Keegan was about to answer, but he caught himself and bit his tongue. Speaking was the mistake men always made in the interrogation room downtown. He thought of the countless hapless characters he’d watched being grilled from the other side of a two-way mirror—all the notes he’d jotted, all the stories he’d filed. Talk was what always got them in the end—all those panicked, careless sentences expertly braided into a noose. Most of those guys might have been okay, if they’d only kept their mouths shut. Guilt or innocence had little to do with it, once they started talking.

A house sparrow flitted down from somewhere overhead into the wishing well. It perched on the edge of a bowl that spilled over with foamy water—WISDOM. The bird hopped down into the water, and Keegan watched, with a measure of envy, as it splashed about and ruffled its feathers.

He turned from the well again and leaned back on the rail. The iron fencing pressed against the small of his back. It was hot, and it felt perversely good against his thrumming muscles. The shopkeeper still stood watching them from his store’s dark interior. He held the broom with both hands but didn’t move it. It was just a prop. Keegan’s head was starting to swim. “So, what is it you want from me?” he asked the lieutenant. “Am I supposed to break down and confess?”

“I just want you to open your eyes, Jimmy,” Moore said. “It isn’t like you to let your guard down like this. I don’t know what that girl has over you, but you’re not thinking straight.”

Eve again. What was Moore’s obsession with her, with him? Jealousy, maybe?

The sparrow flew up from the fountain and darted away over Keegan’s head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Keegan said.

“That girl is leading you down a dark alley,” the lieutenant said, “and you don’t have the good sense to strike a match.”

“I’ve only talked to her a couple of times,” Keegan said. “We’re just acquaintances.” The sentences came out sounding hollow, pro forma—even in his own ears. The hot railing was beginning to burn his back now, but he didn’t move. Again, he thought of the wary, hunted faces he’d watched from the other side of the interrogation-room mirror. The poor dopes never knew when to shut the hell up. “I barely know her,” Keegan said, even as he warned himself not to speak.