Mom frowned. She looked toward the shut door to Dad’s office. Which is what she does when what she has to say, she knows he won’t like.

“She tried to burn the house down,” Mom said softly.

I gaped at her. “What? Why would she do that?”

“You’d have to ask her,” Mom said.

“I’m asking you. You were friends, weren’t you?”

“Hadassah was not a well woman,” Mom said.

“Who is well? Am I well? Are you?” I said. “Tell me what happened.”

“It would be irresponsible of me to repeat it.”

“But she’s in prison.”

“Yes.”

Mom was watching a cop show. And here’s something I learned from her cop shows: wherever there’s a woman in jail for a violent crime against a spouse or partner, there’s a man who did some especially heinous things to push her to that point.

What did you do, Mr. Barrett?

I headed for my room. A couple dozen gun shots echoed from the television.

Twenty-Two

Solomon

A couple dozen gun shots echoed from the canyon. The Clarion office’s windows were all open and the smell of eucalyptus was strong. The front of the building faced out onto one of the most grimy, crowded streets in Darkside, but the back leaned over the beautiful wilderness of a Blighted Space. Brontosauruses munched happily on the tall trees.

“I need you to stop,” Cass said.

“Stop?” I asked incredulously. I’d seen Cass scream at a reporter with a stab wound to the leg for not sticking around to interview the woman who stabbed her. More than once I’d heard her say that “self-preservation is not a helpful instinct for a reporter.” “Are you . . . feeling okay?”

“Don’t tell anyone,” she said, “but it’s getting too dangerous out there. And you’re a great photographer, but you’re also a kid. This is strictly me being selfish, by the way. I have enough to stress about without a dead teenager on my conscience.”

I laughed. She laughed.

“Promise me,” she said.

“I can make no such promise.”

She frowned, and handed me a copy of the Darkside Post. “You saw this?” Darkside Police Commissioner Bahrr was on the front page, standing on the hood of his truck with a shotgun in his hands. Hunting chupacabras and rakshasas in the Northern Marsh.

“That asshole,” I muttered.

“He’s nervous,” Cass said, “about the queen making a speech. He’s threatened by her. Wants to get his own share of the press, so he poses for this.” She threw the paper down. “One of my journalists is working a source. She found some paperwork, intentionally misfiled at police headquarters: a shipment of five thousand handcuffs reported missing last month.”

“How do you misplace five thousand handcuffs?” I asked.