My phone pulsed.

Staring at the screen, I saw a group text to Remy, Abe, Merle, and me. The sender was Chief Senza, and it demanded that we all be at the precinct in an hour.

“Looks like you guys got lucky, though,” Mandelle said.

“How’s that?” I asked.

“With this stockpile.” He motioned in particular at the AR-15. “If he’d brought any two of these to that school, a lot more people could’ve been hurt. Kids. Teachers. Cops.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Which made me wonder: Why hadn’t Harrington armed himself better?

I told Mandelle I had to get in to work, and grabbed a blue-suiter from out front to sit on the backhouse. Make sure no journalist snuck over a fence and started snapping photos.

Before I left, I walked back into the casita. Mandelle was jotting down serial numbers. “That twenty-four hours on the gun trace,” I said to him. “Any way you can make it twelve?”

“I’ll do my best,” he said, and I nodded in thanks, dialing up Remy as I walked back outside.

An electric line ran across the yard and fed power to the backhouse. A red-tailed hawk sat on the cable, sagging the middle of it and staring at me.

My partner picked up on the first ring, and I could tell that she was driving. “I saw the text,” she said. “Just running home for a quick shower.”

I’d been up for twenty-three hours straight and was pretty ripe myself.

“Listen, there’s a dog here, Rem,” I said. “Real nice pup. With your work in County with animals—anyone you could call to pick him up?”

My partner had spent the last ninety days as a humane enforcement officer working in a temporary division that was formed after a dog-fighting scandal broke in May.

“I could ring up one of my buddies,” she said. “But the place is overcrowded, P.T. Odds are, the dog’s gonna be euthanized within a couple days.”

“See what you can do?” I asked, and she agreed.

I filled up a water bowl, grabbed food for the dog, and found Abe inside. He dropped me at my house, and I walked right into a freezing-cold shower.

No rest for the weary.

No sleep when there’s a crime to be solved.

5

I got to the precinct by seven forty-five a.m. and grabbed a coffee from the kitchen, heading into the main conference room before anyone else showed.

Someone had left a pink box of donuts there, and I flipped the top open. Two crullers and a jelly. The sugar had crystalized, signaling they were yesterday’s leftovers.

Out the window, the sky was blue and windswept, but the banana palms in the grassy area outside were like statues, so the wind must’ve died overnight.

Remy came in, dressed in black pants and a yellow blouse, her Glock in a shoulder holster under her jacket. Lately my partner had begun wearing contacts, but since she’d been up all night, she sported her old glasses, black-framed numbers that made her look bookish.