“Anyway, this went on for a couple of years. She’d run away. I’d track her down. Impose tougher rules. Check up on her. She hated me, and I think because I was a cop she ended up not trusting the police. Which killed her in the end.”

“What happened?”

What had happened? Even Zack wasn’t completely sure he understood Amy and all the events leading up to her murder.

“After high school, one of her best friends died of a drug overdose. It hit her really hard. She’d been living with some older college kids at the time and asked if she could move home. I said yes, if she lived by my rules. She was nineteen, and I believed-by her actions-that she really wanted to get out of the life she’d made.

“For a while, things were fine between us. I got her into drug counseling, and it seemed to help. She didn’t want to talk to me about anything, but she’d lost some of the anger and hostility, so I didn’t push her to talk. She started taking classes at the community college. That’s where she met Kirby.”

“The reporter?”

Zack nodded, remembering the day Amy brought Kirby home for dinner, ostensibly to meet him. Zack already had met Kirby, a cocky reporter who’d turned up at every sensitive crime scene like a bloodhound since taking over the crime beat six months previous. Kirby knew no boundaries then, and he hadn’t learned them since.

“What Amy saw in him-I don’t know.”

Maybe he did know. Kirby was attentive. He had seemed to really listen to Amy. He understood her in ways Zack never had. Maybe it was because they were closer in age; maybe because Zack still resented the choices Amy had made with her life. He had been proud of her for cleaning herself up; would he have felt the same had she still been doing drugs? Would he have still loved her?

“They saw each other for a long time. Couple years. I’d sort of grown to accept Kirby as part of our family, I guess. I mean, if Amy was home, Kirby was there. I wasn’t home much, taking overtime wherever I could get it. We had the house free and clear from Mae, but no money, so I needed to pay off my student loans and get Amy through college and pay bills.

“Then everything changed.” Changed? Was it sudden, or gradual? He didn’t know; he didn’t remember much about that time except work.

“I heard about an undercover drug operation at Amy’s college. I was worried about her, because she’d seemed preoccupied. I feared she still had friends into that scene.”

He’d never forget what he’d learned that day. When he started asking around, he was called into Chief Lewiston’s office. And told in no uncertain terms to stay out of it. The sting was a joint federal-state operation to put some big players behind bars. If it was a success, they’d be able to dry up half the drug channels into the city overnight.

“How is my sister involved?” Zack had asked.

Lewiston hadn’t wanted to tell him. But in the end, Zack learned that Amy was playing undercover cop. He told Olivia, “Amy knew everyone in the drug scene. They trusted her. We couldn’t get any of our guys close, so when one of our narcs on campus approached her, she said she’d help.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

Zack shook his head. “She didn’t trust me.”

“She was scared.”

“She should have been. She was playing a dangerous game. If I’d known, I would have stopped her. Or protected her. As it was, I could do neither.”

“Did she die during the sting?”

He took a deep breath, shaking his head. “The sting went off perfectly. Took down everyone they wanted. Cut off major supplies into the Pacific Northwest.

“Amy was gunned down the next morning in a drive-by shooting.”

Olivia reached for him. “Oh, Zack! That’s awful.”

“You know what the kicker is? Kirby knew all along. He knew and didn’t tell me. He claimed he loved her, but did nothing to protect her. In fact, he wrote all the follow-up stories about the sting and Amy’s murder. I can’t look at him and not think that he should have done something different. That I should have done something different. Not just with her playing undercover cop, but raising her.”

Olivia leaned her head on his shoulder. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a parent. To be responsible for the health and safety of another human being.”

“You don’t want kids?”

“No. Never. Though there were a lot of little problems between Greg and me, we divorced because he wanted children and I didn’t. I refused to bring a child into the world. A child who could be raped or killed or hurt. I’ve seen too much pain, too much anguish. My mother killed herself because she lost a child. Brenda Davidson was in deep depression. I don’t blame either of them, really. How can a mother survive when she’s lost part of herself? And how can a mother protect her child every minute of every day?”

“Our line of work can make us jaded,” Zack said. “And your childhood didn’t help. But there’s good out there, Olivia. There are things to enjoy, to celebrate. I was raised in Seattle and couldn’t think of a more beautiful place to live. The entire Pacific Northwest is incredible. To see the mountains on the first clear day after a snowstorm. To take a sailboat through Puget Sound. Go up to one of a hundred lakes and fish for hours.” He paused, ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know. The world is dangerous, but there’s so much to live for.”

“Yes, I suppose there is.”

They sat in silence watching the young children play.

Zack’s phone rang several minutes later and he glanced at the number. “Chief Pierson,” he told Olivia, then answered the call. A minute later he hung up.

“Bruce Carmichael is the man we’re looking for. He died of prostate cancer three years ago. But the warden agreed to let us see his records and talk to some of the guards who knew him. He’s expecting us at one. We’d better jump on it.”

Zack and Olivia spent their first hour at San Quentin reviewing Bruce Carmichael’s prison file.

In 1960 he killed his common-law wife, Miriam Driscoll, a cocktail waitress in New Jersey. He disappeared with his two minor children, Christopher Adam Driscoll, eleven, a child from Miriam’s previous marriage, and Angel Lee Carmichael, six, his own daughter.

He avoided capture for nearly three years until Chris Driscoll called the police from a low-rent apartment in Los Angeles, saying his stepfather killed his sister and claiming to have killed his stepfather. LAPD responded and found Carmichael and Driscoll both covered in blood. Carmichael had been knocked unconscious, but he wasn’t dead. The nine-year-old girl had been stabbed to death. An autopsy revealed that she’d been repeatedly sexually assaulted. After a forensic investigation, evidence proved her own father had molested her.

The fourteen-year-old Driscoll told police that he heard his sister scream and called the operator before going into the bedroom, where he saw Carmichael stabbing her. He tried to stop him, but Carmichael turned the knife on him. They wrestled and the knife was lost under the bed. Driscoll then hit Carmichael over the head with a lamp and he was knocked unconscious. A blood test at the hospital confirmed that Carmichael had been drinking, his blood alcohol level at point-two-five.

Driscoll told police he and his sister had been planning on running away because of the physical abuse, but Carmichael found out about their plans and killed Angel.

Carmichael had a completely different story. He claimed he walked into the apartment and saw Driscoll sitting on the edge of Angel’s bed. He was holding a knife and Angel was dead. Carmichael fought with his stepson over the knife, but he’d been drinking and slipped, and Driscoll knocked him out with a lamp.

Time of death could have supported either story, but the prosecutor believed Driscoll. Not only had Angel been sexually assaulted by her father, but Carmichael had stabbed Miriam Driscoll to death with the same knife.