In Ms. Cunningham’s office, bracketed by her parents, Eve had a terrible moment. She was still more good girl than skeezer then-she had not started smoking, much less using pot, although she would learn to do those things over time-and she could not imagine the punishment her father would fashion when he learned what she had done with Graham Booth. Her father always said the punishment should fit the crime, by which he meant it should have a certain Old Testament logic. Would he bind her mouth with duct tape? Make her swallow something even more disgusting? Did her parents even know about oral sex? It seemed unlikely. As Eve understood it, the activity had been pretty much abandoned until the former president made it popular again.

But Ms. Cunningham did not tell. She had meant to, Eve was sure of it, perhaps had thought Eve would volunteer the story, which showed how little Ms. Cunningham knew of Eve. In the end, however, she could not form the words, and Eve certainly didn’t volunteer any information. Ms. Cunningham told Eve’s parents that she was worried about Eve’s thinness, to which her father had said, “You wouldn’t be if you could see our food bill. The girl eats like there’s no tomorrow.”

Her mother put in, “It’s just genes. I was built the same way, as a girl.”

Ms. Cunningham gave Eve’s parents some pamphlets on eating disorders. Her father glanced at them, then stared at Eve. “Do you do this? Eat good food and throw it up? Because that’s just wasteful.”

“No, sir,” she said. It was so easy, being sincere when telling the truth. It almost seemed like cheating. Then again, Eve was pretty sure she could be just as sincere when lying. Ms. Cunningham waited to see if Eve could be bluffed into saying anything, then finally sent the Muhlys on their way.

“That was a strange to-do over nothing,” Eve’s father grumbled. “Making a man come all the way up to the school just to ask why a girl is thin.”

Eve supposed that Ms. Cunningham thought Eve owed her now, which is why she kept asking her questions yesterday. But Eve didn’t see it that way. Besides, people didn’t really want to know the truth. They thought they did, then got mad at the people who insisted on it. It was a lesson Eve had learned over and over in high school. Stick to the official version of things. Say what people wanted to hear. And no one, no one, wanted to hear what she knew now.

Harold Lenhardt had made sergeant twice in his life, first in city homicide, where he got his twenty and got out when the new commissioner proved to be a jackass, and now he was a sergeant in the county, going on five years. Funny, that “new” commissioner back in Baltimore was almost ten years and four commissioners ago. Time flies, whether or not you’re having fun. His colleagues liked to tease him, ask if he was going to retire from Baltimore County when he got his second twenty, then head to Carroll, the next county over, and make sergeant yet again.

“It’s not out of the realm of statistical possibility,” he said this morning, as he and Infante reviewed their notes in preparation for a meeting with higher-ups who wanted to be briefed on the Hartigan shooting. “I’d only be eighty-three when I was done.”

“Qualifying on the range might get tricky,” Infante said. “They say the hands are the first thing to go.”

“Maybe your hands, Infante. Given how much extracurricular activity they see.” Lenhardt made a pumping motion with his fist, one universally understood by men everywhere. Or was it? Did, say, Chinese peasants or aborigines in the outback do the same thing? It was the kind of topic you never saw tackled on the Discovery Channel, but why not? It could be interesting-the rituals of male bonding around the world.

“I thought when Nancy went on leave, you wouldn’t be able to gang up on me,” Infante mock-complained. “I’m still the butt of every joke.”

“Not today,” Lenhardt said. “Today the joke’s on the guy who’s not getting overtime. And that would be yours truly.”

No overtime for sergeants, to paraphrase the title of a movie that Lenhardt’s father had loved beyond reason. Gary Cooper? No, he had been Sergeant York. Andy Griffith? Yes, that was it.

Normally Lenhardt didn’t mind not getting overtime. He saw it as proof of his professionalism and rank. When he worked an eighteen-hour day, everyone knew it wasn’t because he was padding his time sheet. Besides, he was already drawing his city pension, so he didn’t need the money as much as the younger guys. But on a brilliant Saturday morning in June, it was hard to leave his wife at the breakfast table and his children in their beds, hard to know that he had to miss Jessica’s swim meet. Harder still to realize that Infante would make buckets of overtime on this case, whereas all he would get was grief. At home and here, if this meeting was any indication of what was to come. A veritable exacta of aggravation.

He looked over his notes, trying to find the holes that his colonel would be sure to highlight, if only to embarrass him in front of the chief. The first day had been hit-and-miss. After the interview with the dead girl’s parents, he and Lenhardt had run the gun through state police and gotten an owner-Michael Delacorte, with a Glendale address. The parents of the girl at Shock Trauma had readily admitted that their daughter baby-sat for the Delacorte family, although that was before Lenhardt explained why it was of interest. Once informed of the gun, they had started backpedaling like hell. The parents, the Kahns, then insisted it was unthinkable their daughter would have stolen a gun, any gun. “She was opposed to violence,” the mother kept saying, as if this assertion could somehow undo the inconvenient fact of one dead and two wounded, and a Shock Trauma doctor agreeing the Kahn girl’s wound appeared to be self-inflicted if poorly aimed-more off the cheekbone than the temple. ER docs were notoriously bad at forensics, having been trained to save live people as opposed to autopsying dead ones, but even a first-year resident should be able to identify the entry wound. All in all, it was shaping up to be a pretty straightforward event. Girl shoots two, then self. So why the meeting?

And, more relevant to Lenhardt’s way of thinking, why this nagging at the back of his own mind, a sense that things were far from right? He was not an instinct guy, more of a context one, so the problem had to be in his notes. What had he neglected to do yesterday, what were they going to bust his balls for?

The chief finally showed up, not that Lenhardt begrudged him being late to his own meeting. The chief was a good guy, solid and long-lived in a job where most achieved longevity through mediocrity. Lenhardt got along with his lieutenant, too, a city refugee like himself. The colonel-the colonel was another story. Tall and lean with reddish hair, he was one of those guys who could score points only at someone’s expense. He couldn’t put himself up, so he settled for constantly putting everyone else down.

“I was on the phone late last night and early this morning,” the chief began, and he looked haggard enough for it to be the literal truth. “It turns out the father of the dead girl, Dale Hartigan, is good buddies with our county executive, and he wants to be as involved as possible. Those were his lawyer’s words-as involved as possible.”

“Shit,” Infante said, and he was only blurting out what everyone else was thinking.

“He wants to know where the gun came from,” the chief continued. “He wants to know if there are federal charges that apply. The lawyer even asked if cases such as this could ever be death penalty-and then insisted his client would never support that, and it’s his understanding Baltimore County won’t go for it without familial consent. Hartigan is, in short, all over the map. But the one message that came through loud and clear is that he’s going to ride our asses for the duration of this investigation.”