Then an old murder brought him back to his rookie days, digging up indiscretions by the police chief, and earning him a deal: In return for not going public, he’d be promoted to lieutenant, allowed to avoid that rank’s desk duties and continue to work murders.

Shuffled out of the detectives’ room, he was stashed in a closet-sized office that had once been a storage closet, given a balky computer, the occasional assistance of untested D I’s, if no one else needed them, and told to pick his cases.

Translation: Stay out of our way and we’ll return the favor.

Another man might’ve withered. Milo took well to the arrangement, establishing a second office at a nearby Indian restaurant and closing cases with dyspeptic reliability. All the while indulging his only hobby: complaining.

His solve rate caught the eye of the new chief, a man obsessed with crime stats.

A new captain named Raymonda Grant didn’t care who anyone slept with.

Milo got a better computer, more access to backup, and continuing job flexibility.

Invitations to division barbecues never showed up in his box, but he’d never been one for socializing and it was all he could do to find time for Rick.

If life had gotten easier, he wasn’t showing it.

No doubt Antoine Beverly’s family considered their son’s case as vital as the day the boy had disappeared, but Milo’s pessimism was well founded: Sixteen years is long enough to obscure any evidence and confession-cramming’s a common death row ploy that usually leads nowhere.

Still, he should’ve been happy to work.

Or could be I was projecting because my own work, this year, was proving satisfying. Several child custody cases had actually turned out the way they should, with parents making honest attempts not to eat their young, and attorneys restraining the impulse to destroy. Sometimes my reports even ended up on the desks of intelligent judges who took the time to read them.

I fantasized about a kinder gentler world, maybe in reaction to all the brutality on the front page.

When I raised the possibility with Robin, she smiled and stroked the dog and said, “Could be one of the positive side effects of global warming. We blame it for everything bad.”

She and I were back together after our second breakup in ten years, living in the house above Beverly Glen that she’d designed and I’d found tomb-like in her absence. She’d received a six-figure commission from a dot-com mogul to build a quartet of hand-carved instruments — guitar, mandolin, mandola, mandocello — a project that would occupy her for the best part of the year.

Dream gig, when she didn’t think about the mogul being tone-deaf and unable to play a note.