Traffic was pretty thin on 210, with a few people on horseback as they turned westbound. On her right the Cerner Campus was a hub of activity, with soldiers running their morning PT and vehicles moving out into the city. Towering over the campus, a short way from the road, was the rechristened North Kansas City Federal Medical Center. An army Black Hawk emblazoned with the Red Cross lifted off from a helipad beyond her line of sight, to travel to points unknown.

As they moved closer to North Kansas City proper, the already-light vehicular traffic began to thin out further. KC didn’t really have a peak hour anymore. Most people seemed to get about by bus, the service for which was regular enough that there were always one or two commuter shuttles in view. The remainder of the traffic consisted of government and military vehicles, and a hefty spread of civilian ones featuring the logo of Cesky Enterprises, the biggest reconstruction contractor in town.

‘Now, what you’ve got there,’ said Colvin, nodding towards the folder in her hands, ‘is basically everything the accident investigators and Homicide guys have so far.’

‘This Aronson woman,’ she asked, turning over a page, ‘what shape is she in?’

‘She’s seen better days, poor woman. She’s in a coma up at the hospital. Doctors can’t say yet whether she’ll come out of it. So she’s not going to be much help.’

Caitlin grunted, already distracted by the details in the file. The accident investigation squad had concluded very quickly that the hit-and-run was no accident. The assailant’s vehicle, a blue Toyota pick-up, had accelerated quickly from a standing start, driven in an almost perfectly straight line, until a few metres out from where it had struck the victims; at that point, it had swerved to line them up with the centre of its bull bars. Pieraro had been struck first, and his body flew into Aronson, protecting her from the worst of the impact. The Toyota had stopped in a controlled fashion a little further down the road, the report went on. There, it picked up a passenger – a large male, judging by the boot prints he’d left preserved in the snow. The investigators had been able to track the vehicle for a short distance because of the same snowfall that had provided them with such a rich haul of evidence at the site of the incident.

Caitlin looked up to collect her thoughts as they passed by an old burnt-out McDonald’s on the right-hand side of the road. The familiar feel of suburban sprawl, with a slight edge of the End Times. She couldn’t help thinking, given his effectiveness when steering his charges to safety amid the road-agent gangs of Texas, that Miguel Pieraro would somehow have sensed a vehicle approaching in this environment.

‘I seem to recall hearing that Thursday was blown out by a blizzard,’ she said eventually.