That silences Pete for a moment. Then he says, “Okay, so maybe it worked for awhile and then the chip died. Or whatever they do.”

It worked, all right, Hodges thinks. She played solitaire on it at the kitchen table. Lots of different kinds, like Klondike and Pyramid and Picture. Which you would know, Peter my dear, if you’d talked to Nancy Alderson. That must still be on your bucket list.

“All right,” Hodges says. “Thanks for the update.”

“It’s your final update, Kermit. I have a partner I’ve worked with quite successfully since you pulled the pin, and I’d like her to be at my retirement party instead of sitting at her desk and sulking over how I preferred you to her right to the bitter end.”

Hodges could pursue this, but the hospital is only two stops away now. Also, he discovers, he wants to separate himself from Pete and Izzy and go his own way on this thing. Pete plods, and Izzy actually drags her feet. Hodges wants to run with it, bad pancreas and all.

“I hear you,” he says. “Again, thanks.”

“Case closed?”

“Finito.”

His eyes flick up and to the left.

6

Nineteen blocks from where Hodges is returning his iPhone to his overcoat pocket, there is another world. Not a very nice one. Jerome Robinson’s sister is there, and she is in trouble.

Pretty and demure in her Chapel Ridge school uniform (gray wool coat, gray skirt, white kneesocks, red scarf wrapped around her neck), Barbara walks down Martin Luther King Avenue with a yellow Zappit Commander in her gloved hands. On it the Fishin’ Hole fish dart and swim, although they are almost invisible in the cold bright light of midday.

MLK is one of two main thoroughfares in the part of the city known as Lowtown, and although the population is predominantly black and Barbara is herself black (make that café au lait), she has never been here before, and that single fact makes her feel stupid and worthless. These are her people, their collective ancestors might have toted barges and lifted bales on the same plantation back in the day, for all she knows, and yet she has never been here one single time. She has been warned away not only by her parents but by her brother.

“Lowtown’s where they drink the beer and then eat the bottle it came in,” he told her once. “No place for a girl like you.”

A girl like me, she thinks. A nice upper-middle-class girl like me, who goes to a nice private school and has nice white girlfriends and plenty of nice preppy clothes and an allowance. Why, I even have a bank card! I can withdraw sixty dollars from an ATM anytime I want! Amazeballs!