Cavendish was carrying a paper bag, and on the side was a logo from North Street Bread. If you wanted a biscuit with a piece of chicken in the middle, topped with a fried egg and gooped in spicy honey, you couldn’t do much better.

“Did I interrupt your lunch?”

“Absolutely not,” he said, dumping the bag into a small wicker trash basket. “We’re old friends anyway, right? If I was starving, I’d eat in front of you.”

He got into his chair, which was a brown leather number with a worn mark, right where his butt sat down. I moved to the center of the room and dropped into a gray lounger. The blinds were lowered, and the place was cool.

Cavendish pulled his chair close. His skin was pinkish-red in places, almost as if he’d been stung by a jellyfish, and his eyelashes were so blond they were nearly invisible against his flesh.

“So how are you feeling?” he asked.

“Never better,” I said. “What’ve we got here—two sessions?”

“Two hours,” he said. “Then you’re home free.”

Unless he says different, Purvis said in my head.

Department policy was that Cavendish had the ability to keep a cop from returning to work. Then again, there was an oddism about this time. Unlike normal protocol, I’d already returned to work. Minutes after the shooting.

When I woke up this morning, I was expecting Senza to put a full stop on my work schedule, but then the call arrived for the double murder along 914.

Cavendish and I small-talked for twenty minutes, mostly about the required process of me coming here and the methods the doc used to get cops to feel comfortable and share. To start talking about their hobbies first. Their favorite college or pro teams.

“Well, you know me,” I said. “I’m hobby-less and team-less.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “We’ve talked about both the Hawks and the Dawgs before.”

Cavendish made a comment about a patrolman who’d left the force a month ago, after a different officer-involved shooting.

“Did you know Terry Willard?”

“Sure,” I said. “He was in patrol, but we came up together. Same rookie class.”

We talked about the incident, in which the senior patrolman had mistaken a screwdriver for a gun and shot a man in the numbered streets.

“Willard was a good cop,” I said. “Firing a gun just does something different to each person. For some guys, they don’t want to touch the steel again.”

The mood had suddenly gotten serious, and it wasn’t lost on me what the doc was saying.

“Well, the cops that end up here,” Cavendish said, “two times. It’s a pretty small fraternity, P.T. Not all of them make it back into uniform like you.”

“I guess I’m not like most people.”

He nodded, staring at me like I was a part of some science experiment. “And what do you attribute that to?”

“My first C.O. taught me to view violence as a zero-sum game,” I said, thinking about my commanding officer when I was a rookie. “Like this guy with the gun at that school . . . he made a choice to put lives in jeopardy. If we can get to him before he gets to someone innocent—like Avis Senza—then the life he exposes becomes his own.”