I pull out a seat at the kitchen table for Ingrid, and Lassie jumps on her lap.

“So, do the doctors know anything yet?” I ask her.

“Not much. They’re doing tests right now. According to my dad they have her listed as critical.”

“How is Hal handling it?” my dad asks.

A couple months earlier, my dad and Ingrid’s dad started chatting on the phone every now and again. It seemed odd my dad was friends with my girlfriend’s father, a man I’d never exchanged a single word with.

“He’s doing alright. My aunt Rita, his sister, lives on the same street, so she’s been trying to keep him calm.”

“You should probably head down there,” I say.

She nods. “I am.” She looks at my dad and says, “I was actually gonna try to grab the five a.m. flight and was wondering if you could drop me at the airport.”

“Of course, sweetheart.”

“It’s out of Dulles,” she says, which is a forty-minute drive due west, nearly a half hour farther than Reagan International which is a short four miles directly north.

“No biggee,” he says, nodding. “We should probably get a move on though.”

I look at the clock.

3:23 a.m.

My dad heads back to his room to put on some clothes.

“What a shitty day,” Ingrid says, then stands up and gives me a nice long kiss.

We separate and she tells me that on top of her mother’s stroke, she was also pulled off all her cases by her captain and forced to look into a thirty-year-old cold case. “I spent five hours doing paperwork and filling in the detectives taking over my active cases.”

“Couldn’t Billy have done that?”

Billy is her partner, a second-year kid whom I have met a handful of times. He is a sarcastic little punk. I adore him.

“I didn’t tell you. Billy was suspended for two weeks for punching a suspect in the face.”

“Did the guy deserve it?”

“Girl.”

“It was a woman?”

“Yes, and yes she did. She kicked him in the balls, then slapped him, then spit in his face. And Billy didn’t punch the woman, he more or less shoved her away from him and accidentally hit her in the face. But the woman claims he punched her and her two friends backed her up, so they suspended him.”

“Shit.”

“And I guess I was the obvious candidate to look into this cold case because I would be working solo for the next couple weeks anyhow.”

“Alright,” my dad says, now clad in shorts, socks and sandals, and a mock turtleneck. “Let’s boogie.”

I give Ingrid a long kiss, tell her I love her, and then watch as she and my dad push through the front door.

I look at the clock.

3:29 a.m.

Murdock and Lassie are both staring at me.