“Why are you telling me this?” I demanded. “All I did was come up to him after he was already dead. What are you going to do, arrest me for not finding him early enough to save his life?” I made fists of my hands and stuck them out. “Slap the cuffs on me, Officer, it was me. I did it.”

Ash laid a hand across my wrists and pushed them softly to the table. “Minnie, we knew this was going to be hard on you. That’s why we asked you to come in. We wanted to tell you this in person, not over the phone.”

Detective Inwood stirred. “There was nothing you could have done, Ms. Hamilton. There’s an extremely high certainty that Mr. Bernier’s death occurred moments after he sustained the injury.”

I pulled my hands out from underneath Ash’s, put them on my lap, and stared at the table, trying to wrap my mind around the two big things that had just happened. One, learning that Brown Bernier was a murder victim. Two, that Hal Inwood was trying to be nice to me. Number one was tragic and far more important, of course, but that shouldn’t completely eclipse the significance of number two.

“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate you saying so.”

Since I hadn’t known Brown Bernier before his death, I wasn’t sure I was going to move through the bargaining stage of grief, and Hal’s assurance might keep me from sliding into the depression part. Acceptance was next, and though my dreams the next few nights might be dark, I could already feel myself accepting the truth of what I’d been told.

“So.” I sighed and looked up. “He was murdered.”

The two men nodded. “The pathologist,” Hal said, “is taking the case very seriously. She is analyzing the skull fragments in hopes of learning more about the object that caused the injury.”

I shied away from thinking about that. Let the forensics people do their jobs; I had no desire to think about angles and trajectories and force and mass. Too much math, for one thing. For another, it would provide my dreams with more detail than I wanted them to have.

“That night, afterward,” I said, “I talked to Rafe about what happened. He said Brown worked for the city.”

Hal said, “Correct. Mr. Bernier recently retired from the city’s employ. He’d worked in the maintenance department for thirty-three years and been the department’s director for eleven years. Preliminary reports are that he was well liked by his subordinates and trusted by his superiors.”

“The kind of guy,” Ash said, “that people say doesn’t have an enemy in the world.”