Keegan shook his head. “She said she wanted me to meet someone down by the old pier,” Keegan said. “She didn’t tell me who it was.” He thought of the story Eve had told him in the furnace-heat of his bedroom. Secret trysts and crown jewels. “The man they pulled out of San Francisco Bay,” Keegan said. “The one you told me about. Was he black?”

The lieutenant straightened up a little. He seemed taken aback by the pivot in Keegan’s reasoning. “Yeah,” Moore said. “He was. What of it?”

“Nothing,” he told the lieutenant. “It was just something she said.”

He bent to look closely at the photos again. He tried to avoid Eve’s face. Her tasteful blouse clung close to the secret contours of her body. She wore only one shoe. A delicate watch dangled from her wrist, crusted with sand. It looked expensive, but the killer had left it behind. He looked closer, and then he looked away.

The next minutes were a mute, numb daze. Darnell and Moore talked quietly together, their voices like a distant wind scattering leaves. Eventually a uniformed cop—bald-headed, slope-shouldered—came in from the hallway and told Keegan to stand.

Darnell felt about in his coat for the handcuffs, and the cop clicked them back on Keegan’s wrists, more loosely than the first cop had. He took Keegan’s elbow in his plump fingers. “Nice and easy,” he said. “Let’s get you back downstairs.” He led Keegan, anesthetized, to the room’s open doorway.

“Let me work on this, Jimmy,” the lieutenant’s voice called from behind them. “Get some sleep down there. We’ll talk. We’ll figure this out.”

Keegan nodded without looking back. He floated past desks and doors and bulletin boards and panes of wire-mesh glass. His loose shoes shuffled far, far beneath him. She was dead. She was gone. The thought seemed to strike him again and again and again, like cold water lapping the shore. He thought of the small, searing body on the bed beside him. He thought of the way she had rolled over in the dark when he had reached for her necklace. That image—her slender back in the shadows—was the last he would ever see of her.

Keegan stopped dead and brought the cop behind him up short. Some of those jewels even had names. Der Alte Saphir. Der Leiningen Rubin. “No, no wait,” he said. “Wait. Take me back.” He turned to go back down the hall, but the cop’s grip tightened on his arm.

“Hey, easy there,” the cop said.

Keegan tried to shake his arm loose and step around the man, but the cop took hold of both his arms in some kind of wrestling hold, and then another body, also in uniform, appeared out of nowhere to block his way.