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still remember holding Bernie’s father, Reverend Boykins, who wept openly in the hospitalparking lot, Jay saving his own tears for the moment he brought his daughter home, a fall day like this one.
    Officers Young and McFee keep their three-thirty appointment, stopping by Jay’s office at the tail end of their shift. They’re day cops usually, seven to four. Tuesday night they’d been picking up overtime. By sunlight, McFee looks a little older than Jay originally thought, and she’s Latina, no matter the last name. She has her hair slicked back into the same tight little bun. In the entryway to Jay’s office, she hovers, barely filling half the door frame. She’s letting her partner take the lead. Young, to Jay’s dismay, hasn’t written down a single word. He’s holding a notepad and is clicking the top of his ink pen.
    â€œHe was in the room where my files are kept,” Jay says. “Wouldn’t figure a kid like that to be interested in anything he couldn’t trade or pawn before the sun came up.”
    Young nods, a gesture more of appeasement than agreement. “But you said yourself that nothing was actually stolen from the property.”
    â€œThe case files up there go back more than ten years,” Jay says. “It would take nearly that long to go through every photograph and sheet of paper to know if any of it is missing.” The phone on Jay’s desk rings. From down the hall, Eddie Mae hollers his name. Since her eldest grandson installed their phone system, she’s learned to forward calls to his office, but she won’t fool with the intercom, not when it’s just the two of them in the office half the time.
    â€œMrs. Delyvan is on the phone for you.”
    Jay sighs.
    He has to take this call.
    â€œDid you see him take anything?”
    â€œWell, no.”
    â€œHe have anything in his hands?”
    Looking back, Jay can see only one thing: the smile on the kid’s face, a split second before he leaped out the second-floor window. Of course he didn’t see if the kid had any stolen goods in his hands; he was looking for a gun. “If you hadn’t walked out of here without doing a proper search, you might have actually found the kid upstairs, had a chance to pat him down yourself.”
    â€œOne more time, Mr. Porter,” Young says, his thick jaw bricklike and unyielding. “There was no one upstairs. I checked the place myself.”
    â€œI didn’t see any sign of a suspect downstairs either,” McFee says.
    A suspect, Jay thinks, not the .
    Suddenly, the very existence of a perpetrator is under suspicion, as if Jay imagined the whole thing, or made it up, or maybe broke into the office himself, which for all he knows is what the cops are really thinking, the two of them on the verge of opening a separate investigation into a potential insurance scam. He resents the two cops for making him feel crazy, for making him feel that he can’t trust his own eyes.
    The phone on Jay’s desk rings again.
    â€œThat’s the Delyvan woman, Jay!”
    â€œLook,” the cop says. “Officer McFee and I have no problem amending the initial report, Mr. Porter, adding in your description of the intruder and the bit about the misplaced glass.” He delivers that last part as if he were describing the plot of an Agatha Christie novel. This isn’t a murder mystery, he wants it known, just a simple case of breaking and entering, one of thirty or forty on a given night in the city of Houston, depending on the weather. “But I will also add words to support my opinion, based on ten years on the force, that I did not see evidenceof an intruder in your place of business at the time my partner and I were present.”
    Jay holds up a finger, not the one he wants to, mind you, but a single index finger to indicate he needs to answer this ringing telephone.
    â€œMrs. Delyvan,” he says, picking