“No. Fuck not being fair on me. I don’t care. It’s not fair on Conor Brennan.”

His voice was still rising. I made mine stay even. “No? I’m not seeing what a video camera would do for him. Say we set up and catch nothing: how does the lack of otters invalidate Brennan’s confession?”

Richie said, “Tell me this. If you believe Pat, why aren’t you all for the cameras? One shot of a mink, a squirrel, even a rat, and you can tell me to fuck off. You sound the same as Pat, man: you sound like you know there’s nothing there.”

“No, chum. I don’t. I sound like I don’t give a damn whether there’s anything there or not. If we pick up nothing, what does that prove? The animal could have been scared off, could have got killed by a predator, could be hibernating … Even if it never existed, that doesn’t put this on Pat. Maybe the noises were something to do with the subsidence, or the plumbing, and he overreacted and read too much into them. That would make him a guy under stress, which we already knew. It wouldn’t make him a killer.”

Richie didn’t argue with that. He leaned back on a desk, pressing his fingers into his eyes. After a moment he said, more quietly, “It’d tell us something. That’s all I’m asking for.”

The argument, or fatigue, or Dina, had heartburn rolling up into my throat. I tried to swallow it down without grimacing. “OK,” I said. “You fill out the request form. I’ve got to head, but I’ll sign it before I leave—better have both our names on there. Don’t go requesting any strippers.”

“I’m doing my best here,” Richie said, into his hands. There was a note in his voice that caught at me: something raw, something lost, something like a wild call for help. “I’m just trying to get this right. Man, I swear to God, I’m trying.”

Every rookie feels like the world is going to stand or fall on his first case. I didn’t have time to hand-hold Richie through it, not with Dina out there, wandering, shooting off the kind of fractured strobe-light glitter that draws predators from miles around. “I know you are,” I said. “You’re doing fine. Double-check your spelling; the Super’s picky about that.”

“Yeah. OK.”

“Meanwhile, we’ll forward this link to Whatshisname, Dr. Dolittle—he might spot something in there. And I’ll have Kieran check out Pat’s account on this board, see if he sent or received any private messages. A couple of these guys sounded like they were getting pretty invested in his story; maybe one of them got into some kind of correspondence with him, and Pat gave him a few more details. And we’ll need to find the next discussion board he went to.”

“There mightn’t be a next one. He tried two boards, neither one of them was any use … He could’ve given up.”

“He didn’t give up,” I said. On my monitor, cones and parabolas moved gracefully in and out of one another, folded in on themselves and vanished, unfurled and began their slow dance all over again. “The man was desperate. You can take that any way you want to, you can say it was because he was losing his marbles if that’s what you want to believe, but the fact remains: he needed help. He’d have kept looking online, because he had nowhere else to look.”