If what Director LeHigh had said was true — that my mother was an acclaimed CIA torture specialist and the reason I was only awake from 3 a.m. to 4 a.m. each night wasn’t because I had some one-in-a-trillion sleep disorder named after me (I’m Henry Bins and I have Henry Bins) but because she had conditioned me through sleep amplification — then where was my father when this was all happening?

Yes, my mother might be alive, but I hadn’t seen her in thirty years and I had no intention of ever seeing her again. But my dad was my rock. He taught me everything I knew, made me into the man I am today. What if he allowed her to do these horrible things to me? What if he’d been lying to me for thirty years?

“Don’t bring it.”

I turn around.

Ingrid stands in the doorway of the large walk-in closet. She looks good for having been awake for going on twenty-seven straight hours. She wears a typical outfit for summer on the east coast: dark blue jeans, a gray University of Maryland T-shirt, and white and purple Nikes. After helping me pack last night, she headed into work early, then spent the next twenty hours trying to wrap up two open cases and all the paperwork that accompanies a week-long vacation as a homicide detective.

“This is supposed to be our time together,” she says.

I nod.

She’s right.

Although we’d lived together for going on seven months now, we only saw each other three or four hours a week. She couldn’t control when or how long she would be away working her next case, and sometimes three days would go by without the two of us seeing each other. The unique circumstances of our relationship seemed less challenging on paper than they proved to be in reality. And with everything that transpired in the fifteen months we’d been dating — Jessie Kallomatix’s murder, not to mention Ingrid colluding with the President to help me expose a CIA secret prison on American soil (and getting me tortured in the process) — it seemed like there was always someone else in the room.

I shut the door to the safe and give the dial a quick spin.

“You’re right.”

She smiles, then shouts, “Viva la Mexico!”

“We’re going to Alaska.”

“Viva la Alaska.”

I laugh and pull her into my arms and give her a long kiss.

“Come on,” she says, giving my butt a slap. “I don’t want to have to drag your ass onto that plane.”

I nod and we exit the closet.

“Where’s Lassie?” I ask.

“He’s sulking. I don’t think he wants to go. I think he’d rather go to your dad’s and hang out with Murdock.”

Lassie is indeed sulking. He is on the kitchen table, his black and tan body liquefied. His tawny eyes are half open.