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Then he closed it and threw it on his desk with the others.
    So you’re a little bored,
he thought.
It’s your own damn fault.
    The Arthur Pender case, with its sensational premise and its bloody, made-for-TV finale, had made Kirk Stevens something of a minor celebrity. His face—alongside Carla Windermere’s—had appeared on news broadcasts across the country. His name was in newspapers for weeks as the full scope of Pender’s audacious scheme gradually was revealed, and then again as the ringleader’s accomplices stood trial. There were interviews, and award ceremonies.
    And there were job offers.
    There were job offers from police departments all over the map, many of them quite generous. A few of them really tempting. The BCA, anxious to protect its star agent, had offered Stevens a plum position at the head of a newly founded Major Crimes task force. It was a compelling offer, a career-making promotion, and Stevens turned it down. He turned them all down.
    That final Detroit shoot-out with Pender had been an incredible thrill. It had also been incredibly stupid. He’d risked his life like a cowboy, and Carla Windermere’s, too. Put his life in the hands of a madman when he could have stepped back and let the FBI’s hostage team do their job.
    “If you died,” his wife had told him. “If you died, Agent Stevens, this whole family would be ruined.”
    He’d shaken his head, played it tough. “I wasn’t going to die, Nancy.”
    “That man had a machine gun pointed at your head,” Nancy Stevens retorted. “You and your little friend Windermere both could have been shot. And where would that have left me?”
    Newly minted hero he might have been, but Kirk Stevens’s tough act played only so far where his wife was involved. And Nancy had a point. She’d struggled to manage the family alone while he chased Arthur Pender—wrangling the children to doctors’ appointments and volleyball games while keeping up with her own responsibilities at the Legal Aid office, all so her husband could get his rocks off playing action-movie hero.
    “I married a cop,” Nancy told him. “I knew what I was getting into. But this hero stuff doesn’t work. Not for me, Kirk. I need you.”
    He’d thought about it for a long time. Had weighed the Pender-fueled adrenaline rush against the tedious, day-to-day work inside the BCA, and he’d known which lifestyle he preferred. A part of him longed for that excitement again.
    In the end, though, he was a family man first, and his wife and kids needed him more than the BCA did. So he’d sighed and looked Nancy in the eye and told her he was sorry, had turned down the bureau’s promotion, and let the phone ring unanswered when the job offers came through. Soon enough, the calls slowed, and then they stopped altogether, and Stevens had settled into a quiet existence working cold cases and coming home nights. It was a good life, and satisfying, most of the time.
    Except now, one year after Arthur Pender, Stevens could feel that old restlessness returning. It was the same itch he’d felt as a Duluth city cop, looking for something more than convenience-store burglaries and domestic disputes. It was the same itch he’d felt after ten years with the bureau, the itch that the Pender case had satisfied—briefly.
    Stevens leaned back in his chair and stared across the BCA office, letting his thoughts settle on Carla Windermere. He’d seen her picture in the
Star Tribune
a few days back; she was working some bank robbery in Minneapolis, glamorous stuff.
    Windermere looked the same in the picture as she had the last time he’d seen her, a beautiful woman and a competent, kick-ass cop. Sent a little jolt through his body, seeing her like that, along with the same vague sense of guilt. The guilt didn’t make any sense—Stevens’s relationship with his young colleague had never been anything but professional—but then again, neither did the thrill.
    Stevens wondered what Windermere