“We were planning Tim’s memorial, with him. We had musicians, poets, dancers, the whole nine, lined up for one awesome send-off. Why would he go through the trouble of all that, if he planned on killing himself? And why put together a final trip to St. Maarten? He was shoving off next week. I know because I was going with him, along with a couple of other buds. My stuff’s packed and ready to go. That’s why he was giving stuff away. He was clearing things out, lightening his load. Maybe I should have told you, but I really didn’t think I had to. I thought you’d believe me and trust that I knew him better than the cops did, but you didn’t. You don’t.”

Jung looked like a lost puppy left out in the rain. Obviously, he hadn’t thought the break-in through. He had no clue what he was doing. There was nobody on the street but the two of us. I turned and stared at him as he stood there on the curb. This is it, I thought. This is the moment. Either I’d drive away and leave him and Tim Ayers behind, or I wouldn’t. Everything about the case seemed locked up tight. Marta was a good detective, solid. Not much got by her, but a planned memorial, a trip to the Caribbean, and what about the lack of fingerprints? That still bothered me. I wondered why it didn’t bother Marta. Every inch of Ayers’s boat would have been checked. How’d he get over the side without touching anything? I idled for a time, my eyes peering through the windshield, aware that Jung was watching me sit there, waiting for me to decide.

Dying didn’t mean despondent, but that’s exactly how Tim’s brother described him to Marta. Something was off, but Marta had a point. Who’d go to the trouble of killing a dying man? She’d been adamant that the logic in the statement validated her theory of either accidental drowning or suicide, which she did not press, out of respect for Tim’s family and pressure from her bosses. Could Tim’s death have been murder?

I turned to Jung. “Who’d want to kill a dying man?” It was the question Marta had posed to me. I didn’t have an answer then, or now.

His eager eyes widened, appearing as though I’d startled him by speaking. “Somebody who didn’t know he was dying. That lets out everybody who knew him, though, right? This could have been, like, a kidnapping gone bad. Somebody out for money, but Tim gets away somehow? Only he didn’t.”