I dunked the tea bag into a Styrofoam cup of tepid water, pulled it out, dunked it in again. I’d done it now more than twenty times. Marta was in with Spada and his lawyers, and I wasn’t allowed anywhere near them. Instead, I’d been relegated to a grungy interview room at the district to wait it out, sitting across the table from Jung, his eyes closed, snoring lightly, his mouth slightly open so that he emitted a low whistle every time air flowed in and out. He’d been here since I dropped him off after Swami Rain’s. It’d probably taken this long for Marta to get anything not weird out of him. I’d given him a full report before he nodded off, per our contract, and had had to endure a string of “No way, dude” and “Holy crap.” Yet, finding out that everything had culminated in my barely preventing a dying woman from being killed hadn’t been enough to keep him awake. Now I sat glaring at him, having overcome, at around the tenth dunk, an overwhelming impulse to stuff the tea bag down his throat. I faced quite the moral challenge.

Marta had the fake nurse in custody and Spada was in the building. But here I sat, watching my dippy client sleep as though he hadn’t a care in the world. I supposed that was what he was paying me for, to sweat the big stuff and the small stuff, to worry so he wouldn’t have to. Still . . .

The files meant nothing without a witness or a confession or some other irrefutable evidence. It was obvious to me, though I couldn’t prove it, that Spada hadn’t done any of the heavy lifting himself. I needed something or someone to tie Spada to the nurse and to Darby’s death. I stopped dunking, and thought of the guys who’d accosted me and stolen back Spada’s files. They were too big and too dumb not to have records. Maybe if the fake nurse wouldn’t roll over, they would? I could ID them. Who could forget faces that ugly? If I could tie them to Spada, that, along with the attempted murder of Stella and her voiceless testimony, might force Spada to try and make a deal. I didn’t care how Spada got put into a cell, only that he got there.