Through the glass I also saw Harrington, in a pool of blood on the floor inside. Ten feet from him was the teacher, Leaf Tanner, and no one was touching either body until the M.E. got here.

But a smart uniform had taken a pile of clean art smocks and made a dam of white fabric between the two men, so their blood didn’t comingle, in case the room’s elevation was off.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah,” Bird agreed.

He gave me an appointment to talk to a shrink first thing the next morning and went back over the details again. What time I got to the school. What made me hike around the back. And why I took the shot.

He told me a shooting board would convene within a week. To confirm if it was a good kill.

“The rule about you not working,” Fuller said to me. “It’s not to jam you up, P.T. It’s to give you time to process. To heal.”

At another time or from another person, I might’ve appreciated this. Might’ve nodded in understanding or even taken time off voluntarily.

But nine months ago, Fuller had sat at my bedside and accused me of being a dirty cop. He told me I was gonna rot in jail.

“Go to hell, Bird,” I said.

4

The sun was going down, and the sweet smell of lilacs from the nearby forest was strong in the air.

Abe had an address on a piece of property that our shooter, Jed Harrington, owned in the foothills south of town. He’d gotten a patrolman at the station to write up an affidavit, and it had been hand-carried to a judge.

When I got into Abe’s SUV, he showed me the signed warrant on the screen of an iPad.

Abe had always been old-school. White lined legal pads. Yellow number-two pencils.

“When the hell did this happen?” I motioned at the tablet. “You caught up with 2010 technology?”

Abe rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I guess it must’ve been during one of your suspensions.”

I grinned at him. Touché.

We headed out then, moving slowly around a gaggle of media vans and black and whites, spread throughout the school’s overflow parking lot. The place was a zoo, and it was good to put it in our rearview mirror, at least for the night.

Out on 903, traffic was light. We drove through a rural area called Ridge Creek, where my best friend had lived when I was a teenager. I stared over at a Dollar General we’d rode our bikes to every week to buy junk food. In Mason Falls, we have all the dollar brands. Dollar General. Dollar Store. Dollar Tree.

As we got closer to Harrington’s house, the conversation shifted to me and Remy.

We’d been a team for eighteen months, but circumstances and a suspension had split us apart. Then last week, I got off desk duty and Remy finished up her time with County and transferred back to homicide.