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middle of the night to deal with Winter.
    Mendoza walked slowly across the small room. It was almost three-thirty in the morning yet she was immaculately turned out. No creases in her jacket or pants, no creases in her blouse. Her black patent-leather shoes were shining. The left side of her jacket had been let out to accommodate her shoulder holster. The first time they met, he had her pegged as the girl who’d done the popular girls’ homework in order to fit in at high school. He’d been wrong about that. Carla Mendoza couldn’t care less what other people thought about her.
    Mendoza stopped beside Hitchin and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I can handle this from here, Sergeant.’ Her accent was pure Brooklyn, all hard syllables and menace. Even though she was a non-smoker, she sounded as though she got through a couple of packs of cigarettes a day.
    Hitchin stood up and snorted. ‘Yeah? Good luck with that.’
    Mendoza slid into the seat the detective had just vacated and waited for him to leave. ‘Why were you in the diner?’
    ‘I was getting breakfast.’
    ‘At two in the morning?’
    ‘My body clock’s all over the place at the moment. The middle of the night and it feels like the middle of the day. It’s one of the downsides of spending a large part of your life stuck in airplane cabins.’
    ‘Why O’Neal’s? It’s kind of off the beaten track.’
    ‘I found it by accident a couple of nights ago. I woke up hungry in the middle of the night, so I headed out to find something to eat. I didn’t have any real plan where I was going, I just let my feet find their own way. Because the food was so good, I came back again the next night, and the next.’
    ‘If the food was as good as you say, then why did you kill the cook?’
    ‘Omar,’ Winter corrected her. ‘His name was Omar.’
    Mendoza nodded once. ‘Okay, why did you kill Omar?’
    ‘I didn’t kill him.’
    ‘If you didn’t do it then who did?’
    Winter hesitated. This was the hard part. Omar had been stabbed right in front of him and he was still having trouble believing it was real. ‘How about I tell you what happened and we can work from there?’ he suggested.
    Mendoza settled back in her seat. ‘You’ve got thirty seconds to convince me.’
    Winter took a moment to order his thoughts, then closed his eyes and told her everything. He started at the moment he walked into the diner and went through to the point where the woman disappeared into the night. As he spoke he could see the whole thing unfolding on the back of his eyelids, every single detail. He could smell the grease. He could feel the hot air blasting out of the heater. He could hear Elvis. He finished talking and opened his eyes. It took a lot longer than thirty seconds, but Mendoza let him finish. It was clear that she didn’t like what she was hearing. She was frowning across the table, her head going slowly from side to side.
    ‘And you expect me to believe all that?’
    Winter said nothing.
    ‘You’re supposed to be on a flight to Rome.’
    ‘My flight doesn’t leave until six. And it was Paris, not Rome.’
    ‘And you’re missing the point. You know, I distinctly remember our last conversation. When I told you that it would be good if we didn’t see each other for a very long time, I meant every word.’
    ‘We’re not quite remembering this the same way. See, what I remember is the bit where you told me that you were eternally grateful for all the help I gave you in hunting down Ryan McCarthy. What was is it you said? Anything you could do, just holler?’
    ‘I did not say that I’d be “eternally grateful”. And I would never use the word “holler”.’
    ‘I know how this looks, and it’s not good. But I also know that you know that I didn’t kill Omar.’
    Mendoza shook her head. ‘What I know is that you think like a serial killer. Now, that turned out to be helpful when it came to catching Ryan McCarthy, but it’s creepy.’ She paused a