She'd kept a stack of photo ID's, mostly from school, work, and health clubs. I remembered seeing Ellen at a few company functions and meetings. I knew what she had looked like, but this was the first time I'd seen a picture of her. She had chin-length red hair and hazel eyes. She had high cheekbones that came down to a rather square jaw. She wasn't pretty in the classic fashion model sense, but she was attractive in an unusual way. She didn't smile much, it seemed, at least not in the photos. I lined them up in chronological order and watched her age all the way up to the last one taken in Boston. The first was a Florida State driver's license issued on her sixteenth birthday. I stared at it for a long time before I was satisfied there was nothing in her smile, nothing in her eyes to portend a life already almost half over.

If people can be defined by the things they keep and the things they let drift away, for Ellen, so specific in everything she did, it would be particularly true. Nothing was in that box that hadn't meant something to her. What surprised me was that they meant something to me, too. Mass cards for the deceased, some with the last name Shepard, reminded me of a worn leather box my mother had kept in the basement, filled with old family photos, black-and-white, stiff with age. It reminded me of a picture I'd found in that box of my mother on her graduation day from a Catholic grade school in St. Louis. She was squinting into the camera, wearing a shy smile. It was the first time I'd ever seen my mother as a girl. I stared at that picture forever. She'd looked hopeful, something I'd never seen in her in real life. It was the first time I'd understood that she had been young once, that she had lived a life before me, one that didn't include me.

Ellen's rosary was in a velvet pouch with a First Holy Communion label stitched in gold. I hadn't thrown mine away, but I hadn't kept it, either. I didn't know what had happened to it. This one was tiny and delicate, made for eight-year-old hands with mother of pearl beads and a simple gold crucifix. I hadn't held a rosary in so long, I'd forgotten what it felt like.

Her birth certificate was there from a hospital in Dade County, Florida. When I pulled out an unlabeled file in the back, a news clip fell onto the cotton sheets. When I turned it over, I was confused for a moment because the woman staring back from the brittle, yellowed newsprint could have been a seamless addition to the chronology of Ellen's ID photos. It could have been Ellen in middle age. But it was a photo of her mother, and this was her obituary.

Anna Bache Shepard had died when she was forty-eight years old. She'd been survived by Joseph T. Shepard, her husband of nineteen years, and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Ellen. Services were held at Christ the King Catholic Church in Miami Shores. I read the clipping a second time, wondering why she'd died so young, but there was no cause given. I understood why after I'd read the only other document in the file, her death certificate. Ellen's mother had committed suicide. She'd hanged herself.

The phone finally rang-at 5:14 a.m. At some point during the night, very late, I'd leaned against the headboard, put my head back to rest, and fallen into a dreamless sleep. When I opened my eyes, the lights were still on, the contents of Ellen's box were spread across my bed, and Anna Bache Shepard's death certificate was still in my hand.

"You weren't sleeping, were you, Shanahan?" Dan used his louder-than-normal car phone voice, and the line crackled.

"Are you on your way home?" I swung my feet to the floor and stood up to stretch, my spine popping in three places. My left arm was asleep, dead weight hanging from my shoulder. It began to tingle as I shook it.

"I'm just pulling into the parking lot of your hotel. I'll meet you downstairs in two minutes."

We made a good pair, the two of us, waiting in the lobby for the coffee shop to open. Dan sat forward on a low couch, knees bumping the faux-marble table that held his notes. His soft, faded jeans somehow stayed up without the benefit of a belt. His white cotton dress shirt was open at the collar and filled with those tiny wrinkles you get from wearing your clothes around the clock. He had the same wrinkles under his eyes.

"Like I told you last night," he said, "it was Little Pete Dwyer and Terry McTavish beating the crap out of each other. Both of them got hurt, and neither one will say what happened." He glanced up and caught me stifling a yawn. "Shanahan, if I'm the one who was up all night, how come you look like shit?"

"I was with you in spirit," I said, remembering the puffy-eyed, slack-haired visage in my bathroom mirror this morning. I'd been tempted to wear my sweatshirt with the hood up, drawstring pulled tight. Instead, I'd put my hair in a ponytail, washed my face, and declared myself presentable. "How bad were the injuries?"

"Terry's got a big bruise on the side of his head and a broken hand. From what I hear, Little Pete's got stitches over one eye, but I never saw him. My dumbfuck shift supervisor took his statement, drove him to the hospital, and let him go home from there. Lazy bastard. He didn't even do a substance test."

"Fighting isn't necessarily enough for probable cause."

"He could have used aggression for probable cause. That's what I did for Terry. I had him pee in the bottle when I took him to the hospital to get his hand set. I can tell you right now, though, it's going to come back clean. Terry McTavish is a Boy Scout."

"What do their statements say?"

"Little Pete claims self-defense all the way." He leafed through his file, found the page he wanted, and pulled it out. "Says he was walking across the ramp when Terry jumped him from behind and threw him to the ground. That's it. Except for the fact that he's a lying sack of shit."

"What's Terry's story?"

"He doesn't have a story. I spent all night trying to crack him. All I could get him to say was he had a good reason to do what he did, and he shouldn't lose his job over it."

"No witnesses?"

"None that are talking."

"Do you think-" I stopped and glanced around the lobby. The desk clerk was in the back, and the lone bellman was across the floor out of earshot. Still, I lowered my voice. "Maybe this has something to do with your drug-smuggling theory. Terry could have stumbled into something, and now he's afraid to say what."

"I don't think so. I've been asking around, some of my off-the-record sources. The ones who will say anything swear there's nothing like that going on at Logan at the moment. I don't know if that's the truth, or if it's because Little Pete is involved, but I'm getting nothing on drugs. Dead battery."

"What does your gut tell you about last night?" I was learning that Dan was always in close communication with his gut.

"I think Little Pete was drunk last night, and whatever happened came out of that."

"Drunk during his shift?"

"It wouldn't be the first time."

"Little Pete's a drunk?"

"I thought you knew," he said.

"How would I know that?"

"It's common knowledge."

"Not to someone who's been here two weeks."

He shrugged. "Sorry, boss."

I had a bad feeling, the shaking, rolling, want-to-throw-up seasick feeling I always got when I heard about airport employees drinking on the job. I could just see Little Pete Dwyer careening around the ramp devoid of motor skills, around airplanes, in a forklift or a loader. God forbid he should smack into an engine or punch through a fuselage. God help us all if he did it and never told anyone. "How big is his problem?"

"More like everyone else has a problem, because when Little Pete's drunk, he's mean as hell. He hit a guy in the head with a hand-held radio once because the guy changed the channel on the TV."