“Just taking a quick look. I don’t see anybody in here right now. Doesn’t mean they’re not hiding.”

I shined my flashlight on the dusty floor. I could see my own fresh footprints. Then just a few feet away, was that another set? I crouched down low to the floor and directed the light at an angle. Athletic shoes, a little smaller than mine. There seemed to be one set of the same prints going into the room, another set going back out. That made sense. Somebody came in here and then left. That somebody was probably the kid I tried to chase down.

The incoming tracks led to another staircase. As I went closer, I had a perfect angle to see the various footprints on the treads. There were many different pairs of shoes going up and down these stairs. Some recently. Some not so recently. For a part of the station that was supposedly closed to the public, this was a surprisingly popular destination.

The perfect place for a drug deal, I thought. The perfect place to shoot up or smoke. Or the perfect place to meet up with one of the young male hustlers who hang out across the street in the park.

I started up the steps. Stone, maybe even marble, back when buildings were made to last a thousand years. I came to the landing, made the turn, went all the way up to the next level. I was standing on a balcony overlooking the waiting room. The windows cast oblong rectangles of light across the tiled floor. I went to the railing and looked down. Then I turned.

It took me a moment to process what I was looking at. In the corner. Right behind me. I saw the blood first, so dark in the shadows it was like a black void. The body was half sitting, half lying against the wall, the neck at an unnatural angle.

It was a woman. Her eyes were open. She was staring right at me from the other side of death.

I remembered how to breathe. I remembered how to speak as I keyed the radio on my shoulder.

“Code three, code three,” I said. “This is Unit Forty-one at Michigan Central Station. I have a one-eight-seven here. All nearby units respond.”

A moment of crackling radio silence. Then a voice.

“Where are you, Forty-one?”

“Around the back of the building. One female victim. Suspect as previously reported, a young black male, last seen proceeding east on Bagley Street. Repeat, young black male, proceeding east on Bagley Street. Jeans, gray shirt, black Oakland Raiders baseball hat.”

“Wait, this is the same suspect as before? Your call from a few minutes ago?”

“Affirmative. Same suspect.”

I could just imagine the confusion I was causing, how many partners were turning to look at each other, shaking their heads, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. I was already moving away from the body, back down those stairs, staying to the very edge to preserve the footprints. I went back out the same door I had come in, into the sunlight. Franklin was waiting there on the tracks.

“She’s on the second-floor balcony,” I said. “Stay here and show them where the door is. I’m going to go find my suspect.”

“Alex, wait! He’s long gone by now!”

“Yeah, probably,” I said over my shoulder, “but I’m the only one who saw his face.”

It was a purely instinctive reaction, to get back to that car, to get behind the wheel, crank that engine, take off out of that parking lot and onto the streets. He had been right there in front of me. I had just missed catching him, and then, when he was standing on the other side of that fence, I had looked right into his eyes. I had my gun drawn. I had aimed it right at his chest, then at the center of his back as he turned to run away. I could have shot him down right then.

No, don’t go there, I told myself. There’ll be plenty of time to second-guess yourself later.

I heard the sirens as I pulled out onto the street. I circled the station and hit Bagley Street. How many minutes had passed since he’d come up from the tracks?

Too many. He could have covered a lot of ground by now. But I needed to give this a shot.

I tried to put myself in his shoes. Running down this street, a long straightaway. I’m thinking I switch streets as soon as possible. Next intersection is Vermont. To the right is back to the tracks, so left.

I took the turn. I was heading north now. But now I was heading back close to the station, so another jog to the right, onto Marantette. Dead end at Rosa Parks, jog left, but stay off this main road, so jog right again.

Now I was in Corktown, the old Irish neighborhood. It felt like a mistake now, as I gunned it down Church Street, lights flashing, siren off, residents out on their porches, watching me go by. A young black man wouldn’t run down this street if he had others to choose from. I slowed down as I came up to Trumbull.

Then I saw him. Or at least I thought I did. A young man running. The right size, the right jeans and gray shirt. No black hat, but then losing the hat would be the smart play. He was heading north, moving fast. I made the left on Trumbull and tried to keep my eye on him as I came to Michigan Avenue.

Then I stopped dead at the police barricade.

The Tigers game had ended. All of the people filing out of the stadium clogged the streets. I picked up my transmitter.

“Suspect heading north on Trumbull, just past the stadium. Jeans, gray shirt, no black hat now. All units in the area, please respond.”

The officers working the intersection spotted me and did their best to hold off the crowds for a moment. The barricade was moved and I made my way through. But now I had lost sight of him.

“Okay,” I said out loud, “you see me coming after you. So do me a favor and try something stupid. Make a break for it. And if you’re gonna turn off this street, go right.”

I knew that would be a dead end for him no matter which street he took. Everything ended when it came up to the Lodge Freeway.

But now that I was north of the stadium, I was starting to hit the traffic. Everybody walking back to their cars, many of them parked in lots up and down this street. I still had my lights flashing, but when the streets are full enough, there’s just nowhere for the cars to pull over.

I picked up my transmitter again. “I’ve lost touch with the suspect, last seen heading north on Trumbull. Any luck out there?”

An agonizing silence, as I hoped against hope that he was already being arrested by another unit. I pictured the handcuffs slapped on his wrists, a hand on his head as he was put into the back of the squad car.

Answer me, damn it. Somebody out there. Say something.

“Negative so far,” I finally heard someone say. “No sight of him.”

The cars were lining up to get off the street and onto the freeway. I pulled my car over and got out, locking it and leaving the lights flashing. There were thousands of people on the sidewalk, walking away from the stadium. I started running through them, looking down every side street. Until finally, there, up ahead, a young man’s face looking back, then turning away.

I keyed my shoulder radio. “I’m on foot now, in pursuit of suspect. Still on Trumbull, passing over I-75. I need a unit on the other side to intercept. Repeat, I need a unit on the north end of the street as it crosses over I-75.”

We’ll catch you, I thought. As long as the unit gets there in time, you’ll have nowhere to turn.

I kept pushing my way through the crowds as the street and the sidewalk took the long span over the freeway, cars zooming by beneath us. I didn’t see him, but I knew he had to be there in front of me.

“Come on,” I said out loud, panting as I ran. “Somebody get to the other end so we can head him off.”

That’s all I was thinking about. That’s probably all I could think about and still stay functional. I couldn’t let my mind go back to that scene in the train station. I kept moving, kept watching for my suspect, and kept hoping we’d catch him so that at least one thing in the world would make sense tonight.

Halfway over the bridge now, which seemed to go on forever. Police lights ahead of me, finally flashing on the other side. Two cars, then three. Blocking off Trumbull now, not just the cars but a great mass of people backed up on the sidewalk going north. I ran between the cars, and as I finally got close to the other side I saw a figure assuming the position against the side of a squad car. Jeans, gray shirt, legs kicked out, hands on the hood. An officer on either side, going through the guy’s pockets. Something being taken out and put on the hood. The handcuffs being slapped on and the young man put in the back of the car. Just as I had hoped would happen.

I slowed down to a walk, tried to catch my breath. The scene in the station already coming back to me, fighting its way back into my head now that the chase was over. The process would begin now. The booking, the arraignment, the visit from the public defender. It would take weeks to get to the end of it. Maybe months. But it wouldn’t change what had happened. It wouldn’t undo the violence or bring back a woman who didn’t deserve to be left for dead in the dusty corner of an abandoned balcony.

I’d probably never understand why it happened, but I’d have the rest of my life to think about it. For right now, I just had to finish my day’s work. Go up and thank my fellow officers for the assist on the collar. Take a look at the suspect and confirm he was the same person I saw running from the train station. Then go back and get my vehicle. Find Franklin, make sure the crime scene was secure. Wait for the specialists to arrive, and be glad that part of the operation isn’t my job. Go home, maybe get drunk. It sounded like the right kind of night for it.

A sergeant approached me. Not Sergeant Grimaldi, but another man from another squad. He was probably on his way in for the afternoon shift when he heard the call, and he was close enough to be the first supervising officer on the scene.

“I’m Sergeant Schuman,” he said, shaking my hand. “I believe we’ve met before. You okay?”

I nodded. I still didn’t quite have my voice back yet.

“We’ve got a Ronald Jefferson in the backseat,” he said, looking at the driver’s license in his hand. “We found a few rocks and a fair amount of money on him as well.”

I looked over and saw the evidence on the hood of the vehicle. A handful of small Baggies, each one containing a marble-sized chunk of white powder. Next to that was a thick roll of currency.

“Wait a minute,” I said, going over to the vehicle. “Why would he still have this on him? I saw him throw something on the tracks.”

“Maybe he didn’t have time to get rid of it.”

“He did,” I said, thinking back to the sight of him standing on the other side of that fence. The look of utter calm on his face when he realized I couldn’t catch him. “He had all the time in the world. For that matter, why even bother throwing away drugs if he just killed somebody? Unless it was something else entirely…”

I think I already knew what I was going to find when I opened the back door to that squad car. A two-bit dealer who just so happened to be wearing jeans and a gray shirt that day.

I opened the door. I grabbed the kid and turned his face to me.

“Hey, what are you doing, man?” Attitude all the way, even now that he was in handcuffs. Especially now that he was in handcuffs.

He was around the same age, same build, and wearing, as I had already figured out, the same clothes. Although this kid’s shirt was a slightly different shade of gray now that I looked at it. And he didn’t have a torn sleeve like my suspect.

I let go of him. I slammed the door shut.

“It’s not him,” I said.

“McKnight,” the sergeant said, “are you sure?”

“I’m sure. It’s not him.”

“Then where the hell is he?”

I took a quick scan through the other people still milling around on the sidewalk. Then I came back to the car and looked north, up the street. It went up to Pine and Spruce and Perry and a dozen other side streets. He must have gotten across before these cops closed off the bridge.

“He could be anywhere by now,” I said. “Pretty much goddamned anywhere.”

“Come on,” the sergeant said. “Get in my car.”

I got in the passenger’s seat. He flipped on his lights and headed north on Trumbull.

“Give me a guess here,” he said. “Use your gut instinct and tell me where he went.”

It was useless. There were blocks and blocks of houses on either side of the street. If we turned down one street we’d see another block and then another intersection. Right, left, or straight, it would just be more of the same. The whole west side of Detroit, all those brick houses lined up in rows. He could have been in any one of them.

“Keep looking,” the sergeant said. “But tell me what happened.”

I gave him the basic facts. Seeing the young man on the tracks, chasing him when he fled, his escape through the fence.

“You called for backup then,” the sergeant said.

“Yes, but at that point it was just trespassing, then evading. I had no idea that…” I didn’t finish the sentence.

The sergeant shook his head, but before he could say anything the radio squawked, looking for Unit Forty-one. The sergeant picked up the transmitter.

“I’ve got him right here,” he said. “I’ll bring him back to the scene.”

He put the transmitter back and swung the car south at the next intersection.

“You’re the only one who saw this guy. Am I right?”

“I’m the only one who got a good look at his face,” I said, looking out the window as we raced back to the train station.

“Sounds like you’re going to be a very popular man.”

There were a dozen cars at the train station. Our car was one of them. Franklin must have been sent to retrieve it. It was going on six o’clock now, two hours past my shift. I knew my night was far from over.

I took a deep breath as I got out of the sergeant’s car. I thanked him. He was officially on duty now, so he stuck around to help coordinate.

There was a train stopped at the station, the air brakes hissing. I saw Detective Arnie Bateman waving me over. After all the time I’d spent avoiding him that day, this was real business, and I knew he’d be right in the middle of it.

“This is the five forty-five Amtrak,” he said as soon as I was in earshot. “We held it up to ask the passengers if they saw anything while they were waiting.”

“Yeah, we did a quick pass through the waiting room,” I said. “I don’t think our suspect ever went in there.”

“You might want to take a quick look through the train yourself, before we let it go. I mean, you never know, right? Maybe he’s on board right now. We’ve caught dumber criminals.”

“Last I saw him, he was running away. I can’t see why he’d double back.”

“Just humor me, all right? Maybe you saw someone else. An accomplice or something. Maybe seeing him will jog your memory.”

I knew it was beyond a long shot, but I got on board anyway. I walked down the aisle of every car, giving everyone the once-over. Some of the passengers were clearly annoyed to be kept waiting. One of them actually stood up and asked me when the train would finally be moving. He was wearing a suit, and he reminded me of the man who had wrecked his Saab earlier that day, his time and convenience clearly being more important than anything else. God, how long ago it seemed now, just a routine accident on a day that started out so normal. Now I had this man in my face and I felt like taking him off the train, into the station, up to that abandoned balcony. Here’s your reason, you pompous jackass. Now go back to your seat and sit the hell down.

When I got off the train, having looked at every face, it slowly pulled away from the station. It was heading west. First stop maybe Ann Arbor, then on to Chicago.

“Okay, so now that we’ve got that out of the way,” the detective said, “tell me exactly what you saw.”

We were standing outside between the station and the tracks. He looked just as fresh and energetic as he had that morning at roll call, but the man who had come looking for basketball players, the man my partner and I had both made fun of, was long gone. The sun was low in the sky, and I swear that gold shield on his belt was practically glowing.

“Because the last I heard,” he said, not even bothering to let me start explaining, “you were asking for two-eleven on a suspected drug dealer running away from here. Then a few minutes later… we’ve got this poor woman on the floor upstairs?”

“Have you identified her?”

“Yes,” he said, taking a step back. “Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. The victim’s name is Elana Paige. She was… Well, you saw the crime scene.”

“Multiple stab wounds?”

He shook his head. “From what I’m hearing, way beyond multiple. Somebody just stabbed her and stabbed her. God knows how many times.”

“What else do we know about her?”

“Twenty-eight years old, married, no kids. Lives in Farmington Hills. Not employed at the moment, but she’s taking classes at Wayne State.”

Out of everything he was saying, that’s the one thing that stopped me short.

“My wife is taking classes at Wayne State,” I said. “They might even know each other.”

“I suppose that’s possible. Although it is a big school.”

“I know. I’m just saying.”

“It does bring it home, yes. This woman could have been from anyone’s family. Yours, mine…”

“Any idea why she was here?”

“Not yet. We’re contacting the husband right now.”

I walked away from him. It was getting harder and harder to keep the scene out of my head. Now I was imagining being the husband, too. Hearing that knock on my door, opening it up and seeing two police officers.

“So tell me,” Bateman said. “How did you end up checking out that balcony?”

“I was coming back and I saw the open door. I thought it was worth investigating.”

He walked down the tracks to the far end of the station. The door was propped open now. I could see the sudden bursts of flashbulbs from inside. The crime scene unit was up there, doing their work.

“That door right there,” he said. “You’re saying you didn’t actually see him coming out of the building?”

“No. Like I said, he was on the tracks.”

He stood there looking at the door, then down the tracks, then back at me.

“I didn’t know it went down that way,” he said. “I’m sorry if it sounded like I was trying to find fault. Under the circumstances, if you really didn’t have any knowledge of the suspect being in the building…”

“It’s all right, Detective. It’s a tough day for everyone.”

“This whole back end of the building is abandoned, anyway. How could you have even known? I mean, how did you even think of trying that door?”

“It was just a hunch.”

“Okay,” he said, nodding like he was deep in thought, his mind already racing ahead to something else. “That’s good. But go back to that first pursuit. He goes east down these tracks, right? You were calling for backup at Bagley Street?”

“That’s right. I saw him throw something. I assumed it was a bag of crack.”

He rubbed his chin. “But that would take him back to being just a dealer,” he said. “Why throw away a few dollars of crack if you just killed somebody?”

“In hindsight, it doesn’t make much sense.”

“Hell, maybe this kid isn’t our killer after all. Maybe he just happened to be here at the wrong time, huh?”

“It’s possible.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t throwing away a knife?”

I played the scene back in my head. “I don’t know exactly what he threw away,” I said, “but a knife I would have recognized. This was something smaller. I didn’t even really see it once it left his hand.”

“Show me where that happened,” he said. “Whatever it was, we should try to find it.”

I walked with him, retracing my steps along the railroad tracks. I tried to remember when he had thrown the object, but there weren’t any good landmarks to measure how far down we had gotten. It was, after all, just unbroken lines of metal with identical ties at regular intervals.

“It’s gotta be around here,” I said, slowing down. “I can’t be sure exactly. I could be off by a few yards either way.”

Detective Bateman was already scanning the ground.

“Which way did he throw it?”

“He was running in this direction.” I was thinking back again, trying hard to re-create every detail in my mind. “He threw with his right hand, toward the other tracks.”

The detective stepped over the tracks, to the second set running parallel.

“Did he make it this far? To the other tracks?”

“I’m going to say yes. I’m pretty sure he did.”

We were inside the fenced-off part of the track now, about twenty feet wide. There was the rough gravel at the base, then the railroad ties, then the tracks on top. The detective was walking right down the center of the rightmost tracks, looking closely at every inch of the ground.

“I don’t imagine anybody else got back here to pick up whatever it was,” he said. “Not with this fence and all. But if another train came by…”

“It did,” I said. “I just remembered.”

He looked up at me.

“When I was in the building. A train came by. It didn’t stop.”

“A freight train?”

“Yes.”

“Heading in which direction?”

“Into the tunnel. To Canada.”

“So on these tracks,” he said, looking back down at the ground. “If it was something light, it could have been blown God knows where. Right through the fence even.”

He kept looking for another few minutes. Then he pulled the radio off his belt.

“I need some officers down the tracks,” he said. “While we’re at it, can we get the train traffic held up until further notice? I don’t need anybody getting run over here.”

An hour later, we were still out on the tracks. There were eight officers, including Franklin, Detective Bateman, and myself. It’s exhausting work, bending down low enough to see the ground, tossing aside the random trash and hoping for something significant. Every few minutes I’d stand up and stretch my back. I’d look down the tracks and see the crime unit specialists going in and out of the building. They still hadn’t brought out the body.

It was Michigan and it was June, so that meant light until at least nine o’clock. But the sun was getting lower and everything was losing its bright focus. I decided to walk back to the station and to re-create the whole chase scene one more time, second by second, hoping to pinpoint exactly where we were when he threw away the object.

The detective watched me. I went to the exact spot where I had first seen my suspect. Hey, hold up. Stop right there. The kid turns and runs. Stop. Stop right there. Police.

I’m running after him now. My gun, my flashlight, everything on my belt bouncing up and down as I make my way down the tracks. He’s opening up a lead. Don’t be an idiot. It’s not worth it.

No, wait. I hadn’t said that yet. He had already thrown the object. Like right around… Here.

I stopped a good twenty yards short of my fellow officers and peered at the ground.

“Do we need to shift back?” Bateman said.

“Yes,” I said without looking back. “I think we were looking too far down the tracks.”

The officers moved closer to me. I glanced up and saw Franklin limping, one hand holding his back as he bent over again. I felt bad for him, but I wasn’t about to stop him. The best way to make it easier for everyone would be to just find the goddamned thing the kid threw away.

The detective picked up his radio and listened to it. He said a few words, then returned the radio to his belt.

“The family is on their way down,” he said to me. “I need to be there to let them know what’s going on. If the crime scene is done, they’ll be bringing the body over for identification, too.”

He stopped, closed his eyes, and rubbed his forehead.

“These are the worst days,” he said. “Makes me wonder why I ever became a cop.”

“Tell them we’ll find him,” I said. “No matter what it takes.”

He looked at me. “You know I can’t promise that. Half the time, we don’t.”

“This time we will,” I said. “I’ll personally go through every face in the city until we find him.”

He let out a breath. “I like your attitude, McKnight. But we still can’t even put him inside the station, let alone identify him.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. Not for the first time in my life, I only had a gut feeling and nothing else.

“I have to get back to the precinct,” he said. “If you find something, bring it right over, okay?”

That’s how he left me. I was down on my hands and knees now, moving along the far set of railroad tracks. I figured I only had a few more minutes before the light went. I didn’t want to have to come back and do this again the next day.

“Alex,” Franklin said, a few feet away, “we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

“We’ll know when we see it,” I said. “I know we will.”

He stood up and rubbed his bad knee. I kept looking through the rough gravel bed between the railroad ties.

“She was going to Wayne State,” I finally said to him. “Just like Jeannie.”

Franklin didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t have to. He bent back over and kept looking at the ground.

A few minutes later, I grabbed on to the hard metal of the railroad tracks. I dropped my head in frustration.

“I think we’re about done for tonight,” Franklin said. “We can get right back out here tomorrow morning.”

He was right. The sun was too low now. I picked my head up, and as I did, I saw the tiniest flash of light. Probably just a piece of glass or something, but I looked closer. I sifted through the gravel, brushing aside one small gray rock after another.

Then I saw it.

Among the other rocks, pebbles, dirt, sand, cinder, slivers of glass, and all the other small things that by the million make up a railroad bed, that one little stone that stood out from all of the others.

A diamond.

It was just inside the farthest rail, midway between two ties. It had settled into the bed, so I had to get down close to the ground, like an archaeologist brushing away the debris from an ancient artifact. I brushed and I blew my breath on the stones and eventually I found another diamond. Then another. Then finally, against the track itself, I found a long golden strand with several more diamonds still intact. The clasp was broken.

This is what he threw away, I thought. This is what I saw flashing in the sunlight. This is what puts him in that station.

I didn’t touch it. I called out to Franklin to go grab an evidence bag. As I waited, I keyed on my shoulder radio.

“Unit Forty-one at the train station,” I said. “Please pass along a message to Detective Bateman. Tell him I found what we were looking for.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was a warm morning. I was sitting on a folding lawn chair on the walkway outside my motel room, watching the traffic going by on Michigan Avenue. Across the street there was a softball game going on in the field where Tiger Stadium once stood.

I took out my cell phone, which was out of date and only occasionally functional. Like myself, I guess. I dialed the number for Sergeant Grimaldi. I’d seen him the day before, of course, but since then I’d seen the train station, gone to dinner with Janet, then seen the station one more time. So by this morning I was in a different state of mind.

The call went to his voice mail.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” I said. “I mean Tony. I just wanted to thank you again for the drink yesterday. Also, I had something on my mind I wanted to ask you about. I’d appreciate it if you could give me a call back.”

I ended the call. Just in time for a big truck to rumble by on Michigan Avenue, so loud I wouldn’t have been able to hear his voice anyway, even if he had answered.

“Okay, now what?” I asked myself when the truck was a block past me. “I can sit here and wait for him to call me back…”

Or what else? I could go back to the train station, stand there and feel that same buzzing I had felt the night before. That feeling that there was something important that I was missing. That I had been missing for years.

Or I could just go home. Leave right away and be back for a late lunch at Jackie’s place. Some of his world-famous beef stew, maybe. With a real Canadian Molson. There were worse ways to spend an afternoon.

Or I could even call Janet. Thank her for having dinner with me, maybe answer her question about whether I’d ever consider moving down here again. Not that I knew what that answer would be.

In the end, I chose none of the above. I checked out of the motel, threw my bag in the truck, and started driving around the city again. I was seeing it in the morning hours now, when every able-bodied person past school age should be at work. But I knew the unemployment rate for black males was hovering around fifty percent here. A staggering number of men without jobs. A good position in an auto plant was just a dim memory, and even a job sweeping a floor for minimum wage was all but impossible to find.

There were young men hanging out on the streets, some of them eyeing me like it was a personal affront for me to be there. I stared back at them, an old cop habit that I’d never get over, and I kept driving around. I was still on the west side of Detroit. I was staying on the secondary streets, avoiding the highways. You get on I-94 and you just zip right through everything, from one end of Detroit to the other, without really seeing any of the city itself.

Eventually, I found myself going down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. This had been such an important street for us, back in that month when we were searching for our suspect. On paper, this had seemed like the northern limit to how far a young man would reasonably run that night. It was dense on either side of the street with apartment buildings. How many man-hours we had spent, knocking on every single door.

I turned south on Wabash, not really thinking about where I was going, just circling through this part of town like a goldfish in a bowl. To the east, the Motor City Casino towered over everything else in this part of town. A strange sight I’d never get used to. I turned my attention back to the road ahead.

Then I saw Ash Street. I stopped dead at the intersection.

Ash Street. I’d been driving around for an hour, not even thinking consciously about where I’d end up. But here I was.

I made the turn. There had been a grocery store on the corner of Fourteenth Street. The building was boarded up, the brick walls tagged with graffiti. A sign in front announced that the building was FOR RENT. As if anyone would see any reason to open a business here now, even if the rent was a dollar a month.

The next block was empty. Not a single building. I thought back and remembered that a few houses had been here once. Now it was just weeds and sumac. Even the sidewalk was almost completely hidden.

There’d been a fire here, on this block. That was a sure bet. A fire right here on Ash Street. It was supposedly just another tree-named street, like Elm and Spruce and Butternut, but no, Ash Street in this particular city meant something else entirely.

I drove one more block, to where an elementary school had been. The playground was still there, and so was the building itself, but the windows were all boarded over. The side of the building was tagged with graffiti, as huge and as elaborate as any I’d seen all morning. An elementary school, the heart of a neighborhood, come to this.

One more block, more vacant lots, an old boat somehow left there on the corner and filled with tires. A neighborhood watch sign, like a cruel joke.

Then finally, the block just past Seventeenth Street. There was one house on the north side of the street now. One single house. Two stories, once white, now a shade of light gray. Some of the siding was falling out of line, and the front porch was visibly sagging away from the house.

It was a small porch, just like I remembered it. Just big enough for one chair. A woman sat in the chair, looking serenely out at the street. A large black woman in a sundress, maybe midsixties, her hair the same color as the siding on the house. I slowed down in front of the house. I had to. If she hadn’t been there, I would have kept driving. It would have been a curious little side trip, something I’d shake my head at all the way home. But the woman was sitting right there on the porch, watching me. The same woman I had met all those years ago, on another warm day not unlike this one, on this very same porch.

It was her. No doubt about it. It was Mrs. Jamilah King. Darryl King’s mother.

I parked the truck on the empty street. I got out and approached her. If having a strange white man paying her a visit made her uneasy, she didn’t show it.

“Can I help you?” she asked me. “Are you lost?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I was just driving around and I saw you sitting here. I hope you don’t mind me stopping.”

“If you’re trying to sell me some of that frozen food, I’m going to have to say no, thank you.”

“I’m not selling anything, ma’am. I promise.”

“Then I’m sorry, but I can’t imagine what would bring you to this end of the street. Ain’t nothing here to see.”

“Well, it has changed,” I said, taking a quick look around. There was an empty shell of an old house down the street, on the other side. The sumac was so tall and so close, you couldn’t even see half of it.

“There used to be houses all up and down this street,” she said. “Kids all went to that elementary school on the next block.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I remember.”

“You were around here then?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, I should introduce myself. My name is Alex McKnight. I was a police officer back in the day. The last time I was here at your house, I was, um… involved in the arrest of your son.”

She processed that for a few moments, looking at me again like she was seeing me for the first time.

“I think I might remember you,” she finally said.

“I definitely remember you. I know it had to be a hard day for you.”

She nodded and looked down at her hands. “My son will be coming home soon. It’s been a long time.”

“I know, ma’am.”

“Mind you, it’s not like I’ve been sitting here on this porch ever since he went away. I actually went to live with my sister for a while. But I kept the house. Now I’m back. Because Darryl’s coming home.”

“I understand.”

“They’ve been sending people around to get me to abandon this place,” she said. “So they can knock it down. With everybody leaving, the mayor says we need to ‘right-size’ the city, whatever that means. I guess just move everybody to one side so they can shut down the rest, huh? I understand the part about saving money. I really do. But this is my home, you understand? This is Darryl’s home. The only home he’s ever had.”

“Yes,” I said, looking up at the upstairs windows. There was no doubt a bed up there, waiting for its old owner after all these years.

“So you say you’re not a cop anymore.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then why are you here?”

She put up her hand before I could answer.

“Never mind,” she said. “I know why you’re here.”

That stopped me dead. Because honestly, I wasn’t sure I knew myself.

“I think you should come inside for a bit,” she said. “Get out of this heat. Do you like chocolate cake?”

I was feeling more lost by the second, but there was only one answer.

“Yes,” I said. “That would be nice.”

She pushed herself up from her chair and held the door open for me. I followed her inside. There was a small front room with a fan set in the side window, moving the air around. The floor was once a beautiful hardwood. Now half of the slats looked damaged by water.

“You sit right there,” she said, indicating one of the two chairs facing the television set. It was one of those old tube-style console monsters that must have weighed half a ton. The sunlight came through the front window, filtered through the white lace curtains. I sat there in my chair, looking around the place, still feeling like I was in a waking dream.

A minute or two later, she came back with a slice of chocolate cake and a glass of milk.

“Gotta have milk with cake,” she said. “I’m sure you’d agree.”

I nodded and smiled. I wasn’t about to argue with her.

She went back into the kitchen and brought back her own slice and her own glass of cold milk. It was now officially the most unlikely thing that had ever happened in my life. Me sitting down with the mother of a murderer, a murderer I’d helped put away myself, and eating a slice of her chocolate cake.

I took a bite. It was pretty damned good. I hadn’t had any breakfast, so I had no trouble finishing it.

“That was excellent,” I told her. “I really do appreciate it.”

“I made this cake as soon as I found out Darryl would be coming home. Right after I moved back into this house. But it was kinda silly of me, because he’s not really coming home until the end of the week. So I’ll have to make another cake then.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So you’re doing me a favor,” she said. “Seeing as how I have to get rid of this one. Believe me, I’d have no trouble eating it all myself.”

I looked over at her. She was taking her last bite of cake, and clearly enjoying it.

“I know it’s going to be a hard adjustment for him,” she said, putting her plate down. “A man with a record, that’s one big strike against you, no matter what the circumstances might be.”

She was right, of course. It was already nearly impossible for a black man to find a job in this city. Add a felony conviction and your chances get much worse.

“There’s a man in my church who says he’ll give Darryl a chance,” she said. “That’s a real blessing.”

“That is. I hope it works out for him.”

She studied me for a moment.

“What was your name again?”

“Alex. Alex McKnight.”

“The years have been kind to you. You don’t look much older at all.”

If only you knew, I thought. It sure as hell doesn’t feel that way.

“But like I said, Alex… I know why you came here.”

“Actually,” I said, not sure where to go with this, “I came down here to catch up on things, see a couple of people. I ended up just driving around today…”

“To an empty block with one house left standing,” she said. “On the way to nowhere. You expect me to believe it was just an accident you ended up sitting here in my living room?”

“I admit,” I said. “When I saw this street… I mean, it all kinda came back to me. After all that hard work, we were just about ready to give up. But then…”

“But then you found my son.”

Yes, I thought. We found your son, after finally catching a break, one of the most unlikely breaks ever, a break that led us right to your front door. Then you lied to us about him being here. A forgivable lie, but a lie just the same. Then the way you wailed as we put your son in handcuffs and dragged him away.

I wasn’t about to say any of that, of course.

“Now you’ve come back,” she said. “Just like I knew you would. Someday. It must have been hearing the news about Darryl getting out that made you finally come here. Am I right?”

I just looked at her.

“You didn’t have to wait so long. You could have come years ago. You might have even helped get him out, you know.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry. You’ve totally lost me.”

“You came here to apologize,” she said, her voice fortified with resolve now. “And it’s about damned time. Pardon my French.”

“Ma’am, apologize?”

“For taking my son away. Even though you know he didn’t kill that woman.”

I looked at her for a while, then down at the plate I was still holding in my lap.

“I’m so sorry,” I finally said. “I’ve accepted your hospitality, but I don’t think I’ve come bearing the message you wanted to hear.”

“Listen to me,” she said, moving forward to the edge of her chair. “Look me in the eyes and listen to me.”

I leaned forward in my own chair. I looked her in the eyes.

“My son did not kill that woman. As sure as there’s a God in heaven. As sure as the sun is going to come up tomorrow morning.”

“Mrs. King…”

“There’s a lot of things my son was capable of doing back then. But killing somebody was not one of those things. Dragging some woman into a train station and cutting her up with a knife was not one of those things. Do you hear what I’m telling you?”

“I hear what you’re saying.”

“Do you believe me?”

I hesitated. “I believe that you believe that. It’s only natural that you’d-”

“Oh, stop it,” she said. “Just stop that right now. I don’t need you to pat me on the head and tell me I’m just blinded by motherly love. I don’t need that one little bit.”

“Mrs. King, where is your son serving his sentence?”

“He was in Jackson for a while. Then when that got closed down, he ended up in Harrison.”

“You went down there to visit him.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know about Harrison,” I said, “but I’ve been in Jackson. There’s a big waiting room there, right? Lots of people waiting to see their loved ones?”

“Yes, with all the guards’ shooting trophies on display,” she said. “I guess that’s in case you’re getting any ideas about helping somebody escape.”

“I do remember that. But let me just ask you this. I don’t mean to be rude, and you can ask me to leave your house right now, but when you were sitting there with all those other family members, how many of them do you think believed their sons or fathers or husbands were guilty of the crimes they were convicted of?”

She thought about it for a second. “Not more than a few, I would think. I’m sure even if they knew their man was involved with something, it was probably all a big misunderstanding. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time or whatnot.”

“Exactly. And even those prisoners who were in the visiting room when you finally got in there to see Darryl… If you’d asked them, how many do you think would have told you they were innocent?”

“I know what you’re getting at, Alex. But to tell you the truth, Darryl never said anything one way or another about it. Not to me, anyway.”

“He never said he was innocent?”

“No,” she said. “Never once.”

“And he did confess to the crime. You realize that.”

She shook her head.

“Mrs. King,” I said, “I wasn’t there to see the confession, but I know for a fact that you were. You had to be, because he was a minor. Am I right?”

“I was there, yes.”

“So you heard him say that-”

“I don’t care what some detective made him say.”

I let out a long breath. I knew we could keep taking laps on this same track all afternoon, and we’d still get nowhere.

“He promised he’d look after his little brother and sister,” she said, finally looking away from me. The resolve in her voice was gone, replaced with what sounded like a hundred years of misery.

“Mrs. King…”

“He promised me, Alex. He never broke a promise. Not ever.”

I sat there and watched a tear run down her cheek.

“Now his little sister is dead from drugs. His little brother ran away not long after Darryl went to prison. I haven’t heard from him in years, so God knows if he’s even alive. I’ve got nothing left.”

“You have Darryl now. He’s coming home.”

“Most of his life is already gone,” she said, shaking her head. “How much bitterness is my boy carrying in his heart now?”

“Can I give you my phone number?” I said. “I mean, for any reason. If you want to call me, I’ll be there to listen.”

“You could do that, yes.”

I took out my wallet and found one of my old business cards. Prudell-McKnight Investigations, with the two guns pointed at each other, from back when I had a partner who really wanted to be a private investigator. Who lived to be a private investigator. I still had my license, technically speaking, but I never really wanted any part in the business. Now Leon Prudell was working at a microbrewery in Sault Ste. Marie, and I was back to renting out my cabins and occasionally getting into strange situations like this one.

I turned the card over and wrote down my cell phone number. I handed her the card. She took it without looking at it.

“Any reason at all,” I said. “If you call me, I’ll be there to listen. Just keep in mind, though, I don’t get very good cell phone service up there.”

“Up where, Alex?”

“I live in the Upper Peninsula. In Paradise.”

“That’s a long way from Detroit.”

“You said it, ma’am.”

She stood up slowly. She was wearing sandals, and you could see every year of standing and walking and hard work in her feet. She took the plate from me, put it on top of her own, and took them to the kitchen. I waited for her, looking around the room, seeing all the little touches she had added, trying to make this a real home, even if the floor was damaged and there were God knows how many other problems with the place if you bothered to look for them. On top of the television set, there were pictures of her three kids when they were young. No pictures of a father. Another woman trying to do her best, all by herself. Such a sadly common story in this city.

But she was still here, in this same house. She was still trying. That said something about her.

She came back from the kitchen and showed me out the front door. I thanked her again for the cake. When I got in my truck, she stood there on the front porch watching me. I was about to pull away, but she waved at me to stop.

She came down the stairs, slowly. She came to my window. I rolled it down. She put her hand on my arm.

“I bet you had a lot of people try to lie to you when you were a cop,” she said. “I bet you got pretty good at telling the difference between a lie and the truth.”

“Yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

“My son did not kill that woman.”

I just looked at her. The day was getting hotter. There were insects buzzing away in the tall weeds on either side of her house.

“That’s a bone fact,” she said, squeezing my arm harder. “That’s the bone truth.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

To this day, I still don’t know how the news stations do it. Maybe they have somebody sitting around, listening in on the police band radio, but somehow they always seem to know when something significant is happening, anywhere in the city.

Now, a murder was not significant. Not in a city that would see over five hundred murders over the course of the year. During that hot summer, we’d see two or three a day, easy. But those were usually results of the gang wars, casualties in the fight for control of the drug trade. One black man killing another, whether you want to come right out and say it or not… That didn’t make the six o’clock news with Bill Bonds.

But a white woman from the suburbs, found dead in the abandoned section of the old train station downtown… That was worth scrambling the trucks for. Which is exactly what Franklin and I saw as we came back down the tracks. Channel 2, Channel 4, Channel 7, they were all there. There were remote newscasters standing in front of cameras and lights, and there was crime scene tape strung all across the parking lot, from the station to the tracks, to keep everyone away from that back door.

Sergeant Schuman was still on the scene. He already looked a little frazzled and ready to tee off on the next reporter who asked him a question.

“McKnight,” he said as soon as he saw me. “Get down to the station ASAP.”

“That’s where I was heading.”

Nobody asked Franklin or me any questions as we ducked under the tape and headed out to the parking lot. They probably figured we were just two officers helping to secure the crime scene. Nothing special here, let’s go bug the sergeant again.

I followed Franklin to our car. I sat in the passenger’s seat while he got behind the wheel. He didn’t say anything as he started the car and headed out to Woodward.

“Tell me what kind of world we live in,” he finally said, “where a woman gets killed just because she’s wearing a diamond bracelet.”

I shook my head. Did it even matter now? Was there a better reason that would make more sense?

“They call those eternity bracelets,” he said. “Those bracelets with all the diamonds. They’re pretty expensive.”

I shook my head again. I didn’t know anything about expensive jewelry. I’d come to find out that it was, in fact, an eternity bracelet, bought for Elana Paige by her husband on their five-year anniversary. A couple of years later, Chris Evert would stop a tournament to look for her bracelet, and that’s how they’d come to be known as “tennis bracelets.” But that summer they were still eternity bracelets, and if Elana’s husband thought he’d have anything resembling an eternity to spend with his wife, he was horribly mistaken.

The sun was going down when we got to the police station. It was already feeling like the longest day of my life. Sergeant Grimaldi was still there, and when he saw me he put his hand on my shoulder and asked me how I was doing. It was a small gesture, but it meant a lot to me. It would be something I’d remember even after I left the police force.

“You’re gonna be pulled in about five different directions at once,” he said to me. “But first things first. We’ve got all the current mug shots ready for you. You need to look through them carefully. If we’re lucky, you’ll spot the guy and we’ll have him in custody before the night is over.”

He led me to one of the interview rooms. The mug books were there waiting for me. Four faces per page, each face shown from the front and then from the side. I’d led my share of arrestees to the same wall against which these shots were taken. Now it was my turn to go through a tall stack of them. The hope was that the man I’d chased today had been arrested in the past. And that I’d be able to recognize him.

Franklin came in after a while and asked me how it was going.

“Nothing yet,” I said, pausing to rub my eyes.

“You need some coffee?”

“That would be great, thanks.”

I went back to the mug shots. He brought my coffee. Then he sat down across from me with his own cup.

“You don’t have to stay here,” I told him. “Your family must be wondering where you are.”

“I called them. They know I’m working on something important.”

He wasn’t really working on anything, of course. He was just keeping me company. But I didn’t call him on it.

“You should talk to your wife, too,” he said. “Let her know what’s going on.”

“I will. Next time I take a break. I think she might have class tonight anyway.”

A few minutes later, Sergeant Grimaldi stuck his head in. “Any luck?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Detective Bateman would like to steal you for a few minutes,” he said. “The family’s still here, and he’d like you to talk to them.”

I looked over at Franklin. The night was about to get even tougher.

If you work in a police station in the heart of one of the most murder-prone cities in the country, you’re going to see your share of devastated families. They get led into the room with that same look on their faces, helpless and drained of blood. They sit down. They hardly ever accept anything. No coffee or even water. They just sit there and wait for the nightmare to end. But it doesn’t. They get shown a photograph, taken at the crime scene. A close-up of the face, from above. The eyes usually open.

You need to prepare yourself for what you’re about to see. That’s the standard line, as if it’s even possible. They take the photograph. Something goes out of them, like a sail losing its wind. There’s no longer any doubt, but they still have to say it. They have to give you the verbal identification. Yes, that’s him. That’s my boy. Nine times out of ten, it’s a male.

I’m sorry for your loss. The next standard line. They hardly ever break down when they’re in the station. They must save that for home. While they’re here they summon up the strength to keep it under control. It never fails to amaze me.

The sergeant led me to another interview room, just down the hall from where I had been going through the mug shots. He opened the door, and I stepped into that drywall box of absolute misery.

The husband was sitting on one side of the table. He was wearing a golf shirt, and his hair was pressed down where he’d obviously been wearing his golf hat. I pictured two cops having to go out onto the course and find him. Interrupting him right in the middle of his round to give him the news. Or maybe he was already done. Heading for home, heading for dinner with his wife. Now he was here in this room, looking down at a clear plastic bag on the table. I recognized the pieces of the diamond bracelet I had found. He was framing the bag with his hands, like he wanted to pick it up. I was sure the detective had told him not to touch it. Not until it had been processed for fingerprints. He kept staring at the bag, not even blinking when the door opened.

The father and mother stood together behind him. The father was wearing casual clothes that looked expensive. The mother, too. I didn’t get a good look at her at first, because she stood with her face against her husband’s chest. He stroked her hair, and otherwise had the same faraway look as his son-in-law.

A young man sat in the corner, by himself. More nice clothes, another blank stare. He was working his hands together, like he was getting ready to hit somebody.

That left Detective Bateman. He was sitting at the far end of the table, writing in a notebook. He looked up as the door opened.

“Officer McKnight,” he said. “Thank you. I’d like you to meet Tanner Paige, Elana’s husband. These are her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Grayson. And her brother, Ryan.”

The husband and the father looked at me. The mother kept her face hidden. The brother kept working at his hands and ignoring everything else in the world.

“You saw him,” the husband said to me. “The man who did this.”

I looked at Detective Bateman. He gave me a slight nod.

“I saw the man who we believe is the suspect,” I said. “We’re going to do everything we can to find him.”

The husband wanted to say more, but he seemed to be struggling to find the right words. I was waiting for him to lash out at me. To ask me why I hadn’t caught him.

“Can you tell me…” he finally said. “I mean, why would anyone do something like this? For a diamond bracelet?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’m sorry.”

“I told her not to wear this down here. It was just asking for trouble.”

I noticed the brother glancing up for one moment. He stared at the husband, then closed his eyes and went back to working his hands together.

“You need to find him tonight,” the father said, still stroking his wife’s hair. “He could be a thousand miles away by the morning.”

“Yes, sir. Like I said, we’re gonna do everything we can.”

“It’s something we don’t usually have,” Bateman said. “A police officer who’ll be able to give us a positive ID. When we catch him, and we will catch him… it’ll be an airtight case.”

“Like that will do any good,” the brother said, finally speaking up. “Some gangbanger goes away for life. Is that going to bring her back?”

His mother looked at him, taking her face away from her husband’s chest. Her face was ruined with tears, and there was a great stain on her husband’s shirt.

“Ryan, please,” his father said. “Of course it won’t bring her back. But at least…”

“At least what?”

“He has to pay. Whoever did this. I’ll spend the rest of my life making sure he pays for this.”

The brother waved this away, getting to his feet and starting to pace up and down his side of the room like a caged animal. I watched him, waiting for him to punch the wall. Or something. I wouldn’t have blamed him for anything at that point. I honestly could not even imagine going through what these people had to go through that night.

“This isn’t happening,” the husband said. He was still staring at the bracelet in the plastic bag. “I’m going to wake up and she’ll be right there next to me.”

“It’s happening,” the brother said. “It’s happening because you can’t even walk down the street in this city anymore. Why the hell would you even let her take a class at Wayne State, for God’s sake? Some ghetto school in the middle of the worst city in the world.”

The husband was looking at him now. In about two more seconds, the brother would launch himself over the table and we’d have a full-blown melee on our hands.

“This is not helpful,” Bateman said. He stood up and put himself in the brother’s way. He grabbed both of the young man’s shoulders and looked him in the eyes.

“Let go of me.”

“You need to calm down. You need to respect everyone else in this room. And you need to let us try to solve this horrible crime.”

The brother seemed to run out of steam then. He dropped his head and brought one hand to his face. He started to cry.

Bateman hugged him. It was not something you were supposed to do in a case like this, but as soon as he did I could see it was the right play. The brother cried for a while, and then he stopped. He sat back down in the chair.

“Officer McKnight,” Bateman said to me, “I know you have work to do. I’m glad you got the chance to meet the family. The next time you see them, I hope it’ll be when we tell them we’ve made an arrest.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said to everyone else in the room. One of those standard lines you say, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

Then I went back to the mug shots.

Franklin left for home eventually. I thanked him for everything he’d done that day.

“Just doing my job,” he said.

I kept looking through the mug shots. Detective Bateman came in a while later. His tie was loose. His eyes were red. It was the first time I’d ever seen him looking like something less than a human dynamo.

“I take it you don’t have an ID yet,” he said to me. He sat down in the chair Franklin had just vacated.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then we need to get the sketch artist in here. Get this down on paper while it’s still fresh in your mind.”

“I can’t believe this guy hasn’t been in the system before,” I said, flipping through more pages. “He gave me a pretty stone-cold look on the other side of that fence. Like he was about to laugh in my face.”

“Jeans and a gray shirt. Nothing on the shirt? No logos or anything?”

“No. Plain gray. He did have an Oakland Raiders hat on.”

Bateman nodded. “That’s how you do it if you’re street smart. No markings, no weird hair. A hat you can throw away in a second. Just blend right in.”

“Are you telling me he’s so smart we’ve never had him in the system before?”

“That would be just our luck,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

“Why cut her up so bad?” I said, the scene at the station coming back to me, whether I wanted it to or not. I knew it would be there in my head forever.

“What do you mean? He wanted her dead.”

“This is way beyond wanting someone dead. This guy destroyed her.”

He thought about that one. “We’ll never know why he did that. Not until we catch him. Even then…”

“Any idea why Elana Paige was at the train station in the first place? That’s a long way from the college.”

“Her car was in the parking lot. The crime scene guys found a camera bag about ten feet from the body. Nice camera inside, but it was damaged when it hit the floor.”

“Why leave the nice camera if you’re already stealing her jewelry?”

“Too hard to carry, I guess. Or too obvious if you’re trying to blend into the crowd.”

“So she was a photographer, you’re saying.”

“Well, she was taking a photography course at Wayne State, at least. Maybe she figured she could get some great shots at the old train station.”

“I though you handled things well with the family,” I said. “The brother was about to go off.”

“You realize,” he said, “that you belong to me now. Until we catch this guy. I’ll clear it with your sergeant.”

“Anything I can do. Of course.”

He nodded. “I’ll let you keep looking. Let me know if you get a hit. I’m not going anywhere.”

Neither was I. Another hour passed. Maybe two. It was hard to tell at that point. I had gone through all of the mug shot books. I hadn’t found my man. They got the sketch artist in, and we worked out a sketch. Problem was, although I could still picture him exactly in my mind, the sketch came out looking like a young black man with high cheekbones and a short afro. In other words, like half the male population in the city.

We tried refining it, but in the end we had to send out what we had. Five foot ten, 170 pounds, muscular build. Jeans, gray shirt with a torn right sleeve, basketball shoes. Last seen fleeing north on Trumbull Avenue. We sent it to every precinct in the city, and to every neighboring suburb. We sent it to the Michigan State Police. We sent it to the FBI.

Elana Paige had now been dead for six hours.

It was going on eleven o’clock when I finally left the station. I had processed an official statement, describing everything I had seen and done. I had tried to eat some dinner. I had gone back over the mug shot books. Detective Bateman told me to go home, to get some rest, and to be back at the station early the next morning. We’d see if we picked up any hits on the bulletin overnight and then go from there.

“We’ll start working the neighborhoods,” he said. “Somebody saw this kid. I promise you that.”

“I hate the fact that he’ll sleep in his own bed tonight.”

“Let him sleep. Let him believe he got away. If he does, he won’t leave town. Or he won’t hide. Either way, we’ll get him.”

I said good night to the detective, and to all of the four-to-midnight-shifters I saw on the way out. They were almost done with their day. Mine had lasted fifteen hours.

I got in my car. I had an eight-year-old Chevy Celebrity back then. About all I could afford on a Detroit cop’s salary, with a wife who had quit her job to go back to school. I started driving down Woodward, to hit that freeway that would loop me back through the city and then west to Redford, but then I blew right by the on-ramp and cut over to Corktown. I drove by the stadium one more time. A dark gray monolith now. I drove up Trumbull, daring my man to be outside walking around in the night air, confident that he’d gotten away with his crime today. I slowed down whenever I saw someone. Usually two or three of them at a time, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, staring back at me in my civilian car. I didn’t see the man I was looking for.

I got home at midnight. I lived in a little brick house on a block of little brick houses, in one of the original Detroit suburbs, now a working-class enclave for folks like me, who didn’t want to live in the city itself but didn’t have the money to move out to Livonia or Dearborn Heights.

I parked the car in the thin little driveway that ran between my house and the house next to me. I got out and took a breath. The dog was barking next door, just like every other time I came home.

I went inside, took off my clothes, and lay on the bed without turning the lights on. I could hear Jeannie breathing on the other side of the bed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot to call you.”

She didn’t say anything for a while. I thought maybe she was asleep.

“I was worried,” she finally said. “You promised me you’d call if you were going to be late. You remember?”

“There was a murder. A woman who’s taking classes at Wayne State. Her name’s Elana Paige. Do you know her?”

“Doesn’t sound familiar, no.”

“She was taking a photography class.”

Another few moments of silence. The dog stopped barking.

“Who killed her?”

“Some kid. Seventeen, eighteen years old.”

“Did you catch him?”

“No. Not yet.”

That was the last thing I said before I closed my eyes. There was nothing else to say anyway.

In my dreams I was standing over the dead body again, but a strong wind was blowing through the building. Then I was chasing the young man in the jeans and gray shirt again. Chasing him and chasing him and never catching him, down a set of railroad tracks that went on forever.

CHAPTER NINE

I had left my cell phone in the truck, as usual. I picked it up as I drove away from Mrs. King’s house. I had a voice message from Sergeant Grimaldi. I pulled over and listened to it, then called him back. He answered on the first ring.

“What can I do for you?” the sergeant said. “You’re not back in Paradise already, are you?”

“No, I spent the night down here,” I said. “It was a long day, and I didn’t feel like driving five hours.”

“That sounds smart. So where are you now?”

“I’m just driving around the city a little more. I still can’t believe what I’ve been seeing.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s like postwar Berlin or something. Although, at least, they rebuilt Berlin. Detroit, I guess they’re just gonna let it rot.”

“Well, I hope not, but…”

“Alex, what’s on your mind?”

“Listen, this is going to sound a little crazy.”

“I can do crazy, believe me. Let me have it.”

“You said you called me and you called Detective Bateman, right? About Darryl King getting out?”

“I did.”

“How is the detective, anyway?”

“He’s not the man he was,” the sergeant said. “Put it that way. But I’m pretty sure he still sees himself as the star of his own personal prime-time crime drama. Even now that he’s retired.”

You didn’t spend enough time with him, I thought. You never saw the other side of Detective Bateman, when he turned off the charm and got down to real police work.

“Well, he was a character,” I said, figuring this wasn’t the time to be the detective’s publicist. “But do you think there’s any chance I could talk to him?”

“I’m sure he’d love to hear from you. You want his number?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

A moment of hesitation. “Why do you want to call him, anyway? Just to catch up? Or is there something else on your mind?”

“If you want to know the truth,” I said, “something’s been bothering me about that old case.”

“Yeah, see, I wasn’t even going to go there, but now that you mention it…”

“Wait,” I said, “how do you even know what I’m talking about?”

It was the same feeling of disorientation I’d felt at Mrs. King’s house. How come everybody thinks they know what’s going through my mind today, when I don’t even know myself?

“I know what’s bothering you, Alex, and I don’t blame you. That was a high-profile case, probably the biggest of the year. Bateman made a lot of hay out of it. You might even say it made his career.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Come on, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Bateman was all over the television after King was arrested. He even got that award, remember? But what did you get?”

“You know what I got.”

“Yeah, you and Franklin. I know. But that was a totally separate thing. You should have gotten a lot more credit for tracking down the man who butchered that woman.”

“Well, that’s not where I was going at all,” I said. “I honestly haven’t even thought about it that way, not once in all these years.”

“Then I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about, Alex. What exactly is bothering you?”

“Well, that’s the crazy part. I actually sorta stumbled upon Darryl King’s mother today, and-”

“Excuse me, what?”

“I was just driving by the house where we picked him up. I wanted to see it. She was sitting right there on the porch.”

I wasn’t about to tell him I went inside and had chocolate cake with the woman. That would be too unbelievable, even if it was the truth.

“That’s a new one,” he said. “I’m sure she was glad to see you. The man who helped put her son away.”

“She couldn’t have been nicer about it. And I don’t know, even last night… I was just thinking about the case, and I guess I just want Detective Bateman to fill in some gaps for me, help me to understand how that case got closed in the end. Because I wasn’t there to see it.”

“It got closed because he confessed. You know that.”

“I know. But I never got to see the tape. I never even read the transcript. So I guess I just want to know how it went, that’s all. Call it curiosity, after all these years.”

“It sounds like you’ve got something else on your mind,” he said. “More than just curiosity. But I can tell you, I did see the tape of the confession. It was airtight.”

“Okay, I appreciate you telling me that. That makes me feel better.”

“But you’re still going to call the detective, aren’t you.”

“I thought I might. Unless you think it’s a bad idea.”

“I suppose it might rattle his cage a little bit, you showing up after all these years, wanting to know how he closed out the case. But you know what? That sounds like a good enough reason right there. Hell, I wish I could be there myself.”

“You’re sounding just like the sergeant we all knew and loved.”

“Let me get you the number,” he said. I wrote it down as he read it off to me.

“Okay,” I said. “I got it. Thank you.”

“Let me know how it goes, all right? Let me know what shade of red his face turns when you ask him if it was a clean confession.”

“It’s a deal.”

“Oh, by the way,” he said. “I know I said he’s not the man he used to be, but you should know, he’s really had some health problems over the past few years. So don’t be surprised when you see him, is all I’m saying.”

“I appreciate the warning.”

“You take care of yourself, Alex. It was good seeing you again.”

I thanked him again and hung up. Then I sat there for a while on the side of that empty street. It was a clean confession, I told myself. The sergeant saw it himself, and he would know.

So why do I still have Mrs. King’s voice in my head, telling me her son was innocent?

I picked up the phone again and dialed Detective Bateman’s number.

A few minutes later, I was on the road, driving north. I took the Lodge Freeway out of the city. When I hit Eight Mile Road, the infamous northern border, I had a strange moment of regret and something almost like heartache. This city wasn’t a part of my life anymore. I lived over three hundred miles away. Yet it had meant something to me, once upon a time. I grew up rooting for its sports teams. I went to work here every day for eight years. I saw a thousand terrible things here back in the day, but I also saw what the people of Detroit were really made of. When people tell you this city essentially won the Second World War, it’s not crazy. Even back in the eighties, when things were really starting to fall apart, I still felt like the people who lived here could put the city back together. Now it felt like most everyone had given up on the place. I couldn’t even imagine what it would look like in another twenty years.

I was heading back to Paradise, but with a little detour in mind. When I had reached the retired Detective Arnie Bateman, after exchanging the standard pleasantries, he had told me that he lived “up north” now. “On the lake.” I was already wondering if he had ended up in Marquette, or maybe Eagle Harbor. That was the real “up north,” after all, and the real “on the lake.” But no, he lived on Houghton Lake, the inland lake right in the middle of the mitten. It was about halfway home for me. Hell, not more than a few minutes out of my way, so we ended up arranging to grab a bite to eat on his boat.

He would no doubt want to show me the lake, and I’d have to act like I was impressed. I’d have to resist the urge to tell him that my lake was a thousand feet deep and bigger than ten states.

It took me less than three hours to get there, through Saginaw and Bay City. I got off at the exit and worked my way around the southern shore to the town of Houghton Lake. There were plenty of lakeside motels, restaurants, bars, places to buy fishing tackle. There was a week left until Labor Day, so the place was still moderately busy.

I passed another Ash Street. The day winking at me, if you believe in that sort of thing. Soon after, I left the main road and found the marina. Another quarter mile up the shoreline, I found the address. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe a big white Cape Cod with a sign up front bearing the house’s name, BATEMAN’S BEACH HOUSE or something like that, but I was surprised to see nothing but a mailbox with a number and his last name assembled with those reflective letter decals you buy at the hardware store. I turned down the driveway and pulled up next to a Jeep. The house was a simple log cabin, not much different from my own.

When I got out of the truck, the side door to the cabin opened, and out stepped a man I wouldn’t have recognized in any other context. I mean, I knew Sergeant Grimaldi gave me the heads-up, but the man I saw was at least fifty pounds heavier than the detective I remembered, and he was walking slowly, gripping a cane in his right hand. As he got closer, I could start to see that old face from the precinct, but there wasn’t one single bit of flash left to the man. He looked, honestly, like he was seventy years old.

If Sergeant Grimaldi had lost a step or two with age, then Detective Bateman had lost a whole staircase.

“Officer McKnight,” he said, looking me up and down. “I swear, you don’t look any different.”

I shook his hand. He still had some strength left, at least.

“I’m afraid I’m not moving around quite as well,” he said, looking down at his cane. “But they’re gonna give me a new hip soon, so I’ll be good as new. I told the doctor he should keep going, just turn everything bionic.”

“I could use some of that myself,” I said, rubbing my right shoulder.

His smile went away for a moment, as he made the connection. The reason my shoulder should need such attention when the rest of me seemed to be holding up just fine.

“Yeah,” he said. “How are you doing with that, anyway? I never really got to talk to you after… You know.”

“I don’t even think about it anymore.” Half a lie on my part.

“I heard they left one inside you. Was that just for a souvenir?”

“Something like that.”

The smile came back as he patted my other shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s have a little something on the lake.”

I followed him around the cabin, down to his dock.

“You live in Paradise now? Is that right?”

“I do.”

“Well, then, I know this lake is just a pond to you.”

Another surprise, from this man who once lived to one-up everyone around him. At least a hundred times a day.

“It’s a nice lake,” I said, looking out over the water. I could see maybe a dozen boats, not nearly as many as I would have thought. “You’ve got a nice quiet place here.”

“Hell, you should see this lake during the Bud Bash.”

“What’s that?”

“Every summer, they get thousands of people here, all these boats tied together in a big flotilla down the shoreline a bit. People drinking like crazy, just going insane.”

“Funny, we don’t get that in Paradise.”

“It’s enough to drive an ex-cop out of his mind, Alex. All those drunks driving their boats around. Then later on their cars when they’re going home. It’s a miracle they don’t have a dozen people killed every year.”

The final surprise came when we got to his dock. I would have guessed a sleek speedboat for good old Detective Bateman. Instead, I saw a big fat lazy pontoon boat, with deck chairs, a full roof, and a motor just big enough to move it along at two miles per hour.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “This thing is just a floating gazebo. But on this lake, it’s perfect. I can anchor anywhere, throw a fishing line out, catch a few walleye, maybe take a little nap.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“Come on, I’ve got the cooler packed already.”

He opened up the little gate and stepped onto the deck. I followed him. The boat barely dipped as I stepped on board.

“Rock solid,” he said, sitting in the captain’s chair and pushing the electric starter. I untied the front end and we were off, backing out into the lake. When we were clear of the dock, he put it into forward and gunned it. A baby duck could have paddled faster.

We moved north for a while, Bateman pointing out resorts and bars on the western shore. Then he cut over by Houghton Point, and we started on a great loop that would keep us out here all afternoon. The sun was hot now, even with the awning over our heads.

“So why did you look up your old buddy Detective Bateman after all these years?” he finally said. “Let me guess. It has something to do with that call we both got from Sergeant Grimaldi.”

“Well, I did come down to have a drink with him. Your name came up once or twice.”

“I bet it did. Grimaldi never did like me that much.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. He just never got to know you like I did.”

Bateman looked at me. “We spent a lot of time together that month, didn’t we? I’m glad it all paid off in the end. Although now that he’s getting out…”

“Nothing we can do about that,” I said. “But the thing is, I never got the chance to see how that case was closed. With what happened to me…”

“The only thing that happened after you left was his plea and then his sentencing.”

“I never heard his confession.”

He looked at me again. “You didn’t see the tape?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Too bad. It was my finest hour.”

He was smiling when he said it, but I knew he wasn’t completely joking. It was the biggest case of his career, for all the obvious reasons, spoken or unspoken. A photogenic white woman from Farmington Hills, stabbed two dozen times by a young black male. That same pretty face on the six o’clock news, and in the paper, every day for most of that month. The frustration building every day we couldn’t find our suspect. The pressure from every direction. Until finally we had our man and he was locked in a room with a homicide detective who did things his own way. If this was a television show, you might even say he played by his own rules. Of course, it wasn’t a television show, and the blood on the floor of that balcony was very much real.

“I’ve always wondered how it went down,” I said. “That call from the sergeant was sort of a reminder, I guess.”

Bateman nodded his head. Then he cut the engine. He got up, fished out the anchor, and threw it overboard.

“I take it we’re stopping?”

“Good a place as any,” he said. “It’s only fifteen feet deep here. Most of the lake’s about that. I’m guessing Lake Superior gets a little deeper.”

“Just a little.”

“Interest you in a cold beer?”

“You could twist my arm.”

He opened up the cooler and pulled out two bottles of Sierra Nevada. Not bad if a Canadian isn’t available, especially in the summer.

“I’ve got some sandwiches in here, too.”

The only thing I had eaten that day was the slice of Mrs. King’s chocolate cake, so I was ready for a real lunch. We sat there and had our ham and cheese sandwiches while the other boats on the lake zoomed right by us.

“Okay,” he said, when he was done eating and was wiping his hands on his napkin. “You want to know how I got that confession.”

“If you don’t mind telling me.”

He smiled. “You know how much I hate talking about myself, but I’ll see what I can do.”

I took another hit on my beer, squinting at the sunlight reflected off the water. I ended up closing my eyes, all the better to listen to him, and to bring back that summer and the case that would bind the two of us together forever.

“So we’ve got this kid,” he said. “Remember how we were thinking he was seventeen, eighteen years old? And he turns out to be sixteen?”

“I remember.”

“Sixteen on paper, but he was already a hard case. That day we finally caught him, when he just stood there in the doorway with a dozen cops all aiming their guns at him? The way he didn’t even blink?”

I thought back to that day. That strange, almost anticlimactic arrest, after everything we’d gone through to get there.

“It wasn’t my first confession,” he said. “You know that was sorta my thing.”

“So I had heard, yes.”

“The secret is approaching each suspect on their own terms. Everybody’s different. Everybody’s got their own story. Something that might work on one person will get you nowhere with the next one. So you can’t go in already married to one strategy. You gotta react to the situation and you gotta be quick.”

He gave an ironic grimace of pain as he resettled his bad hip on the chair. The man’s last quick day must have felt like a distant memory.

“So remember, the clock is ticking here, right? We got the kid in the room. His mother’s there with him, because that’s the law. Darryl’s not saying a word, but Mama’s telling everybody to let them go because her little boy ain’t done nothing.”

Having just spent time with Mrs. King, I knew she was a hell of a lot more articulate than that, but I let him go on.

“I know we’re running out of time before we have to charge him or let him walk. I think you’d already gone home at that point, right?”

“Sergeant Grimaldi told me to go home, yes. He didn’t think there’d be anything else to see.”

“That’s right,” Bateman said. I could tell he was happy to hear it put this way. Like fourth and long from your own one-yard line, just a few seconds left on the clock. So everybody’s already on their way out of the stadium.

“So I finally go in the room,” he said. “I sit down in front of him. His mother starts talking, but I tune her out. It’s just me and Darryl. I don’t try to get real close to him like I might to some guys. Get right in his face or anything. I just sit back and I don’t say anything for a while. He’s looking right back at me. I had to remind myself he was only sixteen years old.”

Another boat roared by. He took a sip of his beer and gave the boat a quick glance. Then he was back to that day in the interview room.

“Finally, I just say to him, ‘You think you’re a man already, don’t you.’ He gives me a look, doesn’t say anything. I say, ‘Some people might look at you and say you’re nothing but a little punk gangbanger, not even seventeen years old yet. Think you’re so bad and everything.’ Notice I’m not saying that I think that. I’m just saying some people. That was the important part. Make it all indirect, you know?”

I nodded, even though I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at.

“I say, ‘I’ll tell you what a real man does. A real man stands up and admits when he’s done something wrong. A real man tells the truth, no matter what. While a little punk gangbanger, on the other hand, you know what he does? He runs away crying like a little girl.’ Which started to get his attention, I could tell. And then I say, ‘So how come you ran away like a little girl, Darryl?’ I don’t even give him time to answer. I just say, ‘You’re not even that fast, you know that? That cop who was chasing you, that old white guy? He used to play baseball. He was a catcher. You know how slow catchers are, right? That’s who was chasing you, and he almost caught you.’”

He stopped and put his hand up to me.

“No disrespect, Alex. It was all part of the story I was building.”

“I got it. Go on.”

“I say to him, I say, ‘Look, we’ve got you on this, Darryl. We’ve got a cop who’ll take the stand and testify that he saw you on the scene. Not just some Joe Schmoe from Hamtramck, Darryl. A cop who’ll sit there in his shiny uniform and tell everybody how it went down. If that’s not enough, we’ve got your fingerprints on the bracelet. You understand what that means, don’t you? We could take this whole thing to trial right now, and I’m pretty sure we could get anything we want.’ Which was a bit of a stretch, I realize. But you know how it works. Then I say, ‘Here’s your chance, Darryl. To stand up like a man and to make this a whole lot easier for everybody. If you do that, I’ll make sure it gets taken into account.’ This kid’s just sitting there. His mother’s telling him not to say anything, but I can tell he’s thinking it over. Me, I keep ignoring her, so maybe he’ll ignore her, you see what I mean? And I just ask him flat out, I say, ‘Come on, Darryl. Are you a man or not?’”

He paused for effect. Then he took another sip of his beer.

“That was the first time he spoke,” he said. “He sits up in his chair and he says, ‘I’m a man. Don’t forget it.’ So at this point, some guys would think they’ve got him on the hook, right? Yeah, you’re a man, that means you’re gonna tell me the truth now. Let’s have it. And then they get a big lie. So instead of that, I just had this gut instinct that I should keep pushing it. You wanna know why? It was something you said to me.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, when you were telling me how you were chasing him down those tracks, and he finally got under that fence, and he’s standing there on the other side. You said that as soon as he knew he had you beat, he just stood there and looked at you. Ice cold, you said. Like he was daring you to shoot him. Knowing that you wouldn’t. You remember that?”

“I do.”

“That’s all I needed to know about this kid. He ran, but he didn’t want to run. The second he didn’t have to run anymore, it was like he was pretending he never ran at all. So I say to him, ‘I don’t believe you, Darryl. I don’t believe you’re a real man. Because you ran down those tracks like a little girl, and you even threw that diamond bracelet away. You probably left a trail of piss all the way down the tracks, too. I don’t know, because we didn’t actually test for that. We didn’t run the forensics test for a little girl running away and pissing herself.’ I could tell I was getting to him. It honestly felt like he wanted to get out of his chair and start something. Which I would have been ready for, believe me. But instead he just says, ‘I’m a man, and if there’s something I need to do, I do it.’ Those were his exact words.”

He let that hang in the air for a moment. It didn’t sound exactly like the beginning of a confession to me, not any I’d ever heard. But I knew there was more.

“Now his mother’s having a fit, and he just tells her to be quiet. At that point I knew I had him. Don’t get me wrong, I knew I was cutting the mother right out of the equation, but this guy was a child in name only. Only by the letter of the law. So I told him, I said, ‘Okay then, just between you and me, the two men in this room right now, you gotta tell me what happened. Start at the beginning and lay it all out for me.’ So he did. He said he was there at the back of the station when this woman came by.”

“What was he doing back there?” I said.

“What?” The interruption seemed to throw him off track for a second. “He was looking to rob somebody. It was a popular spot for young hustlers to bring their johns, he said. A perfect setup to rob somebody because they’re not going to go to the police.”

“Okay, I got it. Continue.”

“He said he saw her taking photographs of the building, and he told her there were some even better shots inside.”

“Wait, seriously? She went along with that?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “No, of course not,” he said. “It was just his first play. When she refused to go inside with him, he pulled his knife.”

“And what, dragged her inside? She didn’t scream?”

Bateman looked at me again. I wasn’t playing the rapt audience he was accustomed to when he told this story. And I knew he had told it, many times.

“The place was deserted back there,” he said. “Darryl was a strong kid.”

“Okay,” I said, still not quite seeing it. “Go on.”

“He takes her inside and up the stairs to the balcony.”

“Why go upstairs? That’s a lot of extra work, isn’t it?”

“He knew there were people coming in that door,” Bateman said. “He wanted to be out of the way, all right?”

“All right.”

“Then he stabs her with his knife. She was screaming at that point, so he just kept stabbing her. Then he took the bracelet off her wrist. He would have taken her money, but she’d left her purse in her car.”

“But he didn’t take the camera bag.”

“No, he didn’t. He said no way he’s gonna carry around an expensive-looking camera case. Might as well put a neon sign over his head.”

“Okay, that makes sense.”

“When he went outside,” Bateman said, “that’s when you showed up. The rest is history.”

“Did you ask him why he threw the bracelet away?”

“Pure reaction at that point. It connected him to the murder. So he threw it away.”

“But he didn’t throw away the knife.”

“Not when you were chasing him, no. He threw that away later.”

I sat there on his boat and worked it over it in my mind. There was a question I wanted to ask, a question that would get to the heart of things and make it all fall apart if it wasn’t really true. But I couldn’t come up with the question.

“The knife was in his pocket,” Bateman said. “He wasn’t about to try to take it out while he was running. It would have been a foolish move, even if he could throw it.”

“But he did throw the bracelet. That wasn’t in his pocket? And that wasn’t a foolish move?”

Bateman looked out at the water. I could tell he was getting frustrated. “Alex,” he said, “he threw it away on the spur of the moment, this thing that didn’t belong to him. He kept the thing that did belong to him. Then he threw that away later, when he had time to think about it. It’s really not that complicated.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. So that was his confession.”

“Yes. That was his confession.”

“He didn’t try to take it back later? Say you tricked him or you forced it out of him? I know that happens all the time.”

“No, he stuck by it all the way to the end. The prosecutor worked out a plea to simple second degree homicide, on account of his age, and I don’t know, maybe because he didn’t want to have to bring you back to testify.”

That stopped me dead. “Why wouldn’t I want to testify?”

“I seem to recall, you had more important things to worry about. Like not dying from your gunshot wounds.”

I wiped my forehead with the back of my sleeve. There was no breeze, and it was getting too hot out there in the middle of the lake.

“All right,” I said. “Thank you for telling me all that.”

He sat there looking at me for a moment. “Alex,” he said. “It was a clean confession. I saw a few before that, saw a hell of a lot after that. This one was Grade A kosher.”

“Okay. I got it.”

He turned his chair and started up the engine. “Let’s get you back to shore,” he said. “It’s hotter than hell out here.”

We made our way back to his dock, taking a direct line now so it only took half of forever. When we had the boat tied off and I had carried the cooler up to the cabin, he shook my hand.

“Before you go,” he said, “I have to say one more thing to you.”

“What’s that?”

“I should have let you make the arrest. It’s bothered me ever since.”

“Detective, you can stop thinking about it right now. Because I did a long time ago. It was a pleasure working with you back then. And it was a pleasure seeing you again today.”

“Thanks,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”

As I turned to my truck, he called after me.

“We got our man, eh? That’s the important part.”

I didn’t answer him one way or another. I just gave him a wave and then I left. As I drove back to the freeway, I knew the whole thing should have been resolved in my mind. Every question was answered, I said to myself. You can let it go now.

So how come I still couldn’t?

CHAPTER TEN

I got up early the next morning. I didn’t wake Jeannie. I let her sleep as I left the house in the pale light of dawn. I drove to the station on Woodward Avenue, not sure if I was ready for everything that would happen that day.

Detective Bateman was already there. He was shaved, showered, caffeinated, smartly dressed, and ready to roll. He said good morning to me, and then two minutes later we were in his unmarked Plymouth Gran Fury, driving to Corktown.

“We’ve got two sets of prints back on the clasp of the bracelet,” he said as he drove. He didn’t have lights or a siren, but he still drove like he owned the road. “One was Mrs. Paige herself. The other was presumably our suspect, although we didn’t get a hit on it. So he’s not in the system.”

“That would explain my big swing and miss on the mug shots.”

“I still can’t believe he’s been under the radar his whole life,” Bateman said, shaking his head. “I don’t care how young he is. If he’s capable of doing something like this…”

“I’m out here every day,” I said. “Sometimes it feels like we only catch the dumbest ten percent, and everybody else is just doing whatever they want.”

“I’d hate to think that’s true.”

He took us right to the train station. There was still crime scene tape along the back side of the station. A pair of night-shifters in their last hour of duty were standing guard.

“They’ll keep working the crime scene,” Bateman said, “now that the sun is up. But really, I think it’s all going to come down to hustle. As usual.”

“So why are we here at the train station?”

He stopped the car in the lot. Then he got out and looked up at those mostly empty eighteen floors. I did the same.

“When in doubt,” he said, “start at the beginning. Now show me again exactly where he ran.”

We got back in the car. I directed him over to Bagley Street, to the bridge over the tracks where our man had scrambled up from the fence. From there, we went up Rosa Parks Boulevard, where I had thought I had spotted him when I went after him in my car. We cut over to Trumbull, up to the stadium. Then across the freeway where I was sure I had him trapped. We stopped at that same intersection where I had stood looking off into the distance. West, north, or east, all of the streets he could have taken at that point. It was hardly more than twelve hours ago, and yet it felt like he could be anywhere in the world by now.

“There aren’t many houses until you get up past Temple Street,” he said. “And you’d have to cut all the way over past the high school if you lived east of here.”

He moved his finger in the air like he was drawing a map.

“The freeways sort of isolate this one part of the city,” he said. “Like a big horseshoe. West, east, and south. So pretend you’re him for a minute. You’re running away and trying to get back home. Would you risk coming up Trumbull and getting yourself trapped in this horseshoe if you didn’t live here?”

“Probably not. Not if I was thinking straight.”

“You said you usually only catch the dumb ones. Hell, he led you right through the stadium traffic, didn’t he? A great way to lose you. So let’s assume he knew exactly what he was doing.”

“Okay, so he’s in this horseshoe,” I said. “That’s still a lot of real estate.”

“Get back in the car. We’ve got some ground to cover.”

We spent the next hour driving, first up Trumbull to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, then cutting west through the apartment complexes. We agreed, this felt like about as far north as he’d reasonably live, assuming he had to start his day here, then walk down to the train station looking for trouble.

“This is good,” he said. “See, I wanted to get the lay of the land before we started sending out the troops. Now that we’ve got it narrowed down, we can get officers out here knocking on doors. Get some handbills up on every telephone pole, too, asking for anybody with information to contact us.”

“That would work a little better if people in this city thought we were on their side.”

He looked over at me. “We’re not asking them to snitch on a drug dealer. This is a psychotic murderer. I’m sure they don’t want him living next door.”

I raised both hands in surrender, but I wasn’t convinced. I knew many people in this city saw us as the enemy. It’s something I dealt with every day. On the other hand, it would only take one neighbor to drop a dime on this guy. Just one mindful neighbor. That’s all it would take.

He checked his watch. “Come on, it’s time for roll call.”

A few minutes later, we were back at the precinct. The day-shifters were all sitting there in the room, listening to Sergeant Grimaldi run down the assignments. There was no joking today. The whole building felt different.

Detective Bateman took over for a few minutes, giving everyone the details about our case. Or at least the few details we knew at that point. He wasn’t trying to act like a big shot today. He wasn’t the basketball coach or the clotheshorse or the man with the big smile. He was a homicide detective, and he knew he wouldn’t break this case without help.

“Somebody saw this young man,” he said to the assembled officers. “It would be impossible for that not to have happened. We need to get out there on the streets and we need to find that witness. Officer McKnight and I have identified a likely target area. Now it’s time to start knocking on doors.”

Everyone had the description of our suspect. Everyone had the sketch, as inadequate as it might be. Everyone knew the stakes. This was not your regular murder case.

“The target area overlaps with the Third Precinct,” Bateman said, “so expect to see them. Obviously, we need to respond to every other call, as usual. But the sergeant will be sending extra units to the area throughout the day. So please just be extra observant today. I’d like to tell the family of this woman that we have this man in custody, ideally by the end of the day.”

He thanked them. The sergeant dismissed them.

Franklin came up to me then and put one of those big hands on my shoulder and squeezed. He asked me how I was doing. I told him I was thinking about finding this guy and not much else. He went off to do his thing with his new temporary partner.

“I know I don’t have to tell you this,” Franklin said to me, “but keep your eyes open today, huh? I know you want this guy more than anyone.”

I found the detective at his desk a few minutes later. All of the homicide detectives sat together in a random assortment of desks on the second floor. He was reading something. It took a moment for him to even notice me standing there. He asked me to sit down.

“This is the initial coroner’s report,” he said. “I’m not sure how much of this I should share with the family.”

“What does it say?”

“She was stabbed twenty-three times. There were many defensive wounds on her hands. Meaning she fought back. Also meaning it probably took a while for her to lose consciousness.”

I took my hat off and held it in my hands.

“She was not sexually violated prior to the stabbing,” he said. “But several of the stab wounds were, um… let’s just say, in that area.”

He didn’t say any more. He didn’t have to. He sat there looking down at that sheet of paper. At that string of words that could never really capture what she went through.

“We’re going to find him today,” he said, finally looking up at me, “if I have to personally take you to every house in the city.”

Of course it wasn’t that easy. It never is. By the end of that workday, we had a few dozen leads that went nowhere. The case was once again the lead story on Channels 2, 4, and 7, only now they had a sketch to show and a plea to call the Detroit police with any information. That led to a number of phone calls, none of which panned out. I had been out in the car with Detective Bateman all day. I was still at the station when the calls came in. It was another double-shift day for me.

By the time I went home, it was dark. Elana Paige had been dead for thirty hours.

We went through the same process the next day, although this time there was a backlog of leads for us to follow up on. Information developed by officers on patrol, or tips called in to the station. Toward the end of that day, the detective asked me to accompany him on one more trip. It was starting to get dark now. We were no closer to finding our suspect. The detective was starting to wear his frustration as visibly as one of his tailored sports jackets. God help you if you happened to be standing in his way while he was walking down the hall, or making any noise while he was on the phone.

“Where are we going?” I said. We were heading south, away from our so-called target horseshoe.

“To the train station.”

I thought maybe we were going to start at the beginning again, like we had done the previous morning. But no, he had something different in mind.

He slowed down on Michigan Avenue as we got close to Roosevelt Park. He was looking carefully at the people walking on the sidewalk. There were plenty of men out enjoying the warm summer night. A few women. The female prostitutes couldn’t have been more obvious, but that’s not what the detective was looking for.

When we passed Sixteenth Street, he did a quick U-turn and came up slowly on the opposite side of the street. We were in his unmarked car, so he wasn’t turning any heads yet. The detective let the car roll to a stop. There was a young man leaning against an iron fence. He took a quick look up and down the street. Then he came closer. He stopped when he saw my uniform, but by then the detective had already put the car in park and thrown open his door.

“Stop right there!” he said. It was a voice that carried across the entire park, I’m sure. The kid started to run, but the detective caught up to him easily and pushed him from behind. It’s the perfect move when someone is running away from you. One good shove and your man is eating dirt.

I was just getting out of the car myself at that point. I was thinking how nice it would have been for the detective to share his plan with me before executing it.

“Open the back door,” Bateman said to me. I opened the door, and Bateman threw the kid into the backseat. I wasn’t positive that this car had the one-way locks standard on squad cars, but from the look on this kid’s face, it didn’t matter. He was not about to try anything stupid.

“All right,” Bateman said as he got back behind the wheel, “it looks like we’ve got our murder suspect.”

“What?” the kid said, his eyes wide. “Are you crazy?”

I looked over the front seat at him. He was about the right age, but the similarity ended right there. This kid was at least twenty pounds thinner. His eyes were more wide set, the nose was bigger, the hair was shorter. This was certainly not our suspect.

“What do you think, Officer?” he asked me. “Is this our man?”

“I think he might be,” I said, wondering how I was supposed to play along. “I guess close enough, right?”

“Damn straight,” Bateman said, putting the car in gear. “We just need somebody to go down for it.”

“I wasn’t even around here that night,” the kid said. “You totally got the wrong guy.”

“Ah, so you do know something,” Bateman said, slamming the car back into park.

“No! I don’t know nothing!”

“You just referred to the night of the murder. Because you didn’t ask which murder, I’m assuming you know exactly what we’re talking about.”

“That woman. In the train station.”

“For someone who claims to know nothing,” Bateman said, “you sure have a basic working knowledge of the pertinent facts.”

“The what? No, man, I just know that some woman got killed in the station two nights ago. That’s all I know!”

“You work this park,” Bateman said. “You must have some idea who did it.”

“I don’t work anything,” the kid said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bateman put the car in gear again. “Look, I don’t care what you do here. Drugs, hustling… Right now, I don’t give one little goddamn about any of that. I’m not going to take you down for anything, as long as you start telling me the truth. But if you don’t, we’ll go right down to the station.”

The kid just sat there, not saying a word. Bateman put his foot on the gas and we started to move.

“All right!” the kid said. “I’ll be straight with you, okay? I’ll tell you everything I know. Which is pretty much nothing.”

The car stopped. “Pretty much nothing? What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t know anything. I swear. I didn’t kill her, and nobody I know killed her. Everybody’s freaked out about it. It’s been so strange around here the last couple of days.”

“Strange how?”

“Just strange. Nobody’s doing any business. It’s like everybody knows the place is being watched now.”

The detective looked over at me. He shook his head and took a long breath.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said to the kid. “You get out of the car and you go find everybody who hangs out here. You hear me? Every single one. You tell them that if they have any information about this crime, they need to contact me immediately. My name is Detective Bateman. You got that?”

“Yes.”

“What’s my name?”

“Detective Bateman.”

“No other questions asked. Just like I told you, whatever else they’re doing, I don’t care. I just want to find the killer, and I will personally make sure this place is closed down for you guys until I find him. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, then. Get out and spread the word.”

The kid got out of the car. Turns out the doors weren’t one-way locked. He stood there watching us as we pulled away.

Bateman’s hands were tight on the wheel as he drove back up Woodward Avenue.

“How many years do you have in?” he finally said.

“Eight.”

“You’re gonna take the test?”

“The detective’s test? Yeah, I was thinking about it.”

“I’ve been watching you the last couple of days,” he said. “You’ve got a good way with people. You keep your eyes open.”

“I try.”

“Okay, so let me ask you this. Do you have any problem with what I just did to that hustler? You think you could have done that yourself?”

“I honestly don’t know if I could, Detective. Maybe that’s something they teach you when they give you the gold shield.”

He thought about that for a moment, maybe trying to decide if he should take offense.

“I’m going to call the family tonight,” he finally said. “They’ll want to know if we’re any closer to finding the man who killed Elana.”

“Yes?”

“That’ll be you someday. When you make that call, you’re going to ask yourself something first. You’re going to ask yourself, ‘Am I doing everything I can to solve this case? I mean, no matter what, am I doing whatever it takes?’”

I didn’t answer. He didn’t seem to want an answer yet. Not that night. He drove us the rest of the way back to the precinct without saying another word.

When I finally went home that night, Elana Paige had been dead for fifty-four hours.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

If they had such a thing as an “Indian summer” in the Upper Peninsula, it would probably have to happen in late August, when it’s supposed to be turning cold already. Of course, the whole idea of Indian summer borders on offensive, if you think of it as being just a false summer, in the same way that an Indian giver gives you something and then takes it away. There are plenty of real Indians in the Upper Peninsula, including my neighbor Vinnie Red Sky LeBlanc, and I’ve never heard him use the term. He just says niibin when it’s summer, and then dagwaagin when it’s fall. He won’t actually put a coat on until it’s biboon and there’s a foot of snow on the ground.

He was there at the Glasgow Inn when I got back home that night. Three hours on the road to get to Houghton Lake, then another two and a half hours after leaving the detective’s house. Plenty of time to think about everything he had said to me. I still wasn’t sure exactly what was bothering me, but now that I was home it didn’t seem to matter quite as much. I was back above the bridge, in another world.

Vinnie waited for me to get my cold Canadian and sit down by the fireplace. “How did it go?” he asked me. “Jackie told me you were going down there to get lucky.”

I just about spit out my beer.

“I did no such thing,” Jackie said, throwing his bar towel. “I said he was going down to have dinner with that nice-looking FBI agent. That’s all I said.”

“Five hours down,” Vinnie said. “Five hours back. Ten hours round-trip. If it was just for dinner, I hope it was the best meal of your life.”

“All right,” I said to both of them. “Enough of that. If you must know, it was a nice dinner and that’s all it was. We both realized it’s a bad idea to start something when we live so far apart.”

“I’m pretty sure you could have started and finished in one evening,” Jackie said. “I mean, I know you’re out of practice.”

“I come back home and it’s like I’m in high school again,” I said. “Why did I bother?”

“Give us a break,” Jackie said. “How often do we get to make fun of you?”

“Apparently never,” I said, “because I’m leaving.”

I got up and left my beer sitting there on the little table next to the overstuffed chairs. It was obvious they both thought I was bluffing. But then I opened the door.

“Where are you going?” Jackie said.

“Believe it or not,” I said, thinking this would be the worst thing I’ve ever said to the man, “I’m going to another bar.”

I’d been planning on going there anyway. Seeing the look on Jackie’s face as I walked out that door was just a bonus. I got in my truck and drove over to Sault Ste. Marie. I’d had more than enough time on the road the past couple of days, but I had to make this one last trip before I’d be able to sleep.

I took the main road through the empty hayfields. I rolled down the windows to let in the warm air. It was a dark night with no moon.

Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, or “the Soo” as they usually call it around here, is the last stop on the road to Canada. The bridge was glowing in the night sky as I made my way along the St. Marys River to the Soo Locks. The lighted fountain in the park was on, and there were people walking up and down Portage Avenue. They were out enjoying the night, feeling it a little more than you would in most places for the simple reason that warm nights are a rare thing up here. So when they come, you make damned sure you make the most of them.

I parked the car in the lot next to the Ojibway Hotel. Leon Prudell’s new place of employment was right across the street. The Soo Brewing Company. He was standing behind the counter when I walked in. A bear of a man with comb-resistant orange hair.

Leon has always wanted to be a private investigator, going back to when he was a kid. The first time I met him, he tried to take me apart in the Glasgow Inn parking lot, when he thought I had taken his job away. Later, we were partners. That’s how I ended up with the Prudell-McKnight Investigations business card that I had given to Mrs. King. But that partnership didn’t last long, mostly because Leon’s wife didn’t like the idea of Leon mixing it up with dangerous characters. Much as she loved me, she still blamed me for almost getting him killed. Believe me, Eleanor Prudell is not a person you want to get on the wrong side of.

Leon tried to go solo as a PI. He even had an office over on Ashmun. That didn’t last, either. There’s just not enough business for an investigator up here. Besides, most people up here remember Leon Prudell as the goofy fat kid who sat in the back row, from kindergarten through high school. They don’t know that he’s actually the smartest man in town, and as loyal a friend as you could ever have.

He sold snowmobiles and outboard motors for a while. Then he worked in a movie theater taking tickets and selling popcorn to teenagers. I hated to see him there. Now he had this new gig at the microbrewery. He was learning to make beer, on top of all the other talents you’d never suspect he had. I hadn’t even known he was an accomplished guitar player, for instance, until the night he invited me to hear him record at the studio in Brimley. Typical Yooper, good at a dozen things but won’t brag about any of them.

“Alex!” he said as soon as he saw me. “Get the hell in here!”

He came out from behind the counter and gave me a big hug. That’s almost as dangerous as a hug from his wife.

“What do you think of the place?” he said, gesturing at the shiny brewing tanks. In the front of the store, they had grabbed every old couch and chair and beat-up table they could find and tried to create the ultimate hangout spot. There were a dozen people sitting around, some reading, some looking at their laptops, some eating pizza. All of them had big glass mugs of beer.

“We’ve got the pizza place down the street to deliver to us,” he said. “It works out great for everybody.”

“This is impressive,” I said. “It sure as hell beats the theater.”

“Oh God, tell me about it.”

When he introduced me to the master brewer, the two of them exchanged a meaningful look, like yes, this is the man I was telling you about. The brewer drew a little pony glass from the tap and slid it over the counter.

“Okay,” Leon said, “this is one of our staples. It’s a session ale, as they call it, but it really stands up. Are you ready to try it?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’d be honored.”

I tried the beer. It was pretty damned good. I gave them the thumbs-up.

“I know your beer heart belongs to Canada,” Leon said, “but I’m glad you like it.”

“Hey,” I said, now that everyone was happy, “can I borrow you for a couple of questions?”

“Of course,” he said. “I can use some air.”

We went outside. If there had been a freighter coming through the locks, we could have gone up to the observation deck and watched it, but I wasn’t here to look at big boats. I was here to get his unique take on this thing that had been bothering me.

“Actually,” I said as we walked down Portage Avenue, “before I tell you the details, let me just ask you something on an abstract level.”

“This sounds interesting. Go ahead.”

“Let’s say you were arrested for murder. During the questioning, you ended up confessing to the crime. But for some reason, I have this gut feeling that you didn’t do it.”

“Okay…”

“The biggest question I would have to answer is, why did you confess if you were innocent?”

We walked a block while he thought about it. That was one of the good things about Leon. He wouldn’t give you his opinion until he worked out every angle.

“There are a few possible reasons why I might confess to a crime I didn’t commit,” he finally said. “One, because somebody else has some leverage over me and they’re making me confess.”

“What kind of leverage could they have? You’re talking about going away for murder. What else could they do to you?”

“Prison is better than them killing me. Or, say, killing someone in my family. I’d confess to anything if it meant saving one of my kids from harm.”

“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“Or maybe it was my wife who committed the murder,” he said. “In that case, nobody’s actually threatening anybody, but I know what will happen to her if they find out she’s guilty. So if I’m a good husband, I might confess to the crime to save her.”

I thought back to the stone-cold look on Darryl King’s face. The first scenario was possible, maybe, if somebody was threatening his family. He had a mother who loved him, a little sister, a little brother. As for the second scenario, taking the fall for someone else… I could rule out the mother and the sister. The little brother, from what I could recall, looked like he’d have trouble killing a mosquito.

Would he take the fall for a close friend? Someone he grew up with? That was always possible. But I kept coming back to that face. The way he looked at me from the other side of that fence. Was that the face of a man who would give up his freedom to save someone else?

“Or maybe I confess because I’m being tortured,” Leon said. “That’s actually quite common, I’m sure.”

“You’re just being questioned by a homicide detective,” I said. “You’re not being tortured.”

“There’s more than one type of torture, Alex. You lock me up in a room for twelve hours, you make it boiling hot in the room, you don’t give me anything to drink, then you start yelling at me… I’m sure you could turn that into a real hell. I might break and confess just to make that all stop.”

“I know what you’re saying,” I said, thinking back to Bateman’s account of the interrogation. “I think we can rule that out in this case.”

“Well, then, there’s just one more reason,” he said. “I might confess because I honestly don’t think it matters one way or another.”

I stopped on the sidewalk. We had walked all the way down to the power canal that cut through the heart of the city, and now we were standing just before the two-lane bridge that ran across it.

“Say that again,” I said.

“I confess because I know it doesn’t matter what I say. So I might as well get it over with.”

“Because you’re a black kid in Detroit, and the victim was a white woman from the suburbs. You know they’re going to pin it on somebody, because that’s how you think the whole system works. Besides, you’re one bad man and you can handle it. You can handle prison standing on your head.”

“Now we’re getting specific,” he said. “Someone you know?”

“Someone I helped put away.”

“Now you’re thinking you should try to get him out?”

“I don’t have to. He’s getting released in a few days.”

Leon shook his head and smiled. “Tell me the whole story.”

We turned around and started walking back to the brewery. I laid it all out for him, from the day I chased Darryl King down the railroad tracks to the day we got our break and finally caught him. Then I told him about the confession, as related to me that very day by the retired detective. He stopped me in the same places where I had stopped Bateman. Why had he thrown away the bracelet? Why did he wait until later to throw away the knife?

“This guy sounds like a badass and a half,” Leon said when I was done. “Even if he was only sixteen.”

“That’s why I’m thinking your last scenario makes the most sense. He knew he was going away, no matter what. If he did it or if he didn’t do it.”

“He was an angry young man going in,” Leon said. “Now all these years later, what ends up coming out? Is he older and wiser? Or is he a ticking time bomb?”

“I guess we’re about to find out.”

I thanked Leon and let him get back to work. Then I drove home to Paradise. I was exhausted by the time I went to bed, after all of the miles. I still had this feeling that there was something I was missing. One little piece of the puzzle that, if I found it, would make everything else fit together.

I fell asleep listening to a barn owl sounding its otherworldly complaints. I think I dreamed about diamonds at some point. Floating in the sky, falling in slow motion.

Then I woke up. It was after three in the morning. I opened my eyes, sat up in my bed, and suddenly I knew something. I knew something for a fact that I had only suspected before. Simple as that, just like Mrs. King had told me. This was the bone truth.

Darryl King went to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

CHAPTER TWELVE

On the third day after the murder, I got to the station early again, expecting to do more legwork with the detective. More time on the street, more knocking on doors, more running down anonymous tips, hoping for that one lead that isn’t a dead end.

But no, Detective Bateman had another plan. Or rather someone else had plans for both of us.

He asked me to ride along in his car. He wasn’t saying anything else yet. I could see the tension in his arms and in his face as we left the station and drove west for a few blocks. Then we got on the freeway and headed northwest, out of the city.

“At some point,” I said, “you’re going to tell us where we’re going.”

“Elana Paige’s parents want to have a word with us. Both of us.”

“Detective, you have this habit of not telling me what’s going to happen until we’re already in the middle of it. A heads-up now and then is all I ask.”

“I apologize,” he said. “This trip has me a little worked up.”

“How so?”

“Well, for one, it’s taking us away from what we really need to be doing. And two…”

I waited for him to continue. He was doing eighty miles an hour in the far left lane, his eyes dead ahead.

“And two,” he said, “I don’t like not having any news for them. We’re honestly no closer to catching this guy today than we were that first night.”

“So what are you going to say to them?”

“I was hoping you’d figure something out by the time we got there.”

We crossed under Eight Mile Road, and just like that we were out of the city. All of a sudden you had a mall, and a golf course, and nicely manicured lawns. Grocery stores and restaurants instead of a cheap fast-food wasteland.

The Graysons lived just off of Twelve Mile Road. Exactly four miles from the city line, it might as well have been a different country. There were houses packed in tight on every street, this being one of the original suburbs, where space was at a premium, but the Graysons had one of the larger lots on the northern edge of Southfield, with a long tree-lined driveway.

Detective Bateman parked the car and sat there for a moment, working his hands together. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go talk to these poor people.”

We walked up to a big brick house with tall white columns on either side of the door. The detective rang the bell. We waited for a while. Then a Hispanic woman opened the door. She wasn’t wearing a maid’s uniform, but we saw the dynamic immediately. This woman probably lived down the road in the Mexicantown section of Detroit, came up here every day to take care of the white people’s big house. She probably thought it was a great job. All things considered, it probably was.

She led us through the living room and the dining room. It was all a bit too stuffy for my taste, with too many glass cabinets filled with little figurines and crystal goblets, but I couldn’t argue with how immaculate everything was. This woman obviously did her job well. There was a sunroom in the back of the house. That’s where Mr. and Mrs. Grayson were waiting for us.

It had been three days since their daughter had been murdered. They both looked like they had aged ten years. Mr. Grayson stood up and shook our hands, his eyes red, his grip weak. Mrs. Grayson stayed put in her chair. She was wearing sunglasses.

“Mr. and Mrs. Grayson,” Bateman said, “I’m so sorry to see you again under these circumstances.”

Coffee was offered and declined. We were finally all seated. Mrs. Grayson looked down at her hands. Even with the sunglasses, I could tell she was crying. Mr. Grayson slid over a box of tissues on the glass table. I wondered how many boxes they’d already gone through.

“We asked you to come here,” Mr. Grayson said, “so you could share any progress you might have made at this point.”

“You know you can call me at any time,” Bateman said. “Day or night.”

“I wanted to hear it in person. I wanted you to see how important this is to us.”

The detective started to say something, then stopped himself.

“We’ve thought of nothing else since it happened,” I said. “Literally nothing else, night and day. I know we can’t even imagine what you’re going through…”

“No,” Mr. Grayson said. “I don’t think you can.”

“Granted,” I said. “But you have to know, this is our only mission in life right now. Both of us.”

Bateman looked over at me and gave me a quick nod. “Officer McKnight speaks the truth,” he said. “Every waking hour, it’s all we’re doing.”

“Okay, fair enough,” Mr. Grayson said. “So how far have you gotten?”

“We’ve been running down many leads,” Bateman said. “We still don’t have anything solid. But I’m confident we will.”

“As I understand it, the first forty-eight hours are crucial in an investigation like this. When someone is…”

He paused, took a breath, gathered himself, and continued.

“When something like this happens,” he said. “The trail gets cold very fast after that. Am I correct?”

“In most cases, you want to develop your information quickly, yes. That’s always going to be the best way to go. But we’re confident that if we keep doing what we’re doing…”

“You seem to have a lot of confidence,” Mr. Grayson said. “You had confidence that first night, too. Just how long is that going to last?”

“Until we find out who’s responsible,” Bateman said. “That’s how long.”

“I understand that a reward can be helpful in a case like this. Has that been your experience?”

“It’s often helpful, yes. Were you considering-”

“A hundred thousand dollars,” Mr. Grayson said. “To whoever provides information leading to the apprehension of the animal who took away our Elana.”

Mrs. Grayson stood up at that point, knocking her shin on the coffee table. Without saying a word, she left the room.

“She’ll be okay,” her husband said. “I’ll go see her in a moment. I just want to know what else I need to do to make the reward happen.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Bateman said. “You probably don’t need to-”

“It’s nothing, Detective. Now that our daughter is gone… it’s literally nothing to us.”

“Well, I’ll get right to our PIO. Sorry, that’s the public information officer. He’ll make the arrangements, and we’ll make sure it’s publicized.”

“Today?”

“Yes, today. We can make sure it’s on the news this evening.”

“Okay, good. Let’s make that happen. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go see how my wife is doing.”

He left us there. The maid reappeared and showed us out the front door.

“I don’t know how Mister and Missus are going to survive this,” she said to us. Her eyes were red, too. “Elana meant everything to them.”

“I understand,” Bateman said. There wasn’t much else to say.

“You’re going to find out who did this, right?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we are.”

“Okay, thank you.”

Then she closed the door. The detective closed his eyes and let out a long breath.

“That’s a big reward,” I said. “It has to help, right?”

“Yes and no. It’ll get us more calls, but if we get a thousand of them all at once…”

His thought was interrupted by a car coming up the driveway. It was a silver Jaguar. The driver pulled up alongside the detective’s car. The door opened and out stepped Ryan Grayson. Elana Paige’s brother.

“Sorry, we were just leaving,” Bateman said to him.

“You came with news?” The man was a bit of a mess. More red eyes. I’d pulled over enough DUIs to recognize the loose way he was walking and talking.

“No, we came to talk to your parents about a reward.”

“As opposed to just doing your job and catching this guy. It’s been what, four days now?’

“Hey, let’s not get on the wrong track here,” Bateman said. “We all want the same thing, as soon as possible.”

“Yeah, sure,” the man said. He came up to the front door, took a wrong step, and launched himself right into me. Fortunately, I caught him.

“Easy,” I said. “Come on, you know you shouldn’t be driving that vehicle if you’re impaired. You get in an accident, that’s not going to help anybody.”

“So arrest me.” His face was close to mine, and his breath took away any reasonable doubt.

“I’m not going to do that,” I said. “I’m going to let you go inside and sleep it off.”

“Do you have any idea…” Then he trailed off. He would have sagged to the ground if I hadn’t been holding him up.

“We’re doing everything we can,” I said. “I promise.”

“You want to know what happened to my sister?”

I looked over at the detective.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“I’ll tell you what happened to her. She married the wrong guy. Kinda guy who would let her walk around by herself in goddamned downtown Detroit. He’s out playing golf while she’s being…”

That’s the same line he had the first time I met him, I thought. He’d probably take it with him for the rest of his life, never letting his brother-in-law off the hook.

“I was going to be a fireman, you know that? You know why I’m not?”

“No, why?” I said, wondering just where this drunken conversation might go next.

“Because I’m white. Because I took the test and aced it and had to wait in line so they could hire a bunch of black guys and fill their quota.”

This is going downhill fast, I thought. I really don’t need to hear this, no matter how broken up he is.

But before he could take it any further, his eyes rolled back in his head and then he threw up all over the front porch. I dodged most of it. When he was done doing that, he started crying. We opened the door and walked him back inside. The maid took him into the kitchen to clean him up. We could still hear him sobbing as we left.

When we were back in the car, I found some takeout napkins in the detective’s center console. I used those to wipe off my pant leg.

“Thanks for your help,” he said. “You handled all of that pretty well.”

“It’s all right.”

“You know how to talk to people. It’s something they can’t teach at the academy.”

“There was a lot of anger in him. Not that I can blame him for most of it.”

“I’d stay away from him if I were the husband. At least for a while.”

“I wasn’t about to tell him my wife’s going to Wayne State, too. Which I guess would make me just as bad.”

Bateman shook his head. “You can’t blame the whole city. It’s a good school.”

“Yeah, tell that to him.”

He pulled out onto Twelve Mile Road, heading west. Away from the freeway that would take us back to the precinct.

“Where are we going now?” I said.

“I’ll give you one guess.”

All we had to do was cut down Orchard Lake Road to Eleven Mile and we were at the town house owned by Tanner Paige and the late Elana Paige. It was nothing near as impressive as the Grayson house, but what the hell, they were still relatively young, only married a few years, no kids yet. A little town house in Farmington Hills was all they needed.

“I actually tried to call him,” Bateman said as we pulled into the lot. “Yesterday. Then today. I haven’t gotten an answer yet.”

We went to the front door and rang the bell. It was one those places with four separate town houses in one building. Then another building next to it, looking exactly the same. Then another and another.

Nobody answered the door. Bateman rang the bell again. After a few seconds passed, we both looked at each other, and I could tell the same thought was hitting us at the same time.

“You don’t suppose…” he said.

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

He stepped back and looked up at the second-story windows. “I think the lights are on up there. It’s hard to tell in the daylight.”

I was picturing our grieving husband either hanging in the closet or else lying face up on the bed, an empty pill bottle on the floor beside him. I was wondering if that was a suspicion I should be calling in to the station immediately, so we could get someone out here to open the door. Or better yet, at least find out what kind of vehicle he was driving, so we could check the parking lot before doing anything else.

Then the front door opened.

Tanner Paige stood there in the doorway. We’d already seen some red eyes that morning. Tanner’s set a new standard. He was wearing a robe, sweatpants, and slippers. He obviously hadn’t shaved, showered, or done anything else for himself since that first evening we saw him. You couldn’t have drawn a better portrait of a man who’d given up on everything.

“Mr. Paige,” Bateman said. “We’re sorry to bother you. Are you okay?”

He just looked at us like he’d forgotten the English language.

“Mr. Paige, can we do anything for you? Come on, let’s go inside.”

He pushed the man backward, into the town house. Mr. Paige didn’t offer any resistance. He let himself be led to the couch in the living room. He let himself be lowered into a sitting position.

“Have you been eating?” Bateman said. “What can we get you?”

He gave me a quick nod, and I went into the kitchen. The whole town house was just as much a wreck as the owner. He didn’t have a maid to keep things in order, like his in-laws.

“Mr. Paige,” I heard Bateman say, “you need to have someone here to help you. Is there somebody you can call?”

“My wife,” the man said, finally speaking. “You can call my wife.”

A warm half gallon of milk was sitting on the counter. I opened it and poured it right down the sink. Then I heated up some water and found some tea bags. I wasn’t sure what else to do.

The in-laws all have each other, I thought. I didn’t know why this man was left alone like this. It was clearly driving him insane.

When the tea was ready, I brought it into the living room and put it on the table in front of the couch. Mr. Paige looked at it like he wasn’t quite sure what it was.

“Here, drink this,” Bateman said, picking up the mug. “This might help you feel better.”

Mr. Paige took the mug. He gave it an experimental sip. Then he closed his eyes and began to drink. I knew it was a little too hot to drink this fast, but I wasn’t about to stop him.

When he was done, he took a few deep breaths. Then he opened his eyes and looked back and forth between us.

“Detective Bateman,” he said. “Officer McKnight, was it?”

I nodded.

“You’ll have to excuse me. It’s been a rough couple of days. I haven’t slept at all since… I mean, if I do I just have these nightmares where she’s…”

“It’s okay,” Bateman said. “We understand.”

“I assume you have news,” he said, putting the mug down. “Have you caught him yet?”

“I’m afraid not,” Bateman said. “But we were down the road at the Graysons’. So I thought we’d stop by.”

“I don’t understand. Why come out here if there’s nothing to tell us?”

“Your father-in-law asked us to come out. He’s going to put together a reward for any information leading to an arrest.”

“Is that going to make any difference?”

“It usually does, yes. A large sum of money tends to make people get over their reluctance to call the police.”

“Okay,” Mr. Paige said, nodding slowly. “Okay. So that’s good. That should do it, right?”

“We hope so.”

“Detective Bateman,” he said. “That first night… I think you promised us that you’d catch this guy. Didn’t you?”

“I’m sure I promised you that I’d do everything I can to catch him, yes.”

“No, no. You said, ‘I promise you, we’ll catch this guy.’ Or words to that effect. But that was the message. We’ll catch him.”

“I don’t remember exactly what my words were,” Bateman said, hesitating. “You understand, we can only do what we can do. Some things are out of our control.”

“All right, so if you said that and you don’t really mean it, then promise me something else.”

Bateman looked over at me.

“What is it you want us to promise you?” I said.

“Promise me that if you catch this guy, you won’t take him right to the station.”

“I don’t understand. Where else would we-”

“Bring him here,” Mr. Paige said, grabbing my arm. “That’s all I ask. Bring him here for one hour. So I can have him first.”

Bateman dropped his head and rubbed his forehead. Mr. Paige kept his eye contact with me, his grip still tight on my arm.

“You have to promise me,” he said. “I’m not letting you go until you do.”

“Mr. Paige,” I said. “You know we can’t bring him here. That’s not how it works.”

He kept squeezing my arm, with surprising force for a man who probably hadn’t eaten a real meal in three days. Then he let go.

“God, listen to me,” he said. “I’m so sorry, guys. I’m just…”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’d probably be thinking the same thing, believe me.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “What thing do I do next?”

“Maybe we can send somebody over to talk to you,” Bateman said. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow, too. And the day after that. Okay? We’re not going to let you face this alone.”

“I appreciate that,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I’m the one who has to try to sleep in that empty bed.”

“You should get out of this place,” I said. “Go somewhere else for a while.”

He nodded.

“It’s a great idea,” Bateman said. “Is there someplace you can go?”

“I’ll find a place. You’re right. I’ll just go crazy here.”

He stood up then. He went into the bathroom and slapped some water on his face, tried to do something with his hair. When he came back out, he looked like he remembered how to be a human being, at least.

“I appreciate you guys coming over,” he said. “I guess I needed somebody to knock some sense back into me.”

We left him with a promise to get back to work and to let him know the second we had a break. The detective and I walked back to the car in silence. We got in, he started it, and we headed back to the freeway. Back to work.

“Grief’s a bitch,” Bateman finally said.

I nodded my head once and watched the other cars as we blew by them.

“So that reward…” I said, a few miles later.

“Yeah, I hope you’re ready,” he said. “We’ll get a thousand calls by the end of the night.”

We got the calls. Maybe not a literal thousand, but our phone did not stop ringing for more than a few minutes at a time. Most of them were fishing expeditions. A young man down the street who always acted suspicious. He kind of looked like that portrait in the newspaper.

Some of the calls were more specific. This young man next door, he came running home that same evening as the murder. I haven’t even seen him since then, which is weird because he’s always hanging around front with his no-good friends. Now it’s like he disappeared off the face of the earth.

Those were the calls we followed up on, right away. A drive out to the house in question, a knock on the door. A quick census of everyone who lived there. Your older son, ma’am, where might he be? Oh, there he is right now. Okay, that’s not who we were looking for. Sorry to disturb you. Have a good night.

Then back to the car, trying not to let the disappointment build when it was one dead end after another. We worked every lead we could that night. We picked up more leads in the morning. The photograph I had in my mind was still right there. I knew I’d recognize him the second I saw him. That was the frustrating part. All those doors opening, all those young faces looking up at me. Not one of them was the face I was looking for.

Other murders kept occurring in the city. They weren’t going to stop just because we had one particular case we wanted to solve. They weren’t even going to slow down. It was a hot summer, and there were wars going on over the crack business. The casualties would get rolled into the hospitals every night. Literally every night without fail that summer. You didn’t say it loud, that one drug dealer shooting another was not something that was going to make you lose any sleep. An innocent bystander was another matter altogether. Someone just standing there on the street when a car comes by and the bullets start flying as randomly as raindrops.

The Uzi was big that summer. A compact little machine pistol from Israel, not much louder than a sewing machine. It was the perfect weapon for making a point about who owned a particular corner, and making it dramatically.

Five days after the murder of Elana Paige, we had another high-profile case in our precinct, this time an eighteen-year-old kid from Allen Park who was shot dead over a ticket-scalping dispute outside the Masonic Temple. He’d come down to attend a rock concert, ended up bleeding out on the sidewalk. His assailant had disappeared into the crowd, this time with no police officer around to serve as an eyewitness. Another news story, another grieving family. Another case to eat up some of Bateman’s workday, because there were only so many homicide detectives to go around.

At the end of the week, Sergeant Grimaldi called me aside and told me that the approved overtime for my double shifts could not last forever, and that I’d end up killing myself if I didn’t go back to a normal schedule anyway.

By the start of the next week, it was official. The case wasn’t closed, of course. It would remain open until it was solved, whenever that might be. But there were other crimes to solve, too, and resources had to be put back into balance. Priorities adjusted for maximum effectiveness. Or some words like that. Whatever they were, I didn’t really hear them. Because to me they meant we were all but giving up on ever putting away the man who killed Elana Paige.

I was back on patrol, but I still checked in with Detective Bateman every day. He was usually sitting at his desk, a pile of paperwork in front of him. Often on the phone. Never a smile on his face. Not his usual flashy self at all. Not that month.

“I had to call the family today,” he said one morning. “The Graysons first, then the husband. Naturally, they all wanted to know what the hell was going on. All these days gone by, still nothing.”

He stopped to beat the edge of his desk with a pen.

“I’m not a good liar,” he said. “I’m sure they could hear it in my voice. Everything I was saying was just so useless.”

Later that same morning, he received what he thought might be a solid lead. He called me in from the beat, and we went out together to chase it down. Once again, it turned into nothing. Once again, we were no closer to breaking the case.

So aside from those occasional futile morning trips with the detective, it was back to the squad car for me. Back with my partner, Franklin. He took it easy on me for a while. He could tell I was still wearing the case around my neck.

I kept watching as we drove, of course. Every young black man on the street, that could have been the man I was looking for. One day, I was driving through a neighborhood when I suddenly stopped dead, sending Franklin’s coffee onto his shoes.

“What the hell!” he said.

I was looking at a woman hanging up her laundry in her backyard.

“That’s what made you stop?” Franklin said. “Because all I see is a woman putting out her family’s clothes to dry. Probably doesn’t have a working dryer in the house.”

Out of all of her laundry, the shirts, the pants, the dresses, the towels, it was the one combination that had caught my eye.

“Wait, is it because she’s got some blue jeans on the line?” Franklin said. “Along with that gray shirt? Because I hate to break it to you, but those aren’t exactly exotic items of clothing. I’m pretty sure we could both go home and find that particular outfit for ourselves right now.”

I got out of the squad car and went to talk to her. A minute later, I came back and got behind the wheel. Franklin was still looking around for something in the car to wipe his shoes with.

“Those clothes are hers,” I said. “There are no men in the house.”

“You’re going to drive yourself crazy. You’re going to ruin all of my shoes, too.”

He was right, of course. At night, after a full shift of driving around with my eyes wide open, I’d always make a point of taking the long way home. North from the precinct, through those same neighborhoods in Detective Bateman’s “horseshoe.” Or even east or west, because there was no guarantee that we were one hundred percent right in our initial assumptions about where he was running to. In fact, I was becoming more and more convinced that I didn’t see him running up Trumbull at all. Or if I did, that he took a last-second turn and didn’t cross that bridge over the freeway. He could have doubled back and gone toward one of the neighborhoods next to Mexicantown. So that’s where I drove, down one street after another. Then I’d finally go home to Jeannie.

I wasn’t talking to her enough that month. With everything else that was going on, I should have reached out to her. But I have to admit, I just didn’t do it. I had no idea what to say. I kept it all inside me, and the next day I’d get up and do it all over again.

Two more weeks passed. The kids were all out of school, running around on the streets. I was still on the day shift until the end of June. The days were hot, and the nights seemed even hotter. For the first time, Sergeant Grimaldi did not so much as mention the Elana Paige case during roll call.

I was out in the car with Franklin. I was driving that day. There’s a place called Covenant House, up on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. They take care of young people who have nowhere else to go, and this wasn’t the first time we’d taken some kid up there with the vague hope it would be the right place for him or her. If it’s that or prison for some girl who’s shoplifting food from the 7-Eleven, we’d rather give the House a try first.

When we had dropped her off, I was driving back east on the boulevard. I was looking at every young face on the sidewalk, something I’d probably never stop doing for the rest of my life, especially when I was in this part of town.

“How hard did you hit this street?” Franklin said. “This was still in the target area, wasn’t it?”

“We drew a line here, actually. This is about as far north as we thought our man would come.”

“All these apartment complexes,” he said, looking out the window as we rolled past them. “That’s a lot of doors to knock on.”

“We knocked on every one. Probably twice.”

When I got to Wabash Street, I turned right and headed south.

“Where are we going? Oh, don’t tell me…”

It was late in the day, time to get back to the precinct. But there was no rule about taking the most direct route.

“You must have covered all of these neighborhoods,” he said. “This was right in the middle of the detective’s golden triangle, or whatever he called it.”

“The horseshoe. Between the freeways.”

“The horseshoe, that’s right. You must know every house by now.”

“Pretty sure I do.”

“And yet here we are.”

I came up to the first intersection. Ash Street. I slowed down, thinking to myself, the man is right, we worked the hell out of each one of these streets. This is just a waste of time.

I turned anyway.

We passed Fourteenth Street and the little corner store. Three young men were hanging around out front. I looked them over and then kept going.

We passed Fifteenth Street and then Sixteenth Street. The elementary school was closed up tight for the summer. Some more kids were hanging out on the playground equipment, violating a minor rule but nothing I was going to stop for. I looked them over and kept going.

I came to Seventeenth Street and was about to make the turn. There was only a block more, with just a few houses. Then the street dead-ended at a locked gate, with a parking lot on the other side.

I kept going straight.

“Oh, come on,” Franklin said. “You’re driving yourself crazy. You’re also going to make me late for dinner.”

He was right. I had no argument. But I kept going down that last block, already figuring I’d loop back and then head down to Butternut Street, maybe check those houses on the way because what the hell, as long as I’m there, and why did I even bother because I don’t see a soul on this street now anyway, except for that one woman hanging out the laundry.

I was two houses past before I even realized what I’d seen. I stopped the car.

“What is it?” Franklin said.

“Probably nothing,” I said, swinging the car around. “At least I didn’t ruin your shoes this time.”

I rolled back down the road slowly, the house on our left now, out my driver’s side window. It was a white two-story house with a little porch on the front. A woman was out in the side yard, hanging clothes from a line she had strung from the side of the house.

“Oh, come on,” Franklin said. “Not this game again.”

I watched her take out another pair of jeans and hang it on the line. Next to the other jeans, and the gray shirt.

“I told you,” he said. “You’re going to drive yourself crazy.”

I looked more closely at the shirt. Plain gray. Yes. But the sleeves…

No. There was no tear. Both short sleeves were perfectly intact.

“I’m sorry,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I guess I’ll never look at a gray shirt again without doing a double take. I’ll go my whole life just waiting to see that one torn sleeve.”

I took my foot off the brake and aimed the car dead ahead. To the precinct, to civilian clothes, to dinner.

“Alex, hold up!”

I stopped the car again and looked out the window, just as the woman was pinning another gray shirt to the line. A gray shirt with one ragged short sleeve.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I went back to the Soo the next day. I needed to try out this idea, to say it out loud, hear myself saying it, see someone else’s reaction to it. Someone I could trust.

I parked on Portage Avenue, a busy street on this day, one of the last days of the tourist season. The freighters would keep running until the weather closed them down for the winter, but today was one last chance to walk through the Locks Park without a warm coat. I knew people came from all over to see these seven-hundred-footers go through the locks. I don’t totally understand the attraction, but then I live just up the bay, so I see these boats all the time.

I walked into the Soo Brewing Company. The air was heavy and the front window was steamed up, but enough light came through to make the furniture in the seating area look even further past its prime. Although I suppose the lingering aroma of the hops more than made up for it.

Leon appeared from the back room, dragging a large metal trash can. “Alex,” he said when he saw me, “two visits in two days. I knew this beer would win you over.”

“You need help with that?”

“I got it. But I bet you can’t guess where it’s going.”

I looked into the trash can and saw nothing but a soggy mass of grain. “I’m guessing the Dumpster out back?”

“Hell no. This is from the mash tun. It’s going to the buffalo ranch so they can feed it to the herd.”

“The buffalo ranch.”

“Down toward Pickford, yeah. You’ve seen them.”

“If you say so,” I said. Then I saw his coffee on the counter and realized I desperately needed one myself.

“I’ve got a pot going,” he said, before I could even ask. “I’ll get you a cup.”

A couple of minutes later, we were sitting in the front room on the beat-up couch. The cushions were shot, and I knew it would be a battle to get back on my feet, but for now I was comfortable. I took a sip of coffee.

“You don’t look like you slept a whole lot,” he said to me.

I shook my head.

“I imagine the story you told me last night has something to do with that.”

“I’m not exactly sure how I know this,” I said. “Or why I didn’t know it until now. All these years later. But I believe we put away an innocent man.”

“You believe this based on what?”

“Well, based at least partly on something I thought of in the middle of the night. You’re the one I always come to when I need help seeing something clearly, right?”

“I try.”

“You do more than try. You have a gift for it. You cut through all the clutter that gets in the way and you go right to the one thing that makes it all fit together. I’ve seen you do it over and over again.”

“You’re flattering me now. But go ahead.”

“When I was telling you what happened at the train station, when I was chasing Darryl King down the tracks, you stopped me and you asked me a question. Do you remember what it was?”

He thought about it for a few seconds.

“I asked you,” he said, “why the young man threw away the bracelet and not the knife.”

“Right. Which is exactly the same question I asked Detective Bateman, when he told me the story.”

“What was his answer?”

“His answer was the kid threw away the knife later, after he got home. Or he just wasn’t thinking straight at the moment. Or whatever. It really doesn’t matter, because the whole question is just one of those things that gets in the way of us seeing the situation clearly.”

He nodded his head slowly. “Okay…”

“So that’s what I realized last night. I was asking that question when I should have been asking something else.”

He raised his eyebrows, waiting for it.

“Why throw away anything?” I said. “What good does it do?”

“It’s incriminating. It’s a natural reaction to throw it away. When you were chasing somebody with drugs, you must have seen-”

“Them throw away bags of crack. Yes, I saw that all the time. We’d go pick it up after the arrest, and inevitably they’d say, ‘Oh, no, Officer, that’s not mine. I don’t know where that came from.’”

“So it’s the same idea here,” he said. “The kid had the bracelet, so while you were chasing him he threw it away.”

“Exactly. Now you’ve got it.”

“Got what? We’re back where we started, aren’t we?”

“No,” I said. “Now we’re somewhere else. Look…”

I noticed that he had his cell phone clipped to his belt, so I reached over and grabbed it from him.

“I just took your cell phone,” I said. “It’s much nicer than mine, after all. It probably even works up here sometimes. So now I’m going to leave before I get caught, right?”

“Yeah?”

“But wait, here comes a cop, so I’m going to throw it away.”

I tossed it onto the table.

“It wasn’t me, Officer. I have no idea how that cell phone got on that table.”

He looked at the phone, then at me.

“Now let’s say I just killed you,” I said. “And I happened to take your cell phone while I was at it. Here comes that cop. What am I going to do? If I’m still carrying around the freaking murder weapon, do you think I’m even thinking about the stupid cell phone at that point?”

“No,” he said, grabbing his phone from the table. “No, you’re not.”

“Darryl King threw away that bracelet because he had just committed the crime of taking it, so when I was chasing him he naturally threw it away. He was disassociating himself from the crime. Which I realize sounds like something you would say. Maybe you’re rubbing off on me.”

“If you look at it as a simple robbery, you mean…”

“Then it all makes sense, yes. He does exactly what you’d expect him to do.”

“So he doesn’t throw away the knife…”

“Because he doesn’t have a knife.”

Leon sat back on the couch and thought about this. I could tell he was really working it over. He started to say something, stopped himself. Started again, then stopped.

“But it is possible…”

“If you make up that story in your head, you can make him throw away the bracelet and keep the knife, yes. I suppose in some cases, somewhere, it’s actually happened that way. People do things that don’t make any sense.”

“But in this case…”

“In this case, I think he found a dead body. She wasn’t dead for long, because we know from the forensics that she was killed right around that same time. But he goes up there and he sees the bracelet and he takes it. Because at that point, why not? Then he leaves, and I show up and start chasing him.”

“So he throws it away,” Leon said, still thinking it over. “‘Not me. I didn’t do it. I didn’t take this from that dead woman up there…’”

I just sat there and watched him as he seemed to reenact the whole scene in his head.

“Damn,” he finally said, “that feels right. It really does.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that.”

“It’s completely unprovable, of course. Just one of those things you know in your gut. But now you try to put that up against the fact that he confessed…”

“We go back to that, yeah. Why he would just roll over and give up.”

“Instead of swearing up and down that he didn’t kill her.”

“Well, he’s getting out soon,” I said. “Maybe I can ask him.”

Leon looked at me. “You’re really thinking of doing that?”

“I might. I don’t know. It’ll probably bug me forever if I don’t.”

“That’ll be one interesting conversation,” he said. “But wait a minute. Hold the phone…”

“What is it?”

“Alex, if this Darryl King of yours didn’t kill that woman…”

“Then someone else did,” I said. “I realize that.”

“I would think that would keep me up at night, just as much as the thought of sending the wrong man to prison.”

“Well, thanks. Tonight I’m sure it will.”

“Seriously, what are you going to do about this? Somebody killed her and just walked away.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. Leon didn’t have an answer, either. Not a real answer. I thanked him for listening to me. Then I let him get back to work.

When I was outside again, I found myself walking through the iron gate to Locks Park. Another freighter was coming through the locks. People were standing around watching it, but it barely registered for me. I was too busy thinking about that dead woman left on that balcony in that train station, and a murderer with no face and no name, who never paid the price for his crime.

My honeymooners were gone from the last cabin, so I spent a couple of hours closing that up. Vinnie came by for a few minutes, then left for his shift at the casino. The sun went down, and it started to get cold. The wind was blowing hard by the time I got to the Glasgow Inn. It was just me and Jackie and a few stragglers wandering in on their way up to the Shipwreck Museum. Jackie could tell something was bothering me. He put a cold Canadian on the table next to my chair and left me alone.

I knew Leon was right about not being able to sleep, no matter how tired I was. But when I got back to my cabin, I gave it a try anyway. It was midnight and I was just starting to doze off when I heard a loud knock on my door.

I got up and opened it. It was Leon.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to come over. This can’t wait.”

“Leon, what is it? What the hell’s going on?”

I invited him in. He sat down at my table. He had a folder of papers with him. As he opened it I saw notes and copies of news items.

“I kept thinking about what you told me today,” he said. “I’ve been on the Internet, looking up some stuff.”

“Like what?” I sat down next to him.

“I got thinking,” he said, shuffling through his papers, “that a murder like this is just so brutal… So extreme…”

“Yes?”

“Here’s one,” he said, holding up a printout from a newspaper Web site. “Just read it.”

I took it from him. From the Cleveland Plain Dealer, an interview with the chief of police. The man was talking about an unsolved murder in his city. A woman who had been stabbed seventeen times in a hotel stairwell.

I checked the date. Five years after the murder of Elana Paige.

“I know every murder doesn’t get solved, and stabbings aren’t that uncommon. But look at these, too.”

He handed me two more news items. One from the Chicago Sun-Times, another follow-up on a case that was still unsolved six months after it happened. A woman stabbed to death in a parking structure next to a mall, just outside Chicago. Then the other one, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Yet another unsolved case. Yet another woman stabbed multiple times. This time left outside, in a park overlooking Lake Michigan.

So Cleveland five years after Elana Paige, then Chicago four years after that. Then Milwaukee three years later. Each one of these crimes represented by a single sheet of paper on my table, here in this small cabin hundreds of miles away from any of these crimes, and yet I knew all too well what lay behind the simple facts recited in the news stories. The terrible last moments of an innocent person’s life. Then families torn apart by grief.

“It’s possible there are more,” Leon said. “These are just the obvious ones I found in five minutes.”

“This doesn’t have to be the same person,” I said, spreading the pages back out on the table. “Or if it was for these murders, it doesn’t necessarily have to include Elana Paige.”

“It doesn’t have to, no. But what does your gut tell you right now?”

“I’m tired of my gut telling me things,” I said. “It’s not always right, you know.”

“Sure, maybe it’s wrong this time. Maybe there’s no connection. Hell, if Darryl King really did kill Elana Paige, then you know there’s no connection. Because he was in prison when these other murders were committed.”

“That’s right,” I said, honestly trying to convince myself. Outside, I could hear the cold wind still blowing, driving the last day of summer into oblivion.

“So what are you going to do?” he said.

“I’m going to try to sleep a few hours,” I said, knowing it probably wouldn’t happen. I was already starting to feel sick to my stomach. “Then first thing tomorrow morning, I’m going to call the one person who might have some answers.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I put the car in park. I sat there watching the woman hanging up the shirts and pants and dresses on the clothesline. It was a good day for letting the late-afternoon sun dry your clothes.

“How do we play this?” Franklin said. “Should I call it in?”

“In a minute,” I said. “Let’s just make sure we’ve got something here.”

I turned the car off and got out. Franklin followed me as I walked over to the woman by the laundry basket. She was an attractive woman, maybe pushing forty but obviously not letting it slow her down. She moved with a brisk economy, like a woman who worked hard every day. She probably didn’t have much choice, not with a house and a family that needed food and clean clothes.

She stopped hanging another shirt when she spotted us walking across her yard. It was mostly weeds and crabgrass, but somebody was obviously keeping it all mowed.

“Can I help you?” she said.

“Sorry to bother you, ma’am. We’re just taking one more trip through this neighborhood. I’m sure someone else was here before?”

“Looking for someone who killed that white woman.” Here’s where she could have added her own comment about how black men get shot down every single day and nobody canvasses her neighborhood for them, but she didn’t.

“Yes, ma’am.” Just as I was thinking about what to say next, the back door opened. A young man stepped out of the house. The hair, the high cheekbones. For one tenth of a second my brain was already sending a signal to my right hand, to reach for my service revolver. But then the spell was broken as I put everything else together. This kid was a couple of years younger. Twenty pounds lighter. He didn’t have the muscular swagger of the kid I chased down the railroad tracks. Not even close. This was the kid who got his lunch money taken at recess, not the kid doing the taking.

“What’s going on, Mom?” the kid asked.

“It’s nothing, Tremont. These police officers are just making the rounds again. Like they did the other day.”

The kid named Tremont gave me a shy look and a quick nod of his head.

“How are you?” Franklin said. “You like being out of school for the summer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t know a kid who doesn’t,” the woman said.

How to ask this next question, I thought, without giving myself away…

“Looks like a lot of mowing you gotta do here,” I said to her, nodding at her backyard. It wasn’t real grass, but every square foot was mowed down to something that looked neat and trim anyway. “You got anybody else living here who can help you out?”

“It’s just me and my two kids these past few years now. Please don’t even ask about their daddy, because I try not to use profanity if I don’t have to.”

“Oh, two kids?” I tried to keep my voice even. No big deal, just passing time here. You’ve got two kids, do tell.

That’s when the back door opened again. A little girl came out. She was ten years old, maybe eleven.

“That’s Naima,” the woman said. “Why they need to spend half the day inside watching television, on a nice day like this…”

The girl came over and started picking through the clothes in the basket. She didn’t so much as look in my direction.

“Well,” I said, already feeling deflated, “okay, a boy and a girl. It looks like you’ve got your hands full here.”

“No complaints, Officer. We’re doing just fine. God provides and we are thankful.”

I looked around at what she was thankful for. The house seemed to be in decent shape, but I could see water damage around the top-floor windows. It needed new siding, too. I spotted the lawn mower beneath the one large tree at the back of the property. There was no shed to store it in, so it was rusted out and I couldn’t even imagine it starting, let alone cutting through all of these weeds. Next to that was a weight bench that had probably once belonged to the father, before he ran off. On the other side of the tree a swing hung haphazardly from a thick branch. Not a tire, but a plank of wood tilting a few degrees past level. Tremont jumped up onto it and began to swing back and forth slowly.

Something. There was something in that scene.

Wait a minute. Wait one goddamned minute…

“All right,” I said. “Again, sorry to bother you. We’ll let you finish up with your laundry.”

“No bother at all,” she said. “You gentlemen have a good rest of the day.”

“Thank you,” Franklin said. “It was very nice to meet all of you.”

We went back to the patrol car.

“That obviously wasn’t the kid you were looking for,” Franklin said as he sat down beside me. “I’m glad we didn’t call it in. Get everybody out here, make us look like fools.”

I picked up the radio and hit the transmitter. “This is Unit Forty-one. Is Detective Bateman still in the precinct?”

A few seconds of radio silence, with my partner looking at me, waiting for an explanation.

“Affirmative, Forty-one. Detective Bateman is at his desk.”

“Ask him to wait for me,” I said. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” Franklin said when I put the transmitter back, “are you planning on telling me what the hell is going on at some point?”

“That woman was lying. I’m trying not to take it personally, because I’m sure she thinks she’s doing the right thing.”

“How do you know she’s lying?”

“You saw that weight bench in the backyard?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think our little friend Tremont pumps a lot of iron?”

“I’m guessing it would kill him if he tried.”

“So who uses those weights?”

“The father,” he said. “He didn’t take it all with him. So-”

“So yeah, that’s what I thought, too. Then I noticed something.”

“What?”

“There were weight plates stacked on the ground.”

“Yeah? You got a weight bench, you’re gonna have plates.”

“Did you also notice how well-mowed that backyard was?”

“I did,” he said. “Are you approaching the point here, or are we gonna keep playing ‘I Spy’?”

“If the weightlifter in your family left, would you still keep picking up the plates, mowing under them, and then putting them back on the ground? Every time you mowed? For years?”

He thought about it for a moment.

“Of course not,” he said. “I’d leave them stacked on the bench.”

“There you go. Meaning that there’s someone else living at that house. Somebody who keeps himself in shape.”

He sat there looking at me as I drove back to the precinct.

“Hot damn, Alex,” he finally said. “Just when I thought you took too many foul balls off your mask.”

The mother’s name was Jamilah King. The son named Tremont was in the public school system. So was the daughter, Naima.

So was the other son, at least until recently. He was two years older than Tremont. His name was Darryl. He hadn’t been in school since turning sixteen. He didn’t have a driver’s license. There was no employment record for Darryl King, or any other public record at all, but then that wasn’t unusual for a young black male in Detroit, where it’s so easy to just disappear into the streets.

Detective Bateman looked at the name on the high school transcript, the last official documentation of his existence before he dropped out.

“Darryl King,” he said. “Pleased to meet you, young man. I’d like to introduce you to our SWAT team.”

“I don’t think that’s the right play,” I said. “It’s possible that this kid is inside that house right now, but it’s just as possible he’s somewhere else. If there’s a record for him at that address, it wouldn’t be smart to be there.”

“Look at this transcript and tell me this kid is smart.”

“You know there’s more than one brand of smart, Detective. He’s done a great job of staying off the radar, and obviously he has his mother working hard to keep it that way. You try to flush him out now and he might disappear for good.”

“So what do we do? Watch the house? Wait him out?”

“That’s how I’d approach it, yes.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “That’s the way we do it. Did you see a good spot to park a van?”

“The street comes to a dead end, just a block away. Actually, there’s a locked gate there. On the other side is the back of the parking lot for one of those apartment complexes on MLK.”

“Perfect,” he said. “We put our van in that lot. Use the plumbing and heating sign. Or the cable sign, either one. Have that gate unlocked so we can move through it quickly.”

He picked up the phone to make the arrangements. At one point while he was on hold, he looked up at me with a smile on his face.

“What is it?” I said.

“It’s my new mission in life. Once we catch this guy.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Get you your gold shield. You said you’re taking the test, right?”

“Eventually.”

“Next test, you’re taking it. You’ll do great, of course. The rest is politics. That’s where I come in.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s just catch this guy. Then we can talk about gold shields.”

They rolled the van over that very evening. They parked it in the back of the parking lot, with a direct sight line to the house. We were lucky to have a streetlight on the corner as well, so there was no problem watching for people going in or out.

I was immediately approved for overtime duty again. I spent the evening shift in the van with Detective Bateman. We didn’t see anything happening at the house.

We turned it over to a single night-shift officer while we went home to sleep. Nothing happened. The detective and I were back in the van the next morning, holding large cups of coffee. We’d arranged with the apartment complex to use one of the empty units for bathroom breaks.

It was the first time I’d ever done several consecutive hours of surveillance. My first experience with such a new level of how to do absolutely nothing, with a single thread of anxiousness running through it so that you’re never completely comfortable in your boredom.

The day shift passed. The woman had come and gone, with the daughter, Naima. The son Tremont had come and gone. That was it.

It was evening now. I was going on fourteen straight hours of this, wondering if my sanity would hold if I had to come right back here the next day. They could have done this without me, theoretically. Just wait for a stranger to show his face and then call out the dogs, drag him in and bring me down to identify him. But I was the one person who could pick out this kid before blowing our cover. That was an advantage nobody else could bring to the van.

“I’m gonna be pissed if that kid’s been inside the house this whole time,” Bateman said. “He could be eating pizza and watching television.”

“I admit,” I said, “I’m starting to rethink my original idea. Even if he’s not there, the mother would have to give him up eventually, wouldn’t she?”

The detective looked away from the little observation window. “The long hours are making you delirious, Alex. Like she’d ever do that in a million years.”

I took my turn at the window. It was getting close to midnight. Time for the night-shift officer to relieve us.

Then I saw the headlights.

A beat-up old car came rolling down the street, slowly. It stopped in front of the house. The headlights were turned off.

The driver waited a full minute to get out. When he did, he was just a shadow in the darkness, backlit by the streetlight behind him. But I recognized the body type. I recognized the way he moved.

“Hey, Detective,” I said, not taking my eyes off him. “I thought you said this kid didn’t have a driver’s license.”

“He doesn’t.”

“Well, then we’ll have something else to charge him with.”

He came over to the window and looked out at the house. “Is that our man?”

“He must have missed his mother’s home cooking,” I said. “Let’s go get him.”

We called for backup first. No sense doing anything stupid, now that we had him pinned in the house. As soon as the squad cars rolled up, Bateman dispatched units to all four sides of the house. Then he went up on the front porch and banged on the door.

“Open up! Police!”

Silence.

“Darryl, we can do this the easy way or the hard way! Just come on out and nobody will get hurt!”

The door opened. A figure stood in the doorway.

“Get on the ground!” Bateman yelled, his gun pointed right at the kid’s chest. “Turn around and lie face down! Right now!”

I don’t know if you can give the kid credit for this or not, but he kept standing there, calling the detective’s bluff. Like he was saying, go ahead and shoot me.

In the end, the detective walked right up to him and tackled him. A dozen other officers swarmed the house then, guns drawn. A police dog was barking. The radios were all squawking in unison. I stood back by the sidewalk, watching the pandemonium, feeling oddly out of place. All of these officers belonged to another squad, after all. They were virtual strangers to me. Now they were all working together to back up Detective Bateman on the big arrest.

I was finally called inside to make the official ID. I walked up the porch steps and looked down at the young man lying on the floor. His hands were cuffed behind his back. There was a fresh scrape on his forehead from where he’d been pushed down onto the hardwood floor. He looked up at me.

It was him. This was the man I’d chased down the tracks.

The mother was screaming. The little sister was crying. I saw the brother running down the hallway into the bathroom. If you had anything resembling a human heart, you knew that this was another family devastated by the crime.

Darryl King was picked up off the floor and taken away.

I filled out some paperwork while Darryl King was booked, fingerprinted, and put in a holding cell. He hadn’t said a word yet, not to anybody. Not even to his mother. She had been brought down to the station with her son, because of course you can’t interrogate a minor without a parent or guardian in the room.

I waited around for a couple more hours. The mother was doing all of the talking, telling us all we had made a big mistake. She didn’t want a lawyer for her son. She said Darryl didn’t need a lawyer because he hadn’t done anything. It was a mistake I’d seen play out again and again over the years, and it never stopped surprising me. If the police arrest you, put you in a room, then ask you if you know anything about anything, don’t say a word until you have a lawyer at your side. Even if you know you haven’t done anything wrong.

But with Darryl not talking and his mother playing the same tape over and over again, there didn’t seem to be much hope of a confession before we had to formally charge him based only on my ID and the fingerprints on the bracelet. The sergeant on duty patted me on the back and sent me home.

Jeannie was asleep when I got home. She was gone the next morning when I woke up. It was late. But I had been given that day off.

I made dinner reservations. I was looking forward to having a normal life again. Maybe recapturing something with Jeannie, before it was too late. That’s what I was thinking.

But then it turned out she had a late class that evening. I had totally forgotten about it, and she didn’t want to skip it. I told her I understood. We made a makeup date for that weekend. She told me she was proud of me. She told me that she loved me. That was the last time she’d ever say that.

That was the last day of June, meaning I was rolling over to nights. At least this time I wasn’t doing it coming off a short shift. But when I got to the precinct for the midnight roll call, there was a little surprise waiting for me.

“Bateman got it,” Sergeant Grimaldi said to me. “He got the confession.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I thought we had given up.”

“What can I tell you? He took one more shot at it.”

“Did somebody think maybe they should call me and let me know?”

“If Bateman didn’t do that,” he said, “then I should have. I apologize.”

“It’s all right. Can I see the confession, at least?”

“Sure thing. You know what? Detective Bateman will be here when you get back from your shift. So go find him and make him play the tape for you. I don’t think you’ll have much problem getting him to relive his big moment of glory.”

I could tell Sergeant Grimaldi was still feeling bad about how I’d been left out of the loop when the case was closed. So he made sure I got a big round of applause at the roll call. I tried to wave it off, and then I stood up and told everyone that Franklin deserved some of the credit. Which was the absolute truth. I had driven us there, but I was just about to drive away. Then Franklin saw the shirt with the torn sleeve being put on the clothesline.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said to me when we got in the car.

“Yes, I did. Maybe it’s about time for you to get a gold shield, too.”

He smiled and shook that off. As we rolled out, we knew we had a long eight hours ahead of us. That first night was always the hardest, whether you were short-shifting or not. You’re trying to fool your body into staying awake and alert through eight hours in the dark. Your body knows a lie when it hears one. So you just try to pace yourself, deal with everything that comes up, talk to the knuckleheads, try to keep a lid on things and have as peaceful a night as you can possibly manage.

It was yet another hot summer night. There would be nothing peaceful about it.

There was a disturbance at the hospital on Woodward Avenue. The place was already the epicenter of that city’s hot summer, with gunshot victims being wheeled into the ER every night. It was a job I couldn’t even imagine, dealing with that over and over. Now there was apparently a Code 35 wandering around the ER waiting room. A Code 35 is a mentally disturbed person.

What happened next is a story that changes a little bit every time I tell it. It was all too much to take in when it was actually happening. Years go by and I’ll remember little details for the first time.

We went into the lobby. We talked to the receptionist. She told us that the man had been bothering the inpatients all night. At one point he had tried to hide behind the plants.

She had heard this man lived down the street, in a high-rise apartment building. It was a building Franklin and I had visited, more than once. It was one of those addresses you knew immediately, as soon as you heard it on the radio. Oh great, this place again.

The elevator was broken. We had to take the stairs. Franklin complained with every step. His knee was hurting. We had gone back to the sports banter that night, everything back to normal. Football versus baseball, the endless argument.

The man was named Rose. We went into his apartment and sat him down at his kitchen table. There was aluminum foil on the walls.

In the middle of our pleas for him to stop bothering the people at the hospital, he took out the Uzi from beneath the table. It had been taped to the underside. In that endless minute he had the gun pointed at us, ready to shoot the second either of us moved, he told us he had found it in a Dumpster. Not an unusual find in a summer filled with gun battles over the crack trade.

I hate thinking about what comes next. It’s something I replay in my head and I always try to make turn out differently. But of course it never does.

He shot Franklin five times. He shot me three times. That’s what you can do with an Uzi, before either one of us could even get our revolvers out of their holsters. I lay on the floor, looking up at the ceiling, which Rose had neglected to line with aluminum foil. I can still see that ceiling when I close my eyes at night.

Franklin died on the floor next to me. He left behind a wife and two daughters. I was still in the hospital when they held the service for him, then put him in the ground.

Jeannie told me she would stick it out, but the wife-of-a-cop thing had already been wearing her down. This was much worse, and I can still remember that expression on her face as she looked down at me in my hospital bed. Like this was all just too much. When I finally got back on my feet, I spent a lost year drinking and taking painkillers, and one day, a few weeks into that dark period, Jeannie left me. Although I suppose you could argue that I had already left her, in my own way. I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end.

I was off the police force on two-thirds disability. I never went back.

When I was pulling myself back together after that year, I came up to Paradise to sell off the cabins my father had built. I’ve been up here ever since. But if I thought I could run away from my past, I was sorely mistaken. It always finds you, even in the most remote little town you can imagine. Even in a town called Paradise.

Even now, when I think I’ve finally come to terms with everything that happened in my life, I find something new. I can look back on that last summer in Detroit, past the shooting, to that one last big case I helped solve. All these years later, and somehow it’s just coming to me that I never did get the chance to see that confession, and that this young man may have been innocent of the crime for which he was charged. And worse, that the real killer walked free. Possibly to kill again. Possibly all because we missed something that would have pointed to him.

We could have stopped him then. That was the one thing I couldn’t get over. If we were so goddamned smart, we could have charged Darryl King with robbery and maybe tampering with a crime scene, put him on probation, given him back to his mother, and then gone out and found the man who really killed Elana Paige.

I was cut down by a madman myself, after all. A madman who got caught just a few days later and put away forever. So how could I live with myself now, knowing that in that same hot summer, I may have missed my chance to catch an even bigger monster?