When I first came to investigate the robbery in December 2017, I’d met a man named Christian Pelo. He was a new employee, a few days into the gig, when a man in a ski mask walked in and demanded everything in the register.

Pelo was in training, and his boss, a store manager named John Adrian, had just left for the bank. Adrian left Pelo shorthanded, with only thirty-three bucks in the till.

If you were a crook, it was the definition of shitty timing. Then again, I hadn’t arrested a lot of Rhodes scholars while working in burglary or homicide.

Pelo showed the thief the safe, which was empty, and he opened the register too. Full transparency to try to save his own life.

The robber cracked Pelo with his rifle, took the thirty-three dollars, and filled up a Cherry Coke. Fountain drink, not bottle. And that’s what got me fired up about finding the shitbrick back in 2017. The nerve to stop and fill his drink with ice. Then soda. Take his time leaving.

The event also reminded me how much the numbered streets had fallen into disrepair since I’d been on patrol. Part of me thought the blame for that fell on us, in MFPD, for choosing to ignore calls and not make obvious arrests. “Why arrest them?” I’d once heard a blue-suiter say. “Let the animals kill themselves.” It was exactly the wrong philosophy to come from any cop if our goal was to ever come together as a city.

Within a day, Christian Pelo was gone from the job at the Golden Oaks.

When I came by to get more information from John Adrian, the store manager, he never seemed to be able to tell me where Pelo lived.

“Do you have his employment paperwork?” I’d asked Adrian, trying to get a valid address for the short-term employee. “His I-9 form?”

At every turn, gathering information was like peeling cat hair off duct tape.

I got railroaded. Ignored.

But I’m a stubborn person. And proud of my record on cases back when I worked robbery full-time. So even though I was just covering for guys in that department, I stuck by the case. Came by again and again over the next week. A couple weeks after that, on December 21, the accident with Lena happened.

In the days that followed, I dropped the Golden Oaks robbery. I later learned that it was closed as unsolved. With only thirty-three dollars missing, no one seemed to care.

Remy and I fanned our flashlights across the place, and dust moved through the rays of light. We walked into the main area of the store and out toward those plywood boards that covered the windows facing 20th.

With Remy digging through details and not liking them, I felt recharged. I wasn’t some crazy guy who lived in the past with a talking dog and invented details to fit the case. I was Detective Marsh, from the old days. The guy with gut instinct. The guy you went to when the hair on your arms stood up.