“Just leave me alone, Tori Warshawski. Every time you come near me, someone in my family gets hurt.” She spat this out reflexively, because, a second later, she told me to call her folks, who lived over in Pullman. “They only have a pullout bed in the front room, but April and me, we can stay with them for a few days. My dad’s old local, they’ll send someone around to fix the house up for me.”

It was a relief to know she wasn’t completely on her own, but her departure left me to try to explain to the police what had been going on. I decided a bare-bones story would work best: I was the interim basketball coach; April was sick, her father had just died, I was dropping something off for her when a scumbag broke in through the back. He’d grabbed Sandra and threatened her; I took the kid out to my car to try to keep her out of danger. We waited for the posse—which, by the way, only arrived some thirty minutes after Sandra’s first call.

The bare-bones story got bogged down when they saw my Smith & Wesson. I had a gun, yes, I had a license, yes, I was a private investigator, yes, but I wasn’t here as a detective. I told them my history, my connection to the Czernins because April was on the Bertha Palmer basketball team and I was subbing for the coach, blah, blah. They didn’t like it: I was here with a gun, the house was a wreck, they only had my word that Freddy had ever been on the premises.

I was trying hard not to lose my temper—that was a sure recipe for spending the night in a holding cell at the division—when Conrad called me on my cell phone: he’d gotten home, he’d gotten my message, and what the hell was I doing interrogating suspects?

“It took your damned squad twenty minutes by the clock to respond to a 911 call about a home invasion,” I snarled. “Don’t give me word one about staying out of your turf, leaving police business to the Fourth District, giving tea parties, or whatever it was you said last week.”

“Home invasion? What are you talking about, Warshawski? You didn’t say anything about that in the message you left.”

“It hadn’t happened then,” I snapped, “but Freddy Pacheco, the guy I called you about, was breaking into the Czernin house less than an hour later. I did report my encounter with him to one of your detectives, but he wouldn’t work up a sweat over it. Now your boys want to arrest me for saving Sandra and April Czernin.”

“You’re so wound up, I can’t make head nor tail of what you’re saying,” Conrad complained. “Let me talk to the officer in charge.”