"I know, Dex," she said in a kindly voice that somehow made it feel even worse. "It seems way too easy, right? But think of all the shit we go through every day, with every other case. It stands to reason that now and then we get an easy one, doesn't it?"

"I don't know," I said. "This just doesn't feel right." She snorted. "With the amount of hard evidence we got on this guy, nobody's going to give a shit how it feels, Dex," she said. "Why don't you lighten up and enjoy a good day's work?" I'm sure it was excellent advice, but I could not take it. Even though I had no familiar whisper to feed me my cues, I had to say something. "He doesn't act like he's lying," I said, rather feebly. Deborah shrugged. "He's a nut job. Not my problem. He did it." "But if he's psychotic in some way, why would it just burst out all of a sudden? I mean, he's thirty-something years old, and this is the first time he's done anything? That doesn't fit."

She actually patted my shoulder and smiled again. "Good point, Dex. Why don't you get on your computer and check his background? I bet we find something." She glanced at her watch. "You can do that right after the press conference, okay? Come on, can't be late."

And I followed along dutifully, wondering how I always seemed to volunteer for extra work.

Deborah had, in fact, been granted the priceless boon of a press conference, something Captain Matthews did not give out lightly. It was her first as lead detective on a major case with its own media frenzy, and she had clearly studied up on how to look and speak for the evening news. She lost her smile and any other visible trace of emotion and spoke flat sentences of perfect cop-ese. Only someone who knew her as well as I did could tell that great and uncharacteristic happiness was burbling behind her wooden face.

So I stood at the back of the room and watched as my sister made a series of radiantly mechanical statements adding up to her belief that she had arrested a suspect in the heinous murders at the university, and as soon as she knew if he was guilty her dear friends in the media would be among the first to know it. She was clearly proud and happy and it had been pure meanness on my part even to hint that something was not quite righteous with Halpern's guilt, especially since I did not know what that might be-or even if.

She was almost certainly right-Halpern was guilty and I was being stupid and grumpy, thrown off the trolley of pure reason by my missing Passenger. It was the echo of its absence that made me uneasy, and not any kind of doubt about the suspect in a case that really meant absolutely nothing to me anyway. Almost certainly