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After a pause, I ask him to rush the DNA lab work.

  “Everything is rushed these days, which means nothing is.” He stares at me through a cloud of smoke, pleased with this pronouncement.

  We stand around for a bit, soaking up the UV rays and the secondhand carcinogens; then I thank Bridger for the help and get going.

  “That wasn’t much,” Lorenz says.

  “No. But just to be thorough, let’s check with the Mexican Consulate. Maybe somebody important’s gone missing south of the border. If this is the cartels, they don’t seem to think twice before dusting cops and politicians.”

  Lorenz adds yet another task to the end of his lengthening list.

  At the Consulado General de México next to I-59, no one seems sure what to do with us at first. We have to explain ourselves to a series of increasingly senior officials until a small, elegant man in a dark suit and gold watch suddenly appears, ushering us into a small, elegant office. From behind the desk he makes a number of phone calls, swiveling his chair so we can only observe him in profile, speaking softly into the receiver.

  “I am sorry,” he says finally. “But leave your card with me, Detective, and if I am able to obtain any additional information. .”

  Outside, Lorenz pulls at his shirt collar. “Was that the runaround?”

  “No,” I tell him. “That was Old World charm.”

  We stop for an early lunch, wolfing down burgers at a Five Guys chain under the highway-the default choice for Lorenz unless I beg for a change.

  Back downtown we check in on the sixth floor. The daily news has already prompted a respectable quantity of joggers and cyclists who passed through the park yesterday to phone in their details. I glance over the sheets, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary. No one spotted a suspicious-looking man lugging a headless body. Nobody wrote down the license plate of a van with blood dripping out the back door. We’ll have to compile an index of vehicle makes and models, following up any leads we get, but I have a feeling this won’t add up to much. A project for one of our rookie homicide detectives.

  Lorenz comes back from the restroom with his tie loosened and his shirtsleeves rolled up.

  “I’m gonna go hit up Terry Cavallo,” he says.

  “I’ll come along.”

  He shakes his head, but doesn’t object.

  Cavallo is the raven-haired, dark-eyed beauty of Missing Persons, her mess of exotic curls the result not of Hispanic descent-my first assumption-but Italian, which I should have figured out from her aquiline nose. Her boss, Lt. Wanda Mosser, used to be my boss once upon a time, and a couple of years ago Cavallo and I found ourselves partnering up on a missing persons task force that turned into a homicide investigation. In addition to being easy on the eyes, Cavallo’s a sharp detective, sharp enough for Captain Hedges to notice and offer her a position. But she decided she much preferred hunting the living to avenging the dead.

  When we turn up, Cavallo’s in a conference room talking to the parents of a long-missing kid. Through the blinds I see her on the far side of the table, her hair pulled back, her olive-skinned arms exposed by a short-sleeved blouse. At her throat, the flash of the silver cross pendant she always wears. One of her colleagues invites us to wait. After ten minutes, Cavallo ushers the parents out, following them all the way to the security door, maybe even as far as the elevator.

  “You think she’s coming back?” Lorenz asks, checking his watch.

  “Not if she saw you.”

  But she does come back after another minute, briefly staring us down. “The two of you together? This can’t be good.”

  “We might surprise you,” I say. “Do you happen to be looking for any unscarred, untattooed, mid-thirties white boys at the moment?”

  “When am I not?” She frowns at her own joke, then forces a laugh. “Just kidding. You wanna come to my desk and take a look?”

  “Lead the way.”

  Maybe she’s still on edge from the conversation with the parents, but there’s something constrained in Cavallo’s voice. The cheap joke, the forced laugh. There’s always been a certain reserve about her, an aloofness-a necessary defense mechanism looking like she does in a shark tank full of red-blooded cops. But we’ve worked together enough for her to drop that around me. In my book, we’re friends. Maybe having Lorenz here with me is ruining the vibe.

  “Everything all right?” I ask under my breath.

  She brushes the question off. “Everything’s fine.”

  The last time I saw Cavallo was months ago, when her husband came back from his last tour in Afghanistan. They threw a party at their new house, which she’d finally managed to unpack. Smiling and brown from the sun, her husband struck me as a great guy. And she hung from his broad shoulder like a schoolgirl showing off her first boyfriend.

  Sometimes, though, in the middle of conversation, he’d stare blankly into the distance while she talked. Not looking haunted exactly-he’d volunteered for tour after tour-but like he might still be over there in his mind, like he might go out on patrol once the rest of us had left, his cheeks black with face paint and his.50 caliber Barrett slung for action.

  Later in the evening I got Cavallo alone and asked how things were going. She let out a long and satisfied sigh, but then her eyes clouded. “I’m just happy he’s finally home.” Her voice sounded like it did just now when she told me everything was fine.

  After Lorenz explains about our John Doe, she sits at her terminal and punches up a couple of files. None of them look like a match. Either they’re too old or the descriptions aren’t right. Cavallo’s missing persons, unlike JD, do have distinguishing marks, tattoos, and other identifiers. Just to be thorough, she digs through the filing cabinets near her cubicle and shows us a few more photos. Nothing.

  “Well,” Lorenz says, “it was worth a shot.”

  As we head out, I fall a little behind him, pulling Cavallo closer. “Are you sure everything’s all right? You seem a little-”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Tense.”

  She repeats the word, tight-lipped: “Tense.”

  “Is everything all right at home? We haven’t seen you guys in a while-”

  “March,” she says. “What’s the deal? You walk in out of nowhere and decide I’m acting strange? You’re the one who asked for help, not me. As always.”

  “Is that what this is about? It seemed like a good lead to follow up, if you ask me.”

  “Never mind.” She touches my arm. “Forget I said anything. You’re right. I’m all worked up. It’s nothing to do with you-and it’s nothing to do with my personal life, okay?” She smiles. “But your fatherly concern is duly noted.”

  “Fatherly. Ouch.”

  “Anyway, how is Charlotte? You’re right, we haven’t seen each other since. . It was the party, right?”

  I nod. “Charlotte’s out of town again. The new job.”

  “Ah.”

  My wife, Charlotte, after nearly a decade of working from home, marking up legal documents for her old partners, accepted a new position at one of the big law firms, almost doubling both her salary and the amount of time she spends on the road. She’s traveled so much in the last six months that we went to the Galleria on her birthday and bought all new luggage, a shiny set of ribbed aluminum rolling cases like something out of a sixties science fiction movie. And we bought new phones as well, with cameras front and back so we can talk face-to-face from opposite ends of the globe, something we tried once or twice early on before lapsing into the occasional old-fashioned phone call.

  Over by the exit Lorenz taps his watch.

  “The clock’s ticking,” Cavallo says.

  “It always is.”

  I catch up with my partner, giving Cavallo a last look from the threshold. She’s standing where I left her, but with her back resolutely turned. Something’s not right between us.

  The afternoon grinds on, one false lead after another. Then the shift ends and the next one starts and it’s the same all
over again. We have a body without an identification, no witnesses, and no likely avenues to pursue. So we pursue the unlikely ones, roping in the rest of the squad in twos and threes, exhausting leads, exhausting detectives, exhausting the patience of my long-suffering lieutenant.

  “There’s always the DNA,” Lorenz keeps saying.

  Yes, there’s always that. The long shot chance that somewhere in the FBI’s massive computerized index, there’s a strand of chromosomes waiting to be matched. Even that would only get us so far. Knowing a victim’s name doesn’t automatically unmask his killer. It might, though. Why bother making the identification so difficult, removing the head and mutilating the hands, if having a name won’t make any difference?

  By the end of the week I’m starting each day with a conference in Bascombe’s office.

  “Whatever you need,” he says. “Anything at all. ‘You have not because you ask not.’”

  Which is the first time I can remember him quoting anything other than the criminal code.

  “All I need is a hit on those test results.”

  “You’re making the calls? I’m making them, too. Believe me, the pressure’s on to push this thing through the system. I don’t know what the holdup is, but I’ll call again right now if you think it’ll help.”

  He reaches for the phone, then waits for my answer.

  “It can’t hurt,” I say.

  But it doesn’t help. He puts the phone down five minutes later, giving me a shrug. “We’ll get the results when we get the results. Maybe something by shift’s end.”

  So I check back with him a few hours later before clocking out, just to see if anything’s come through. He looks me up and down, deciding what to say. “Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll go at it fresh again in the morning.”

  “All right.”

  He glances at the monitor on his desk. “I’m thinking, while we’re waiting on the DNA to come back, it’s not a bad idea if you and Lorenz catch up on your other open cases. We’re not giving up on this, March. We just need to use our time as efficiently as possible.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In other words, barring intervention from on high, JD will keep clocking time in the refrigerator while Lorenz and I move on to other cases. It’s not the first time I’ve had to put a victim on the back burner, not the first time a case has gone cold on me. They say there are things you don’t get used to, like seeing a headless corpse or an autopsy in progress, but the fact is you get used to them just fine. They even become a little fascinating from a professional standpoint. What I can never get used to is this: giving up. Gathering all the paper and filing it away for what might be the last time.

  Whoever he was, this man was strapped to a chair and tortured, was put through such agony that his young healthy heart finally gave out. What would he have thought if he’d known in those final moments that after a handful of days, I’d be consigning him to a cardboard filing box and preparing myself mentally to move on?

  I take the elevator down to the secure garage, tracing the way back to where I left my car. Sliding between two vehicles, my foot catches on a drain grate and twists. The old pain, fading steadily every day since the night of my fall, stabs through me. I steady myself against the hood of a car and try to shake it off. It feels just like a knife, or maybe a surgeon’s scalpel. And then it dulls down to a throb. I take a step and it’s still there. There, but manageable.

  Not so bad that I can’t function.

  A pain I can live with.

  CHAPTER 3

  When I’m not working, I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. The house is too empty, too quiet with Charlotte gone. The first time she left-a weeklong stay on the East Coast-I’d find myself opening drawers and checking that her things were still there. An hour later, one of her silk slips would still be clutched in my hand, or a little piece of jewelry, and I’d be sitting in the dark thinking about. . nothing.

  “Go visit the Robbs,” Charlotte would say over the phone, sensing something wasn’t right, but not wanting to probe too deeply into what. Her new position made her happy, more than she’d ever anticipated, and by instinct she steered away from any conversation which might call the decision into question.

  In front of the muted television I try calling Charlotte. She’s in London now for some kind of high-level negotiation meant to last through the weekend, after which her plan is to pick up her sister Ann, Bridger’s wife, who’s flying into Heathrow for a couple of days of sightseeing. It’s hard to imagine what the two sisters will do alone together in a foreign land. They can hardly get through dinner together without some kind of argument flaring up. My call goes to voicemail, but I don’t leave a message. She’ll get back to me when she can.

  I check the time, then try to watch the History Channel for a while. Back when they ran Hitler documentaries all the time, I could tune out in front of the tube for hours. Now there are too many reality shows with only a tenuous connection to the past. I switch off the TV and go to the bookshelf, taking down the thick middle volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War, which I’ve been reading intermittently for about ten years, hoping to finish before I’m dead. Not tonight, though. After flipping a few pages, I put it back.

  In the old days on nights like this, when I wanted desperately to shrug off the pressures of work, I’d end up in the parking lot of a bar called the Paragon, wondering what it would be like to take a drink. Sometimes I’d go inside and order one, then let the glass sweat untouched on the table, testing myself. But the place changed hands a few times and finally closed. Now there’s just a darkened storefront.

  So I grab my car keys and the black gym bag I keep next to the gun safe. The weight feels good in my hand. In my new empty life, there is one way I’ve learned to forget everything. And it’s early enough in the evening for me to catch up.

  On the way I stop over to see the Robbs. The couple who used to live in our garage apartment started looking for a bigger place once Gina’s pregnancy started to show. They took their time, hoping to find something large enough for a growing family but not so expensive that Carter couldn’t afford it on his ministry salary, since Gina hoped to quit teaching once the baby was born. He worked in Montrose at something called an “outreach center,” splitting his time between helping the destitute and proselytizing the heathens. In his off-hours he’d try proselytizing me, too, but it’s not so easy when the heathen has a badge.

  With my wife’s help, the Robbs found a rental bungalow not far from Carter’s work, a tiny cottage of maybe nine hundred square feet, no garage, with a tear-down on one side and an incomplete glass-and-steel domicile on the other, the kind of place a Miami Vice drug lord would have been proud to call home. When the market tanked, the architect-builder went broke and left the site mothballed in temporary fencing and plastic wrap.

  I’d gone over to see them a few times, bearing gifts, but without Charlotte things were never as smooth. Any day now, that baby would arrive, throwing their lives into rhapsodic turmoil. The thought makes me a little sad. I guess I’m starting to miss them.

  Carter comes to the door in a T-shirt and shorts. He doesn’t look happy to see me.

  “Is this a bad time? I was just passing through-”

  He shakes his head. “No, come in. I could use the distraction.”

  “I was heading over to Shooter’s Paradise. You should come some time.” Catching his expression, I pause. “What’s up, Carter?”

  From the sidewalk I’d noticed a bluish glow from the front window. Carter nods his tousled head toward the living room, the source of the strange light. Stepping through the arched entryway, I find the furniture pushed into the corners, stacks of books and paper teetering on every available surface, making room for a bubble of empty space at the far side of the room, ringed by light boxes and a lithe and shadowy brunette hoisting a huge-lensed camera. Gina Robb, swathed in some kind of bedsheet, sits perched on a stool, arms and legs bare, frowning intently into the light.

/>   She’s let her hair grow out a little, and tonight it hangs in self-conscious ringlets. I’m more accustomed to seeing it tucked behind a vintage barrette. Her ironic cat-eye glasses are gone, too. She looks beautiful, honestly, almost radiant, her hands on her belly in an earth goddess pose. I feel like I shouldn’t be here.

  I give Carter a look and he shakes his head. I expect him to say something, but he lopes down the hall to the kitchen. Before I can follow, Gina squints my way and gives a nervous giggle.

  “Oh boy,” she says. “This will take some explaining.”

  The photographer introduces herself, shifting the camera so she can shake my hand. Long, cool fingers. Black-rimmed eyes. Gina tells me she’s some kind of artist, that the photos are for a “study,” whatever that is, and they met in one of her night classes at the University of Houston, where Gina’s been working on her master’s degree in English Lit off and on while teaching at a private school out in the suburbs. To prove her point, she indicates a stack of textbooks on the arm of the couch, then adjusts the draped fabric at her shoulder.

  I glance at the books. “That’s a lot of reading.”

  “It’s, like, crazy,” the photographer says.

  “And you. . paint pictures?” I ask.

  “Something like that. I’m working on a series called ‘Madonna and Child.’”

  “You’re starting early.”

  She bites her lip, confused.

  “I mean, the baby’s not here yet. You have a madonna, but no child. Never mind. Just an attempt at humor. I should stick with my strengths.”

  Gina starts to get up, but the photographer waves her back into place. “No, no, I need a couple more. Don’t move.”

  “Go ahead,” I say. “I’ll find Carter.”

  While they snap photos, I find myself lingering near the couch. The first time I met Gina Robb, it took me two seconds to pigeonhole her, and she’s been surprising me ever since. Modeling for an artist during the countdown to having her first kid? I didn’t see that coming. Down the hall I can hear Carter moving around in the kitchen, closing the fridge, scooting things along the counter. I don’t know if it’s the bedsheet that makes him uncomfortable or the whole idea or just the thought of me walking in on the scene.