“I know. You don’t have to do it—and if you don’t, I’ll understand.”

“Your argument is chock-full of what you believe to be true; your supporting facts are tenuous at best. You want me to put my ass—my career—on the line for an instinct?”

Max said, “I shouldn’t have asked.”

They returned to eating in silence, and Max wished he hadn’t come. But after a few bites, Niki said, “When I came to Homicide, I thought I had it all figured out. I could look at a crime scene like I was looking at a piece of cloth. I could tell you the material, the color—hell, I could even give you a thread count. That’s all I thought I needed to be a good detective.”

She averted her gaze as if working up to a confession, her fork carving small lines in her eggs. “But then you came along and taught me a whole new way to look at things. Where I saw thread counts, you saw folds and stretches. You could look at that cloth and see in a twist of the fabric whether it had been used to strangle someone or smother them. You had this… incredible intuition. It was like you could see right through walls, and lies… and people. God, how I admired you for that.”

And Max had thought that he couldn’t feel any smaller.

“It was a thing of beauty to watch you follow your instincts. And I went along… diving in even when I thought the water might be too shallow. Time after time you pulled something from nothing. All because your gut told you so.”

Niki paused as if to think something through one last time. Then she said, “I guess what I’m saying is that if you tell me that this woman is dead and her son has been kidnapped—if that’s what you truly believe happened—I’ll trust you.”

Even though everything in his gut told him that Sandy was dead, Max hesitated. Had he lost his edge living in the woods? He needed to get this right. He closed his eyes and said, “She’s dead and the boy’s been kidnapped—and I need your help to save him.”

Niki gave Max a sad smile. “Okay. I’ll do the ping, tonight, after hours. I don’t want anybody around to ask questions.”

CHAPTER 35

At eleven that night, Max sat in his car outside of City Hall and waited for the last of the detectives to leave. Niki’s text came at 11:15: Come on in.

She met him at the door and they walked the marbled hallway that led to Homicide together, their steps echoing in the emptiness. Max had walked that hallway so many times in his life that it had become just another passageway, but now it seemed longer, and larger, and more impressive than he remembered. Niki walked with purpose, seemingly unaffected by the dubious nature of their visit.

She stopped at room 108 and unlocked the door to the anteroom, then punched a code onto a keypad, releasing the lock on the second door into the unit. Max had watched over her shoulder, curious if the code was still the same. It wasn’t.