It didn’t smell terribly—either that or they’d been numbed by excessive exposure to such places.

The house was dark. Despite the time of day, all the curtains were drawn, which seemed a permanent state. Willy therefore led the way toward a light in the back, to the kitchen, it turned out—not that it looked any different from the room they’d just left.

Cheri Pratt was sitting at a piled-high table in the room’s center, her hands around a stained, half-empty mug of some dark liquid, her eyes straight ahead and her expression grim. Jarring with her environment, her own appearance seemed almost athletic. In a disconnect Willy had seen time and again, her body was lean, accentuated by spangled jeans and the colorful close-fitting top, while her angular features and sinewy hands were lined and worn, as if belonging to someone twenty years beyond her own mid-forties—the results not of exercise and a healthy diet, but of poor nutrition, cigarettes, presumably DNA, and a nervous disposition.

There being nowhere else to sit, Willy leaned gingerly against the rusty refrigerator, while Ron stayed in the doorway.

“Still here?” she asked in a low voice, reaching for smokes and a lighter.

“I know you think it’s too little, too late,” Willy began. “But we’d like to find out who killed your boy.”

“Why?” she countered. “Not sure I do. Won’t change nothin’.”

“’Cause I doubt he deserved it,” Willy told her. “The way I see it, most of us end up doing what we do for reasons we can’t even figure out. I didn’t grow up wanting to be a cop. I doubt you saw yourself sitting here when you were little. Shit happens. You turn right instead of left. You go to bed with the wrong person. You accept a joyride when you shouldn’t. Next thing Donny knew, he was climbing through windows and ripping people off. Why? I don’t know. He liked the thrill. It’s what he did; who he ended up being.”

Cheri lit her cigarette and drew on it. “Yeah,” she said, the word catching a ride on a plume of expelled smoke.

“We checked his record,” Willy went on. “He wasn’t a violent guy. Did a little weed, drank too much, hung out with just the right people to get him into trouble. But he never fought, never carried a gun or knife that I know about. He just liked what belonged to other people. Am I right?”

“Yeah,” she repeated.

“So what got him killed?”

She broke off her blank stare to look at him. “That’s your job.”

“Help me do it, then. Tell me a little about him.”

“He was a good boy, under all the shit.”

“What shit?”

She shrugged a narrow shoulder. “Oh, the show-off stuff. Pretendin’ he was cool. What he was like with his friends.”

“He was different at home? Here?”

“He would bring me gifts he thought I’d like.”

“What kinds of things?”

“A lamp, maybe. A real nice tray I could use in front of the TV. A coat that didn’t fit. You know…”