Next to the building, a decrepit brick church stood in near-ruin, its faded walls tainted by vandals and graffiti. Jose returned to the back of the building and listened at the door Mandy Chase had gone into. The random clank of metal mixed into the occasional bark of orders between people confused him. The door opened easily and the heavy smell of cooking greeted him: frying potatoes, crackling grease, fake eggs, and white toast singed brown and black.

Jose stood at the back of a large kitchen, where several people worked over industrial-size pots with two-foot utensils. Mandy Chase was nowhere in sight. An older black man with tight white curls of hair and plastic-rimmed glasses looked up from his work, wiping the sweat from his face on the white sleeve of his uniform before asking Jose if he could help him.

"Looking for Mandy Chase," Jose said uncertainly.

The man flashed a yellow-toothed smile and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepened.

"Miss Mandy?" the cook said, grinning even harder. "She'll be out there."

Jose followed the direction of the man's bony finger, through a set of swinging double doors and into a large hall, thick with the din of nearly a hundred homeless and mentally ill people sitting on benches along three long rows of tables. At the front of the hall, Mandy Chase stood alongside several older black women ladling out food to the line of tattered people. Armed with a giant spoon, she offered up a smile as well as a couple of words to go with her scoops of rubbery yellow eggs whipped to life from a powder.

Jose walked in back of the other helpers until he came to Mandy. Up close, he could see the dark roots of her blonde hair and the mottled skin on her long neck from too much sun. Still, she was strikingly beautiful and as out of place as a daisy blooming from broken asphalt.

"Anything I can do to help?" he asked.

"Oh," she said, glancing at him with a scoop of eggs balanced on her spoon, "good. Can you get more trays from the kitchen?"

"Sure," Jose said.

To the man who'd directed him in the first place, he said, "Mandy sent me for more trays."

"Helping out? Good," the old man said, pointing to a station beside a stainless-steel sink where a younger man worked over a mountain of dishes with a steamy spray nozzle. "Right over there, and you might as well take them plates, too. They're hungry today. Weather coming and I think they sense it."

Jose placed two stacks of mismatched plates, warm and wet from the water, onto a stack of damp gray trays and carried them out to the service line. He set them down alongside the bins of bent and tarnished silverware and returned to Mandy's side.

"Set," he said. "Anything else?"

"Mr. Jenkins," she said, raising her voice so the toothless man in front of her could hear, "it's good to see you. How's your cat?"

"Linda?" the old man asked, opening his coat to reveal a pouch slung across his naked chest, where an emaciated tabby cat stared out with bulging yellow eyes.

"There she is," Mandy said, scooping out another clump of eggs for the cat. "Get her fed, Mr. Jenkins. She's too thin."

Mr. Jenkins worked his gums and gave Mandy a nod before closing his coat and passing on.

Mandy glanced up at Jose and said, "You're new."

"I'm not really a volunteer," Jose said. "But it's nice to see you helping people."

Mandy's face clouded over. She stopped spooning and studied his face.

"Jose O'Brien," he said, extending a hand. "I used to be with Dallas PD."

"He sent you?" she said, her face crimping with disgust, her big brown eyes wincing.

"Who would 'he' be?" Jose asked.

Mandy turned sharply away, set her jaw, and continued with her work.

"Leave me alone, Mr. O'Brien," she said, bitter.

"Your husband?" Jose asked. "I'm not with him. Not even close. He having you followed after your little thing with Elijandro?"

She ignored him, her shoulders drew back, and the cords in her neck showed. Jose waited for her to turn back, but she didn't.

"I thought," Jose said, "when I saw you here, doing this, no cameras, no reporters, just a bunch of broken-down homeless people, that maybe you're not the rich-bitch wife of a megalomaniac senator."

After a pause, through clenched teeth she said, "That's exactly what I am, so leave me the hell alone."

"I'm not with your husband," he said.

"Everyone is with my husband," she said, scooping out eggs. "Go to hell."

"You knew Elijandro had a wife," Jose said. "I'm helping her. Elijandro had a little girl, too. They've got nothing. Now, some lawyer might have told you that what your husband said about Ellie can't come out in court, but that won't hold up. We know about Nelly hearing the two of you fight."

Mandy looked at him sharply.

"Even without Nelly," Jose said quietly, "I've got a witness who knows Nelly was there and what she heard and I'm told that's just as good. So we're gonna subpoena you, and even the senator can't make that go away."

"What about Nelly?" she asked.

Jose shook his head and said, "She's gone, like you probably know. Look, I didn't think it was going to go like this, then I see you dishing out eggs here and I think maybe you give a shit about someone other than yourself. I've seen wives dipping in with the help before and they're usually not working the soup line in their off-hours."

"Dipping in?" Mandy said, shaking her head. "You're pathetic. If you're not with my husband, you should be. Send him your resume, Mr. O'Brien."

"Your husband is not a good man," Jose said.

Mandy turned and looked him in the eye, her own glass-blue irises burning with hatred as she said, "You have no idea."

"Tell me," Jose said. "Help me. Help Elijandro's little girl."

"I tell you, it'll be the end of my problems, that's for sure," she said.

"How so?"

She looked deep into his eyes and said, "'Cause I'll be dead."

CASEY RACED TO THE COURTHOUSE. SHE PARKED ON THE DECK in back, riffled through her files to find the request for a letter of administration and the complaint, and hurried into the surrogate court clerk's offices. She had to make a couple of calls and use some favors to get the judge out of a conference to sign the letter of administration, but after half an hour she had it and went straight to the county court clerk. After a short wait in line she handed over the complaint along with the letter of administration, cut a check, and got back an index number. Cases were typically assigned the same day, so she left her cell phone number and asked to be called the moment a judge was assigned. With the papers filed, there was now nothing Chase could do to stop her.

That done, she returned to the car and dialed Sharon 's cell phone to find out how the scene with the EPA agents had ended.

"Jesus, you should have seen that guy's face," Sharon said. "I thought his head was going to explode. He said you almost ran him over. His pants were torn, knee bleeding all over. I can't believe you."

"They asked me to leave," Casey said. "I left. They can't arrest you for that."

"A couple city cops showed up," Sharon said. "They listened for a while and headed for the doughnut shop around the corner."

"I got the papers filed, anyway."

"What do we do now?" Sharon asked.

"Call the others. Tell them to think of it like a mini vacation. Let me sort this out," Casey said, "see how our senator enjoys the media crawling up his ass."