“Beth!” He was surprised. He’d never known Beth Herari to pay a house call before and he rarely saw her in her dress blues. He wondered if she was here in an official capacity. It was exceedingly rare to see a cop in a public defender’s office. They didn’t, in general, play nice. After all, public defenders built their careers around their abilities to pick holes in a cop’s procedure and even, occasionally, their character and credibility.

John’s eyes bounced to Richie, who wore an expression that John had rarely seen him wear before. Shock and chagrin.

“What’s up?” John asked Beth.

“I’ve been calling you all morning,” Beth told him.

“I had court. My phone’s off.” He pulled it out of the pocket of his black slacks as if to prove his point. He turned it on. “Seriously, what’s going on?”

“Your girl’s shop got broken into last night. Trashed pretty bad.”

His mind stuttered on the word girl. Whose girl? His? And then his thoughts tripped over to the word shop. He knew only one person who owned a shop.

“Mary?” John croaked, his eyes wide, his voice splitting in two different directions.

Richie and Beth nodded at the same time.

“Jesus.” He took a step forward and then an immediate step backward. “Is she all right?”

“She’s holding it together...” Beth said, one hand on the back of her neck and her eyes on the floor. “But it’s pretty bad, and she didn’t call anyone. No friends or anything.”

John thought helplessly of all the friends she’d had over at her beautiful house just last weekend. She hadn’t called a single one of them. Why?

“She’s alone?”

“Yeah. The cops are going to wrap things up for the day pretty soon, but it’s a crime scene.”

And then Mary would be alone at a crime scene, unable to even clean things up. She’d have to leave everything the way it was.

“God. She lives above the shop.”

“Yeah. They broke through her front door, but the cops got there in time and the perps fled. She wasn’t harmed. Just freaked out.”

“Were they apprehended?” he asked in a voice that didn’t quite sound like his own.

Beth pursed her lips. “No. They went out the back while the cops came in the front. They gave chase but lost them. They saw enough to do a rough identification, though, and the vandalism matches a few others that happened up in Williamsburg last month.”

John nodded, trying to absorb the information in a clinical, practiced way, the way he did the details of any case. But he found that he couldn’t. Mary, alone, scared, her shop wrecked.

“Shit. Maybe I should call Estrella.” He pinched his eyes closed.