Inside, the house was dark, and I slinked into the living room. No one there.

Moving down the hall with the lights off, I felt my way into the bedroom and rolled back the area rug that extended from under the dresser and covered the floor safe. I pulled my Glock from the safe and cocked it to the ready.

I locked the door to the back and cleared the bedrooms, turning on lights as I moved through each room. When I got back up front, I saw Purvis sitting out on the porch.

I dropped into one of the blue Adirondack chairs outside.

No one was in the house, and I touched my bulldog’s skin, trying to tell if he’d been out the whole time, wandering the neighborhood.

But Purvis ran hot, and his coat gave no clues.

I was wired, even as my body was shutting down from fatigue. My mind was still racing through the moments on the school roof, and I craved the taste of rum. Some Papa’s Pilar Dark that I could mix with Coke. Keep me focused.

I heard a noise and looked up. Remy’s red ’77 Alfa Romeo Spider was pulling up to the curb.

My partner came up and took the open chair on the porch.

She didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then turned to me.

“So what’s so damn urgent a girl can’t get an inappropriate booty call with a subordinate?”

She smiled, and we both cracked up, with neither of us saying a thing afterward for a few minutes.

The sounds of the night filled the space between us, the frogmouths and night herons that did their business after the diurnal animals fell asleep. When only restless detectives with guilty consciences were awake, trying to find words for actions that, in retrospect, felt unexplainable.

I pulled my chair closer to hers. “It was a righteous shoot, Rem,” I said. “At the school. I’m sure of it.”

My partner squinted at me. “Nobody doubts that,” she said. But I put my hand on her forearm, as if to say, Let me finish.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

Remy listened, and I started back four months earlier, when we realized that the killer we were hunting in May was not a one-time offender. Our suspect was a paid assassin, a man who’d been killing and hiding his tracks for years.

“I know all this, P.T.,” Remy said.

“There’s parts you don’t know,” I said. “Remember the last day of the case? I went out to a junkyard? I had a lead on an El Camino?”

“Sure.” Remy nodded. “That’s how you found Tarticoft. You told me this.”

“I left a few steps out,” I said to my partner. “Tarticoft drove out of that junkyard in the El Camino. But he drove in a year earlier in a Dodge Aries. The same car that pushed Lena and Jonas off the road.”

Remy blinked. “Wait, I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought you never knew the car that hit them. I thought you weren’t even sure if Marvin was—”