“How does Ghislaine take that?”

“She just keeps trying harder to please him. She bitches to me, but never to Marc. And when I tell her, ‘So dump him,’ she does a complete turnaround.”

“Like what?”

“She’ll say, ‘He’s changing. I know he really cares about me, inside.’ Ghislaine thinks that because he gives her stuff. But it isn’t anything he cares about, just things he steals. Marc likes to think he’s thugged out.” Lisette rolled her eyes. “Anyway, Gish won’t quit him. She keeps trying to think of something else she can do, to impress him.”

Right. Then she did think of something, something really good, and all it cost was Cicero ’s life.

“Was Marc here today?” I asked.

Lisette shook her head.

“Thanks,” I said.

A more impartial observer than I would stand in the doorway to Ghislaine’s bedroom and look at the pretty objects she surrounded herself with, the sweet pastels, and mistake these things as signs of her innocence and harmlessness. They’d see a girl barely out of her teens, who liked pretty things and clothes and shopping, who kept her room with its Target-brand furnishings in perfect order, and they’d wish her well. They’d say it was Marc’s fault she was so desperate to please him; they’d say it was society’s fault that girls her age gave and gave to the boys around them, provided them with sex and money and support and got nothing back, until they were desperate.

I’d thought all these things too, when I’d first met her. I’d dismissed Shiloh ’s opinion of her as grounded in his streak of judgmentalism. I’d been taken in by her chatter and her infectious warmth, and not recognized something malignant as a tumor that grew underneath it.

The truth was, Ghislaine’s love of pretty things and nice clothes was at the heart of her malice. She wanted what she wanted, and if other people were hurt in the getting of those things, that wasn’t real to her. Because they weren’t real to her. Shadrick was, it seemed, and so was Marc. Everyone else was a resource to be used. Like Lydia, who she’d sold to the Narcotics task force. Like me, whose name she’d used to get out of a shoplifting bust. Like Cicero.

At the front door, Lisette realized her indiscretion. “Listen,” she said, “you aren’t going to tell Ghislaine what I told you about Marc, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I won’t.”

Lisette looked relieved. “What do you want me to do if Ghislaine comes home?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll catch up with her eventually.”

“Hadley.”

“It’s me,” I said, sitting in the car outside Ghislaine and Lisette’s building. “I didn’t find the girlfriend. I’m coming back in. Have you thought about what you want to do next?”

“It’s past six,” Hadley said. “I’m going home.”

“I thought we were looking for Marc,” I said.

“There’s not much more we can do,” Hadley said. “A unit’s been to his place, but like we figured, he didn’t go back there. He’s probably on the run, but his description’s out there. Someone will catch him.”

Hadley didn’t sound tired, but he’d probably been on the job since eight that morning. And he was right. In a situation like this, detectives didn’t cruise around after hours in a radio car, vainly hoping to run across a suspect.

“Look, you want me to wait for you to come in?” he asked.

“Why?”

“Your car’s still at that building, isn’t it?” Hadley asked me. “I could give you a lift over there to get it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I might hang out downtown awhile, see if any likely reports come in. I’ll pick up my car later.”

“Sarah, I know I said something like this earlier, and usually I wouldn’t repeat myself, but I really think you’re working this too hard.” Hadley paused. “Did you know this guy? Was that not your first time up there, when you came by?”

I am sick of lying to people. I just want to tell the truth to someone I like and respect, for a change.

“I was supposed to get evidence so we could charge him,” I said, evading the specific question. “If I’d moved faster, he’d be alive and in jail right-”

“No,” Hadley interrupted. “This is not your fault. Those kids just blew Ruiz out like a match they were done with. It pisses me off, too. I’m angry enough at them without having to think that they’ve caused someone I like to be sitting around a precinct house after hours, eaten up with guilt over what she might have done differently.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I won’t stay too late. I promise.”

I stayed at the precinct for two hours that night, drank coffee, talked with the midwatch people. Garden-variety crimes, or activity that might or might not be criminal, were reported over the radio. Along Nicollet Mall, a panhandler was harassing shoppers a little too hard. At the airport, a child who was supposed to be on a flight didn’t get off. On the 35W, a car was pulled to the side without flashers, the driver drunk, sleeping, or slumped behind the wheel. Eventually, I gave up and asked a patrol officer who was heading out to give me a lift to Cicero ’s building. Before I left, I checked out a handheld radio. Just in case.

The patrol officer and I didn’t talk much on the road, and we didn’t talk about crime at all.

“Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “Look, it’s after nine and the sun’s just set.” He took a hand away from the wheel to point at the bath of golden light in the west.

“Tonight’s the summer solstice,” I reminded him.

“I know,” he said. “But I still can’t get used to it. I’ve lived here almost all my life, and it still gives me a thrill to see the sun setting at this hour.”

When we got to the building, I didn’t look up at the empty eyes of the windows above me. “Thanks,” I said, shut the car door, and walked straight across the parking lot, where the Nova waited for me. I almost sensed a rebuke in its low-nosed posture: the Nova and I were getting separated a lot these days, a pilot and wingman out of sync with each other.

It was just as I was crossing into Northeast that the call came over the quietly crackling radio on the passenger seat beside me. In the careful language of over-the-radio communications, the dispatcher’s voice reported a request for backup, shots fired at a small liquor store up Central Avenue. Not very far at all from where I was heading now.

I pressed the accelerator down.

When I’d heard the dispatcher’s voice, a small shockwave had risen from deep in my body, heat rising to the surface of my skin. It was recognition.

The business wasn’t a pharmacy, but that didn’t surprise me. Whether or not Marc realized that Cicero ’s forged prescriptions were nonsense, he knew better than to try again to cash one in, at least not in the Cities. But Marc needed money, and so he was turning to a profession that he knew. Marc likes to think he’s thugged out, Lisette had said.

He had laid low until nightfall, and now he was moving. One score, and then he’d leave town.

The Nova’s front end bumped down and surged up as the car dove into a low parking lot. There was a single squad car outside.

I got out of the Nova, flashed my shield as I approached. “What’s going on?” I asked.

The officer looked up at me, and I saw that she was very young indeed. I knew her: Lockhart, from the drowning scene, who’d taken me downtown to have my statement taken. Roz had been with her then, but now she was nowhere in sight. Lockhart had graduated to working alone, but she didn’t look quite in control of the situation.

She was trying, though. She responded to my question with a clipped nod, just a lift of her chin, and then cut her eyes toward the store. “I think I’ve got an armed assailant in there,” she said. “The sole customer said he ran when the shooting started. Shooter was a young white male, he thinks.”