“That woman” was Hannah. “I’ll think about it,” I said, curious as to why Sam was suddenly so concerned about Jaris Slocum’s welfare.

“You have other reasons, don’t you?” he said.

“What?”

“For asking about Reese.”

The boomerang of subjects threw me. All I managed was a solitary, “What?”

“Thought so.”

I had been trying not to sound defensive; apparently I wasn’t succeeding. The truth was I wasn’t that interested in Reese. Reese was a foot in the door. I wanted to hear Sam’s thoughts on anything to do with the Millers, hoping to hear something that would ease my mind about my last meeting with Bob.

I said, “No, no. What you said at Simon’s hockey game got me thinking, and I’ve been wanting to hear what you know about Reese. Not as a cop, just as a parent.”

“Yeah? That’s all you’re wanting to know, what I know as a parent?”

“Exactly.”

“Pardon me if I don’t believe you.” Sam’s thunderous strides punctuated the silence that followed. Boom, boom. Boom, boom. He broke the tension by asking, “What do you know about the Pearl Street Mile? I’m thinking it’s more my distance than 10K.”

The Pearl Street Mile is a summer evening race run around the Downtown Boulder Mall. Compared to the carnival spectacle of the massive holiday weekend Bolder Boulder, the Pearl Street Mile is a relatively sedate event.

“Not much.” I told him what I knew, adding, “You’re going to pass on the Bolder Boulder?”

“No. Just trying to find the right distance for my running style.”

“And you’re thinking you’re built for speed, not endurance?”

My sarcasm was rarely wasted on Sam.

“You take what God gives you, you know.”

Nor his on me.

“I know.”

Sam pulled up short and put his hands on his ample hips. I stopped a couple of strides later and turned back to face him. He wasn’t breathing hard but each exhale temporarily hid his round face behind a miasma of fog.

My neighborhood, Spanish Hills, is a rural enclave of mostly elegant homes-ours was one of the few exceptions-on the hillsides that comprise the eastern rise of the Boulder Valley, not far from the scenic overlook on the Boulder Turnpike. The western rim of the valley is formed by the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and by comparison the vanilla hills of the eastern rim are, well, wimpy.

The spot where Sam paused on our run was on the top of a rounded ridge just north and east of my house. From where I stood, Sam’s right ear was totally obscuring the rock formation known as Devil’s Thumb. I’d always thought that the huge natural sculpture more closely resembled an altogether different part of the devil’s anatomy, but maybe that was just me.

“What?” I asked for about the tenth time that morning.

“You got something. So tell me what it is, get it off your chest. No secrets, just get it off your chest.”

Sam wasn’t being a bully. He was perfectly capable of it, but at that moment he was merely making me an offer. The features on his face suddenly lit up just a little. The phenomenon was illumination, not insight. Far behind me the morning sun was breasting the almost imperceptible arc of the wide horizon of the Great Plains.

Sam and I had been here before. I knew something I’d learned in therapy that I thought he should know, but I couldn’t tell him about it. With a few exceptions, the rules said I couldn’t tell Sam anything a patient had told me. Life had taught me over the past few years that assiduously adhering to those rules was sometimes as dangerous as breaking them. I was confident that I would ultimately decide what to reveal based on that reality, and that with enough creativity I could find a way to tell Sam what I wanted to tell him without the rules ever knowing they’d been sullied.

Below us, the headlights of a car snaked down the dirt and gravel lane that led to my house. In the predawn shadows I couldn’t identify any features of the car. The guy who delivered the morning paper? No, it wasn’t him; he had a rusty, old post-World War II Dodge Power Wagon that sent its bass rumble bouncing through the hills. In its own way, the sound was as distinctive an announcement siren as the syrupy melody of the ice cream man.

I watched the car’s progress until it disappeared behind the contour of an intervening hill. It was probably the nanny that Adrienne, our urologist neighbor, sometimes brought in to watch Jonas at an ungodly hour so she could keep her morning surgical schedule.

To Sam, I said, “Do you guys know much about the house next door to the Millers? The one that’s for sale?”

“Us guys?”

“The cops.”

Sam started jogging in place. The sight of the ruby fabric stretching across his thick thighs made me think of a matched pair of prosciutto di Parma.

He took off down the trail. I did, too. Over his shoulder, he said, “There something you think we-us cops-should know about the guy next door?”

After a few strides I replied, “Not really.”

“Not really? Or not at all?”

I didn’t know enough about the Millers’ neighbor to answer Sam’s question, and I wasn’t totally comfortable with the territory I was taking him, so I asked, “What kind of fighting did Reese have trouble with?”

“If you’ve been watching all that cable then you know what those kids have been through. He’s a good kid.”

He hadn’t answered my question. I was forced to hustle to keep up with him; the pace he was setting for the second mile was way too fast. “You mean been through with his mom?”

Without any hesitation, Sam said, “What do you know about the trouble with the kids’ mom?”

Startled, I realized three things. The first two? The eastern sky was brightening, and the day had begun. Number three? Maybe there hadn’t been anything in the news about the difficulty that the Miller children might have had with their mom, and I’d just told Sam Purdy that I knew something he didn’t think I should know.

Oops. The information wasn’t particularly important. The fact that I had an avenue to know it? Sam would find that important.

The pace that Sam set for the last mile and a half of our run precluded chatting. Despite my usually rigorous bicycling regimen I was seriously winded by the conclusion of our morning jaunt. To my relief Sam was, too.

As soon as we’d come within sight of my house I’d started looking around for the car that had come down the lane a little earlier. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in front of our house. It wasn’t in front of Adrienne’s either.

The hue of the sky told me that we’d arrived back where we’d started shortly before six. I invited Sam in for coffee. He declined. “Sherry has Simon. She’s bringing him back over early so she can get to class. I need to be home to feed him and get him off to school.”

Sherry was Sam’s ex. She was living in Northglenn, a suburb north of Denver, and attending school at Auraria. She’d sold her flower business and was studying to be an EMT. The custody arrangement that she and Sam had negotiated was so complicated that I thought it would require single-variable calculus equations to put it on paper. But the plan worked; I’d not once heard Sam complain about the convoluted logistics.

He opened the door to his old navy Cherokee. In the thin light the dried muck on the lower third of the squat body made the car appear to have a custom paint job. Almost. “How many miles you have on this thing?” I asked.

“Odometer broke at one-forty-seven-something. That was on the day that the Supreme Court decided who our president was going to be. So more than one-forty-seven. Plenty more than one-forty-seven.”

“How old is it?”

“It’s a ’90.” He climbed in. The concave driver’s seat accepted his rear end the way Lauren’s out-thrust hip supported our daughter’s cute butt. Naturally. With just the slightest trace of a smile in his eyes-it was impish, almost ironic-he said, “You know what? That makes this car the same exact age as Mallory Miller.”