When I told him in a faltering voice what had happened, his face grew as tender and kind as I’d ever seen it, and he peered at me with soft worry and wiped my wet bangs off my forehead with a thick, gentle finger and dabbed the corned beef off the corner of my mouth with a napkin.

“You two had some day,” he said. He whistled and smiled at Phil and Phil smiled back broadly.

My father’s smile, so rare, was a thing of wonder.

“I didn’t mean to bust the window,” I said. “I didn’t mean to, Dad.”

“It’s okay.”

“You’re not mad?”

He shook his head.

“I—”

“You did great, Patrick. You did great,” he whispered. He took my head to his broad chest and kissed my cheek, smoothed my cow lick with his palm. “You make me proud.”

It was the only time I ever heard those words from my father.

“Clowns,” Bolton said.

“Clowns,” I said.

“Clowns, yeah,” Phil said.

“Okay,” Bolton said slowly. “Clowns,” he repeated and nodded to himself.

“No shit,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” He nodded again and then turned his huge head, looked directly at me. “You are, I’m assuming, fucking kidding me.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“No.”

“We’re perfectly and completely friggin’ serious,” Phil said.

“Jesus.” Bolton leaned against the sink, looked over at Angie. “Tell me you’re not part of this, Ms. Gennaro. You, at least, seem like a person of some rationality.”

She tightened the belt on her robe. “I don’t know what to believe.” She shrugged her shoulders in the direction of Phil and me. “They seem pretty certain.”

“Listen for a second—”

He crossed to me in three large steps. “No. No. We’ve blown the surveillance because of you, Mr. Kenzie. You call me over here and say you’ve cracked the case. You’ve—”

“I didn’t—”

“—figured it all out and you need to see me right away. So I come over here and he’s here”—he pointed at Phil—“and now they’re here”—he jerked his head at Devin and Oscar—“and any hopes we had of suckering Evandro into this place are shot because it looks like a fucking law enforcement convention in here.” He paused for breath. “And I could have lived with all that as long as we were, oh, I don’t know, getting somewhere. But, no, you give me clowns.”

“Mr. Bolton,” Phil said, “we’re serious here.”

“Oh. Good. Let me see if I have this right—twenty years ago, two circus performers with bushy hair and rubber pants pull up beside you in a van while you’re walking to a Little League game and—”

“From,” I said.

“What?”

“We were walking back from the game,” Phil said.

“Mea culpa,” Bolton said and gave us a bow and flourish. “Mea maxima fucking culpa, tu morani.”

“I’ve never been insulted in Latin before,” Devin said to Oscar. “You?”

“Mandarin,” Oscar said. “Never Latin.”

“Fine,” Bolton said. “You were accosted by two circus performers coming back from a game and because—do I have this right, Mr. Kenzie?—because Alec Hardiman sang ‘Send in the Clowns’ during the prison interview you think he was one of those clowns and that means, of course, that he’s been killing people to get back at you for escaping that day?”