I felt myself flush with discomfort. I'd killed someone in the course of an investigation two weeks before and I was studiously avoiding the subject. The moment he mentioned it I realized how completely I'd willed it away. It hadn't even crossed my mind and his reference to it seemed as startling as that dream where you find yourself stark-naked in a public place.

"I'm fine," I said briefly, breaking off eye contact. In a flash, I saw the beach at night, that slat of light when the big trash bin I was hiding in was opened and I looked up. My little semiautomatic had jumped in my hand like some kind of reflex test and I'd squeezed off more rounds than were really necessary for getting the job done. The blast in that confined space had been deafening and my ears had been ringing ever since, a high-pitched hiss like gas escaping from a faulty valve. In a flash, the image was gone again and Lieutenant Dolan was standing there, maybe wishing he'd kept his mouth shut judging from the look on his face.

My relationship to Con Dolan has always been adversarial, remote, based on grudging mutual respect. He doesn't like private investigators as a rule. He feels we should mind our own business, whatever that is, and leave law enforcement to professionals like him. My fantasy has always been that one day we'll sit down and exchange criminal gossip like little old ladies, but now that he'd introduced a personal note, I could feel myself withdraw, disconcerted by the shift. When I met his eyes again, his gaze was flat, his expression bland.

I shook my head. "Sorry," I said, "you took me by surprise. I guess I haven't quite sorted it through." Actually what took me by surprise was realizing I'd killed someone and didn't much care. No, that wasn't true. I did care, but if my life was threatened, I knew I'd do it again. I'd always believed I was a good person. Now I didn't know what "good" meant. Surely good people didn't kill other human beings, so where did that put me?

He said, "What are you doing down here?"

I shook my head again slightly and focused on the subject at hand. "I just filed a missing persons report for a client," I said. I hesitated, wondering if he'd encountered Elaine during his investigation of the incident next door. "Did you handle the Grice homicide back in January of this year?"

He stared at me, his face closing up like sea anemone. Apparently he had. "What about it?"

"I wondered if you interviewed a woman named Elaine Boldt. She lives in the condominium next door."

"I remember the name," he said carefully. "I spoke to her myself by phone. She was supposed to come down and talk to us, but I don't think she ever showed up. She your client?"

"She's the one I'm looking for."

"How long she been gone?"