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have day care? Or kindergarten or dance classes or something? His wife doesn’t go to aerobics or have a job or a lunch date with another upper-middle-class young wife?”
    “It bugs you.”
    “A bit. It doesn’t feel right.”
    She leaned back in her chair. “We in the trade call that feeling a ‘hunch.’”
    I bent over my notes, pen in hand. “How do you spell that? With an ‘h,’ right?”
    “No, a ‘p’ for pinhead.” She tapped her pen against her notes, smiled at me. “Check out Sean Price,” she said as she scribbled the same words on the upper margin of her notes. “And death by carbon monoxide poisoning in Concord circa 1995 through ’96.”
    “And the dead boyfriend. What was his name?”
    She flipped a page. “Anthony Lisardo.”
    “Right.”
    She grimaced at the photos of Desiree. “A lot of people dying around this girl.”
    “Yeah.”
    She lifted one of the photos and her face softened. “God, she is gorgeous. But it makes sense, her finding comfort in another survivor of loss.” She looked over at me. “You know?”
    I held her eyes, searched them for a clear glimpse of the battery and hurt that lay somewhere behind them, the fear of caring enough to be battered again. But all I saw were the remnants of recognition and empathy that had appeared when she looked at Desiree’s photograph, the same remnants she’d borne after looking into the eyes of Desiree’s father.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
    “But someone could prey on that,” she said, looking back into Desiree’s face again.
    “How so?”
    “If you wanted to reach a person who was near catatonic with grief, but didn’t necessarily want to reach them for benevolent motives, how would you go about it?”
    “If I was cynically manipulative?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’d form a bond based on shared loss.”
    “By pretending to have suffered severe loss yourself, perhaps?”
    I nodded. “That’d be just the tack to take.”
    “I think we definitely need to find out more about Sean Price.” Her eyes glistened with burgeoning excitement.
    “What’s in Jay’s reports about him?”
    “Well, let’s see. Nothing we don’t know already.” She began to riffle the pages, then stopped suddenly, looked up at me, her face beaming.
    “What?” I said, feeling a smile growing on my face, her excitement infectious.
    “It’s cool,” she said.
    “What?”
    She lifted a page, motioned at the mess of paper on the table. “This. All this. We’re back in the chase, Patrick.”
    “Yeah, it is.” And until that moment I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it—untangling the tangles, sniffing for the scent, taking the first step toward demystifying what had previously been unknowable and unapproachable.
    But I felt my grin fade for a moment, because it was this very excitement, this addiction to uncovering things that sometimes would be better left covered, which had brought me face-to-face with the howling pestilence and moral rot of Gerry Glynn’s psyche.
    This same addiction had put a bullet in Angie’s body, given me scars on my face and nerve damage to one hand, and left me holding Angie’s ex-husband Phil in my arms while he died, gasping and afraid.
    “You’re going to be okay,” I’d told him.
    “I know,” he said. And died.
    And that’s what all this searching and uncovering and chasing could lead to again—the icy knowledge that we probably weren’t okay, any of us. Our hearts and minds were covered because they were fragile, but they were also covered because what often festered in them was bleaker and more depraved than others could bear to look upon.
    “Hey,” Angie said, still smiling, but less certainly, “what’s wrong?”
    I’ve always loved her smile.
    “Nothing,” I said. “You’re right. This is cool.”
    “Damn straight,” she said and we high-fived across the table. “We’re back in business. Criminals beware.”
    “They’re shaking in their boots,” I assured