I decided to review the footage of the observer in Senator Murray’s house to establish if I was perhaps wrong in postulating that the person was male. However, after studying it several times, I concluded that, based on height and build, this person was not the woman who’d fled from me in the graveyard, and Mannie, being black, was the wrong ethnicity.

I contacted Greer and learned that Mannie, apart from declaring that he would talk tomorrow, still hadn’t spoken a word.

“Are you going into the office tomorrow?” Greer asked me.

“Yeah. At least in the afternoon.”

Originally, I hadn’t been scheduled to work, but in this job no matter how many hours you put in each week, there’s always a reason to be at the office. I still hadn’t figured out where to draw the line between personal responsibilities and work assignments. Full days off for me ended up being pretty few and far between—something I needed to sort out, now that I had a family.

“Bad guys don’t take days off,” Greer said, “so why should we?”

I couldn’t tell if he was being reflective or sarcastic. “Right. What about you?”

“Mannie’s not my case, and if he’s not talking, there’s nothing I can really do on that front. I’ll probably tackle a few things here from home.” Ever since moving from Chicago he’d lived in New Jersey and had an hour commute each way, so I understood. “But I’ll come in if I need to. Let’s see how things shake out.”

He told me he would work with Public Affairs to develop a press release that stated we were still collecting more information about Jon Murray’s death and asking the public for any facts they might have.

“Don’t mention the observer,” I said.

“We won’t.”

12

Tessa plugged in her earbuds and cranked the music from DeathNail 13.

Silence weirded her out, especially at night.

Well, that wasn’t completely true.

When she was reading, silence was alright. But times like this, being here by herself, made her think too much, and right now she didn’t want to do that. She didn’t want to think about how mad her mom probably was at her, or why she suddenly took off for Kentucky this weekend. Or how lonely it was around here without Az staying with them.

She hadn’t realized how much she liked having somebody her age around, a little sister, but whatever. That was over. Az was gone, back to Kazakhstan. Even though Tessa had tried emailing her a couple of times, she hadn’t heard anything back. Which wasn’t a hundred percent surprising. Az was probably just glad to be away from her.

A scrap of a poem came to her.

Tessa pulled out her journal and wrote:

i don’t want to get too close to you