Danny did not wait around for her judgment. He disappeared in search of a bar that would help him forget what was likely to come: headlines, at least locally, and maybe even nationally, all about an innocent man being sent to jail while a murderer roamed free, followed by dissections of the case and where we had gone wrong. Soon after, my photo would be dredged up and my shooting death rehashed yet again. Cop shot dead while his partner stood by, killing the assailant only after it was too late. It would all be replayed endlessly in the press and on television, and soon a defense attorney somewhere would demand to go through our other solved cases, searching for even more mistakes. I’m sure there were plenty to find. And though no one would say it aloud, every person we had ever worked with would share a single thought: our failure to find the right killer had led to another young girl’s death, and who knew how many other undiscovered kills? The blood of Vicky Meeks was on our hands. Danny would become the Lady Macbeth of our world, wandering through the final stages of his career, unable to wash away the stain.

Yet I thought of it all with complete detachment. What did it matter now? My wife would not be surprised to learn I’d been sloppy. And if she decided to comment, there was nothing, however disparaging to my memory, that she did not have a right to say. I had failed her as miserably as I had failed Alissa Hayes and Vicky Meeks. If it gave her comfort to defend me, so be it. If she needed to condemn me—then so be it, too.

Judgment belonged to the living. All that mattered to me was making it right. All that mattered was that I stay with Maggie and help her find the real killer. Maggie, my angel. My terrible, beautiful, avenging angel. My Maggie.

She could have gone a lot of places once she finished reading the file. She could have headed upstairs to see our commander, even the chief of police. She could have stopped by to see the district attorney and set the wheels of a new investigation in motion, requesting the beginnings of the paperwork avalanche that would be required to free Bobby Daniels, the man doing time for the Alissa Hayes murder.

But what she chose to do astonished me in both its simplicity and in its humanity: she chose to give an innocent man hope.

I did not know where we were going at first. Nor did I care. It was a joy for me to sit beside her in the passenger seat, breathing in her citrus scent, rejoicing in her closeness as she drove through our town’s streets.

It was not a physical attraction. I had left such things behind, which was only fitting for a man who had so misunderstood lust when he was alive, never bestowing it on the woman who loved him, wasting it instead on drunken wrestling matches in mildew-scented motel rooms, disjointed trysts that never brought satisfaction and were only attempted as a way to assign purpose to mutual drunkenness. I was beyond such things now, capable at last of a purer love and filled with unshakable devotion to the object of that love.

Maggie hummed when she was alone. It was the sound of her brain working, I decided, the engine hum of a mind that never stopped seeing, analyzing, concluding, seeking the truth. I listened to the sound, I treasured her nearness, until, within minutes, we had left the last outpost of town, the Double Deuce Bar, behind us and were headed out on a country road toward the county line.

That was when I knew the magnificence of Maggie’s heart.

That was when I knew we were going to prison.