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us,’ Missy said. ‘Maybe you won’t be late for appointments now. Maybe you can make notes for yourself.’
    Paris opened the package and was not all that surprised to find a Panasonic digital recorder inside, secured firmly in a huge blister package. Paris had casually mentioned it to Melissa six months earlier, and his daughter never forgot a good gift idea.
    ‘Thanks, honey,’ Paris said, leaning over and placing a kiss on his daughter’s forehead. ‘Tell Mommy thanks too.’
    ‘There are batteries in the box. It’s ready to go.’
    ‘I’m not the least bit surprised.’ Paris opened the card once again, this time finding a little more humor in the sentiment. ‘And who taught you what “depreciate” means?’
    Melissa’s slight hesitation answered the question. Because she never lied to him, she just raised her shoulders and stared at the table.
    ‘Did you buy the card with Mommy?’ Paris asked, somehow thinking he was changing the subject.
    ‘You really just want to know about William, don’t you?’
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘Oh,
please
.’
    He had never been able to fool her. Not with ‘Peekaboo’. Not with ‘Which hand has the gum?’ Not even with ‘Find Daddy in the leaf pile’. Paris avoided her eyes. ‘Is it that obvious?’
    ‘Um-hmm.’
    ‘And he never calls himself Bill?’
    ‘Nope, William. Always.’
    ‘Never Billy or Will or Willy?’
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘And he really has a—’
    ‘Jaguar.’
    Paris thought about his own car for a moment. He stopped. ‘And he’s a pharmacist, right?’
    ‘Daddy. You know he’s a doctor. A pediatrician. And Mom doesn’t love him,’ Melissa toyed with her napkin. ‘He stays over sometimes, but mostly they go out to dinner. Or rent movies and kiss on the couch. But Mom doesn’t love him.’
    Paris wiped his lips, ricocheting between ‘stays over’ and ‘doesn’t love him’. Which to hold on to? ‘I see,’ he said. ‘And does he take you places and buy you things?’
    ‘Oh, Daddy,’ Melissa said. ‘You are
so
jealous.’ She stopped, tilted her head to one side and called for the check. Then she smiled at him – a huge, confident, grown-up, career-girl smile – and Jack Paris’s heart flew into a thousand pieces.
    She would be a woman any minute.
    Then she would leave.
    Before Paris could make it to the office he had a two-thirty appearance before the grand jury, an obligation he surely would have missed had Melissa not called. It was a case involving the mother of a young Hispanic kid who had been killed in a King-Kennedy Estates drug dispute that had nothing to do with him. According to the investigation, about nine months earlier, a few days after the shooting, the dead kid’s mother conned one of the gang members responsible onto the roof of her building and threw him off. Seven stories, on to a jungle gym.
    Witnesses had contacted Paris a few weeks earlier – people who had just remembered that they had seen somebody throw a human being off a roof around that time – and Paris had reluctantly passed the information along to the prosecutor’s office. Reluctantly, because he was not looking forward to building a case against the poor woman. The little fucker she tossed had it coming.
    But he
was
looking forward to meeting Diana Bennett, the new assistant prosecutor for Cuyahoga County.
    Tommy Raposo, Paris knew, had hit on Diana Bennett a few times, with no evidence of success. Then again Tommy hit on everybody. Word was that Diana Bennett did her homework, always came prepared, but was no immediate threat to Chief Prosecutor Ardella Patterson-Jones for the top spot. She was not the overly ambitious type, if Paris could believe his ears, and that’s probably what made her even more appealing.
    He couldn’t wait to see what all the fuss was about.
    It was for that reason alone that Paris stopped home, showered, shaved, and did his very best to wrest the wrinkles from the only suit he had that wasn’t at the cleaners.
    The waiting