“He’s been very kind through all this. I’m sure he’ll be happy to work with you. Will you stop in here while you’re in Lincoln?”

“I’d like to do that. I’d like to know more about your husband.”

“He was a really nice man, Agent DelVecchio.”

“I’m not an agent, Mrs. Walker.” He thought it over for a moment, realized he wasn’t sure what his title was. Detective? Just plain Mister? Sam?

“Thanks. I’ll wait to hear from you.”

He hung up, still wondering if, as a private detective, he should call himself detective. He chided himself for getting hung up on something so inconsequential and searched his notes for Christopher Coutinho’s phone number at the Lincoln PD.

The call was answered on the second ring.

“Coutinho.”

“Detective, this is Sam DelVecchio. I’m with the Mercy Street Foundation.”

“Who?”

Sam started over.

“Mercy Street,” the detective muttered. “That thing on TV?”

“You might have seen something on television, but-”

“Big money guy fronting some private agency?”

“That’s the general idea, yes. We’ve been asked to look into a case that I understand you handled last year. Ross Walker.”

“Walker, yeah.” Coutinho paused. “What’s your involvement?”

“His widow applied to the Foundation, asked us to take a look.”

“You mean, see if you can solve the case for us.” The detective’s voice developed a sudden edge. “Thanks a lot. We sure appreciate it. Since, you know, we’re basically incompetent.”

Sam sighed. He’d expected it.

“Look, here’s the thing,” Sam said. “It’s not a reflection on you. But we both know that when a case goes cold, when the evidence isn’t there and there are no leads and no suspects, it takes a hell of a lot of digging to find even one thread to tug on. If you had nothing else to do, no other cases to deal with, you’d probably find that thread, if in fact there’s a thread to be found. But you don’t have the luxury of handling one case at a time for however long it takes. I do.”

Sam let that sink in before adding, “Mrs. Walker came to us, Detective. We didn’t go looking for this case.”

Coutinho fell silent for a few moments, then said, “I appreciate you not rubbing it in that we weren’t able to solve the case. It’s been on my mind since the minute I walked onto that crime scene.”

“Let’s get something out of the way right up front. I’m not looking at this case as one you ‘weren’t able to solve,’” Sam said. “I know that if we are going to make any headway at all with this, it will only be because of the work you did when you caught the call, so let’s look at this as a sort of collaboration.”

“Do you have any idea of just how patronizing that sounded?”

“Yeah, well, it is what it is. I’m sure you guys did a bang-up investigation.”

“You know this how?”

“You got a do-gooder found behind a soup kitchen with a burger stuffed in his mouth, his chest slashed up, someone is going to want some answers. Everyone’s going to be on their best behavior because the case is going to have a profile. The heat would be on you on a case like this.”

“You got that much right.”

“So let’s stop the bullshit, and talk about the case.”

Coutinho’s manner changed and he became all business.

“A call came in around eleven on a Tuesday night. Woman said her husband was missing, that they’d put a few hours in at the mission down on Fourth Street, Pilgrim’s Place. Said she and her husband were volunteers who cooked and served dinner there every Tuesday night, that they usually finished up around ten thirty, but that night, she realized sometime around nine forty-five that it had been a while since she’d seen him. At first, she figured he’d stepped outside to talk to someone and lost track of time-she said he’s a talker-or maybe he was in the men’s room. So they start cleaning up and she asks the others if anyone knew where he was, and no one did. No one could recall the last time they’d seen him. So she’s getting worried and she calls his cell phone, but there’s no answer. So she waits a few minutes more, then calls again. Still no answer. Finally the kitchen cleanup is done, the others are getting ready to leave, and he still hasn’t turned up. They search the house, inside and out, and even go out to the street to see if he’s out there chatting, but he was nowhere to be found.”

“Could I see the statements you took from the people who were there that night?”

“Yeah. There’s not much substance. I mean, they serve a couple hundred people there every week, so during mealtime, it’s pretty hectic. No one has time to look around to see who’s doing what. They’re understaffed and the kitchen is laid out in a sort of L-shape, so you can’t see who’s working there with you. Ross Walker could have walked out the back door at any time and no one would have known, but sure, you can take a look.”

“Who responded to the initial call?”

“Couple of cruisers. They finally convinced Mrs. Walker to go on home, that maybe her husband ran into an old friend or for whatever reason needed to be alone. Both officers said their first thought was that he might have sneaked out to hook up with a girlfriend and things got carried away, but they weren’t about to say that to the wife. She went home around midnight, but called back in around three, and then again at six. By this time, she was hysterical, said she knew something terrible had happened to him. Another car went back to the mission and the officers searched the place from stem to stern without finding a thing. But after the breakfast shift, one of the volunteers took a bag of trash out to the Dumpster, and found Walker slumped behind it on the ground, between the Dumpster and the fence.”

“I’d like to see the crime-scene photos if possible.”

“I can email some of them to you.”

“Hold on for just a minute.” Sam put the phone down and went into the hall, counted doors until he found the one he believed to be Mallory’s. He stuck his head in and said, “I need an email address.”

She recited the address they’d set up for him without looking up from the file she was reading. “Sorry. I meant to give you that earlier. I’m assuming you found your laptop on your desk?”

“I did. Thanks.” He hurried back to his office and repeated the address for Coutinho as he opened the laptop and booted up.

A minute later the email appeared, the photos attached. He opened the document and studied each one carefully.

“Sam?” Coutinho said after several minutes had passed in silence.

“Yeah. I’m here.”

“Sorry, I don’t know what else to call you.”

“Sam is fine,” he said somewhat absently, the photos of Ross Walker drawing all his attention.

He went through them, one by one. “No suspects?” he asked when he reached the last one.

“We had a few of the usuals. The lowlifes that you bring in from time to time then have to let back out on the streets, but you know it’s only a matter of time before they’re back in for something big? You know the ones I’m talking about?”

“All too well. None of them panned out?”

“They were all someplace else doing other things with other people.”

Sam ran through the photos again, the detective waiting patiently on the line for him to finish.

“I thought it was real odd that the cause of death is listed as strangulation when you have all that carnage,” Coutinho said. “The ME said the guy had been strangled before any of the slashing took place.”

“All the blood at the scene, the vic was killed right there. So what are you thinking? That the killer was waiting out back for Walker to come out?” Sam frowned, trying to see it in his mind.

“Basically, yeah, that’s pretty much the way I see it. There’s only one light out back there, over the door. So Walker steps out into the dimly lit area, walks back to the Dumpster, and he’s brought down, strangled manually-there were no ligature marks on the neck, did you notice that? Then the killer drags him behind the Dumpster, stabs him, stuffs the burger in his mouth, and takes off.”