“Why not? It’s fun!” I gave her a look that was far from begging. “Oh, all right,” she said. Lucy typed in a string of numbers and letters and hit enter. Both screens became live-feed CCTV monitors. “I figured hospital personnel were blocked from making any notation of which room he was in, so I checked the schematic of the hospital and found where their hoity-toity private rooms were located. Then I checked the security CCTV feeds, and wouldn’t you know it, the feeds were down on the sixth floor, hall four, rooms three through seven. They physically disconnected most of the cameras, but they missed two. Not the best angles but enough to see Bronson’s security huddled around room six seventeen. I figure the other rooms are for his gestapo—three teams, eight-hour shifts. Are you getting married?”

“What?” I said.

Lucy nodded to the ring on my right-hand ring finger. The “commitment” finger. Not the “married.”

For whatever reason, I felt my cheeks flush. “No, it’s—uh—you know, just friendship rings. ”

“Wow,” Lucy said. “Did you make them yourselves at Bible camp just before the square dance?”

I chose not to answer.

As I got my coat on, Lucy said, “You should marry Tatina, Sherlock. You’re in your thirties, for God’s sakes! Time is not your friend, dude.”

Camped out in the expansive lobby of the Henry Ford Hospital were four print reporters, an AM news radio crew and two local TV news teams. I recognized one of the print reporters: Anna Rayling. Anna used to work for one of the big daily newspapers until they weren’t so big anymore. She was a good reporter with twenty-five respected years of hard news experience and a couple regional and national awards behind her. Now she was a stringer for several small out-of-state papers and online news organizations.

“How’s tricks, Anna?” I said to the short, round Black woman with impossibly large brown eyes.

“If only I was turning tricks, big guy,” she said, giving me a hug. “Maybe then I could afford healthcare instead of waiting around another six fucking years for Medicare to kick in.” She brought up her digital recorder, turned it on and said, “Anything you’d like to say for the record about the rather gruesome death of City Council President Lincoln Quinn?”

I gently took the recorder from her, turned it off and handed it back to her.

“He was a sorry sack of shit who should have died from embarrassment,” I said. “Not beheading.”

“He was a bloviating cocksucker,” Anna said. “Pardon my newsroom language.”

“Anything on Bronson?” I said.

“Zip,” she said. “When I got here, they told us there was supposed to be a press conference in a half hour, but that was forty minutes ago. Sure you got nothing for me, August?”