I thought back to the case files from the investigation that Danny and I bungled so thoroughly. Would anything in there put Maggie on to Hayes? Would his behavior last night be enough to alarm her? Could Danny somehow be persuaded to raise the issue himself?

Would Danny be of any use at all? He’d been stupid enough to interfere with Maggie’s investigation. What else might he try? And why was he trying to block a new investigation? I had to find out.

Maggie had not told Gonzales about Danny’s appearance the night before. If she had, he’d be gone. You did not defy Gonzales directly like that. Ever. Instead, I found Danny at work, where he had been relegated, sitting at a desk in the Found Property section—a department where his surliness would be tempered by the public’s joy that their stolen possessions had, miraculously, been recovered. Plus, there was very little work, as virtually nothing of value was ever reported as found. Gonzales was smart. It was the perfect place for Danny to wait out the five months until he retired. There would be little asked of him and even less that he could screw up.

But Danny, being Danny, did not intend to make things easy on himself. As always, he loved to invite disappointment. He sat at his desk, in full view of others, reading skin magazines and sneaking sips from a flask in his top drawer, occasionally begrudgingly taking a message from some hopeful victim wanting to know if his bike or lawn mower had been recovered. Few people noticed Danny’s blatantly antagonistic behavior as coworkers had long since learned the best way to endure Danny was to ignore him. Perhaps that was why he had escalated his apathy in recent years, flaunting his disregard for what others thought. He had a deep need for attention, and he did not care if it was positive or negative attention. Ever since his life had failed to measure up to his dreams, he’d been driven by a compulsion to provoke and spread his unhappiness. I knew because I had seen that compulsion take root and grow.

But something else was tormenting him that morning, something beyond being reassigned by Gonzales. Was it the night before, the scene with Hayes, or the barely disguised accusation of cowardice Gonzales had thrown at him? I did not blame Danny for my death. I had died of my own incompetence and no one else’s. That didn’t mean Danny saw it the same way.

I sat and watched my old partner for a while, wondering how well he had investigated Alan Hayes and whether he would ever be willing to admit that he had blown it. Danny’s agitation grew steadily as he sat at the desk, finally becoming so severe I wondered if he was taking something. I‘d known him to rely on speed—or worse—before. He began to flip more rapidly through the pages of his magazine, not even bothering to glance down. Finally, he gave up entirely and threw the porn in a bottom drawer before booting up the department’s computer network. This act alone astonished me. Danny had treated anything related to the computer with contempt, maintaining that all it did was add to his workload. Yet there he sat, searching through computerized records, checking out who in the department was online, following some unknown cyber trail with a determination I had not seen from him in years.

He was tracking Maggie. As he pulled up our old case files, at least the ones that had been computerized, I realized he was checking the dates to see the last time they had been accessed, trying to determine whether Maggie had reviewed each file or not. He was wondering how much she was checking up on him and whether Gonzales had ordered her to do so.

What a fool, I thought. Did he not realize that he was leaving his own trail of having been in those files? That Maggie could just as easily track him in return?

Oh, Danny. That was my partner in a nutshell. Always so busy thinking of his own grandiose plans that he never stopped to consider what someone else might be doing.

I left him and drifted upstairs to Maggie’s desk to wait for her arrival. She showed up in late afternoon, freshly showered, smelling of oranges, crackling with energy. Oh, my Maggie. She did not need me to tell her that something was wrong with Alan Hayes. The encounter the night before had been enough for her. Within ten minutes, she was deep into the computer, bringing up all the data she could find on Alissa’s father, downloading his curriculum vitae from the college site, tracking his lecture appearances at conferences around the world, chronicling all the places where he had studied or taught—in short, compiling a list of everywhere he had been and everywhere he had lived over the past twenty-five years. It was astonishing how much information she pulled from the Internet, her attention so absolute that hours passed before she even noticed that almost everyone else in the detective division had left for home or dinner.

Once again, I wondered what drove her so hard, what triggered her obsessiveness.

Her desk phone rang. It was an old-fashioned model and she stared at it as if surprised that it even worked. “Hello?” she said tentatively. “Hello?” She stared into the receiver, then placed it firmly back on the cradle, thought a moment, and picked it back up and dialed.

“Dad?” she asked. “Did you just try to call me at work?” She was silent. “No, it’s nothing. Not a lot of people have this number is all.” She smiled at his reply. “No, I have not been giving my number out to men. Who in the world told you that?” A shadow crossed over her face. “She’s getting senile. Trust me. You’ll be the first to know.”

She smiled again at her father’s answer before bidding him good-bye. She’d barely hung up the phone when Danny appeared, shattering the quiet of the squad room with his blustery, panting approach.

“So, Princess,” he said, perching on the edge of her desk. “How goes it?”

“Don’t call me that,” she said, without anger. “I’ve worked harder than you ever have to get where I am. And get off my desk.”

Danny looked surprised, but recovered and shambled to his feet. “I was wondering if you wanted to get a drink.”

Maggie looked up from the computer and stared at him without comment.

“I’m not hitting on you,” Danny said quickly.

She ignored him and returned to her computer screen.

“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry. I was an asshole. And Fahey and I were fuckups, I admit it.”

Speak for yourself, partner. I wasn’t the one who’d been responsible for looking into Alan Hayes and the rest of the family.

“Maybe I could make up for last night,” he suggested. “I owe you one.” He sounded sincere. “Really. Thanks for not telling Gonzales about . . . you know, what happened.”

“You mean you showing up drunk out of your mind in the middle of an investigation you’d been expressly taken off and inciting the witness to cause the department trouble?”

Danny blinked. “I don’t know that I’d put it that way exactly.”

“Well, I would,” Maggie said. “And Tommy and Fritz agree. I had a hell of a time convincing them not to say anything.”

Danny’s voice rose an octave. “I know that. And I’m grateful. I just want to make up for it. You can ask me anything about the Hayes case you want. I might remember something that could be of use to you.”

“I’m not telling you anything about the case,” she told him flatly. “Not after last night. You’re lucky you still have your badge.”

“I won’t ask you a thing. It’ll be a one-way street. You need me. You know how it goes. You can pore through the files from now until Christmas, but there are still things we never wrote down. Things that might help you now.”

She stared at him, weighing her desire to avoid him versus her desire to solve the case. The case won. “Okay,” she said. “But we’re going someplace decent with real food. This is my dinner break and I am not spending it getting drunk with you in some dive bar. Got it?”

“Deal.” Danny held both hands up in surrender, but I felt something odd rolling off him, an emotion I could not pinpoint until he looked down at the floor, unable to meet Maggie’s eyes. Then I had it: Danny was afraid. Why?

“I’ve only got an hour, tops,” she warned him.

“Fine.”

“Give me a moment,” she said, grabbing her knapsack and heading for the hallway. “I’ll be right back.”

I think I knew what was going to happen before Danny did. The moment the squad room door shut behind Maggie, I knew he would not be able to resist the unlocked drawers of her desk. Hands trembling, he pulled them open, one by one, flipped through files, lifted stacks of paper, pocketed something small he found in a top drawer—I could not see what—then stopped abruptly when he ran across the old photo that Peggy had given Maggie, the one showing Danny and me posed, rifles high, above a bound suspect. Maggie had stashed it at the back of a lower drawer, behind some hanging folders. When Danny pulled it out and saw what it was, his face went white. He started shaking so hard I thought he might be having a heart attack. He looked down at the photo, then up at the squad room door, stunned by a fear I did not understand. It was only when he heard Maggie’s footsteps approaching that he recovered from his paralysis. Shoving the photo back in place, he shut the drawer and took a seat on the edge of Maggie‘s desk just as she returned.

“Get off my desk, Bonaventura,” she barked at him.

“No problem,” he said. His voice sounded rusty. “It’s just been a long day.”

“Then don’t make it any longer,” Maggie said. “Let’s get this over with.”