I told her about recognizing where I was, when I got to Walt Felkin’s, and explained how I knew who Walt Felkin was. Then I described the bike with great care, knowing that it didn’t exist anymore. “I really did think it was a lock cable,” I sighed.

“And then?”

It seemed strange, suddenly, that she didn’t know what had happened at Walt Felkin’s place, that she hadn’t deduced everything I’d done from evidence at the scene. That made me wonder how much evidence was left there, of anything. “You’re going to hate this,” I warned her.

“Probably. But right now I’m getting down what happened, not how I feel about it. Keep going.”

“I knew Walt would do his double-damnedest not to tell you anything. I mean, you or any other cop. And I thought that might not be true if it was just me he was talking to. So I went ‘round the front and knocked on the door.”

At the pause, she looked up from her notebook and waited.

“Then I saw the bomb wired up to go off when the door opened. I yelled through the door and told him about it. He asked—after I told him I thought it had to do with the motorcycle, he wanted to know who sent me. And then he said something about… a backstabbing son of a bitch, and ‘Fuck him.’”

I raised my hands to rub my head, which ached, and my fingers brushed against the bandage on the right temple. I settled for rubbing the left side. “After that—before I could stop him, he tried to get out the back door. Boom.”

Rico didn’t comment. Instead, she flipped back a few pages in the notebook and began to re-read what she’d written. I stared off into space, consoling myself with Tick-Tick’s observation that Walt would have opened the door eventually, that that had been the bomber’s original intention, in fact.

I was brought back to the room by a new intensity in the silence. Rico was looking across the top of her notebook, not quite at me, and I could see a muscle appear and disappear in her jaw as her back teeth worked. “Tell me again,” she said quietly, “about what you did at the station.”

I started to, and she said, “Slow down.” I did, and she still stopped me with questions like, “Was that when Toby came back in?” and “Did you see Vic again after he left to check the dock?” and “Did Hawthorn leave the building while you were there?” and “Was that the first time you’d seen the two morning shift officers?”

I’d been hit on the head, but I still wonder why it took that long before I said, “You think it’s a cop.”