So it was role-playing from a seminar. My shoulders sagged a bit farther. “If I tell you, will I have to repeat it to Mallory? It’s not a story I feel like going over more than once.”

“You know the cops, Warshawski—we never take any story just once. But if you’ll give me the outline tonight, I’ll make sure that does for now—get you home while there’s still a little left of the night to sleep in.”

Maybe there was a little personal concern mixed in. Not enough to make me tell the whole truth and nothing but—I mean, I wasn’t going to explain about the doctor’s medical texts. And certainly not Jurshak’s relations with Louisa. But after I’d pulled a crate over to the water’s edge and sat on it, I gave him more details than I’d originally planned to.

I started with the call from Dresberg. “He knew Louisa was important to me—my mother had looked after her when she was pregnant and they’d been pretty good friends. So they must have realized she was one person I’d come out here to help.”

“Why didn’t you call us then?” McGonnigal asked impatiently.

“I didn’t know how you’d manage a quiet assault. They had her in the back of the plant here—they’d simply have murdered her if they figured they were under attack. I wanted to sneak in here myself.”

“And just how did you manage that? They had a lookout where the road turns off to here and another guy at the gates. Don’t tell me you sprayed some amnesiac in the air and slid by them.”

I shook my head and pointed at the dinghy floating below us. The floodlights overhead picked up the incredulity in McGonnigal’s face.

“You rowed up the river in that? Come on, Warshawski. Get real.”

“It’s the truth,” I said stubbornly. “Believe it or not. Ms. Chigwell was with me—it’s her boat.”

“I thought you said they’d come here together.”

I nodded. “I knew if I told you the truth, you’d keep her and her brother here all night and they’re too old for that. Besides, she got shot in the arm, even if it did just graze her—she should have been in bed hours ago.”

McGonnigal pounded the crate with the flat of his hand. “You don’t have an armlock on empathy, Warshawski. Even the police are capable of showing concern for a couple as old as the Chigwells. Can’t you drop your sixties ‘Off the Pigs’ mentality for five minutes and let us do our job? You could have been killed and gotten the Djiak woman and your elderly friends knocked off in the bargain.”

“For your information,” I said coldly, “my father was a beat cop and I never in my life referred to the police as pigs. Anyway, no one got killed, not even those two pieces of shit who deserved it. Do you want to hear the rest of my story or would you rather get up in your pulpit and preach at me some more?”