“But you haven’t found her body?” I said.

“No. I was wondering if you would come take a look.”

This was sad, and it was also professionally awkward. In view of his obvious misery and our friendship with Victoria, I wasn’t even thinking about money. I was thinking about the rest of the cops out there who would decide that my arrival on the scene was Rudy Flemmon’s anxiety taking an extreme form.

But there wasn’t much I could say except, “Give me ten minutes.”

I jumped into the shower, soaped up and rinsed off, brushed my teeth, and pulled on my clothes. I put on boots; not high-heeled fashion boots, but flat, waterproof Uggs. The weather had been intermittently rainy, and I didn’t want to get caught by surprise. Though I hadn’t watched the forecast that morning or checked the paper, I noticed Rudy was wearing a heavy jacket, and I bundled up accordingly.

There was no question of Tolliver coming. That idea suddenly hit me in the face when I was ready to go out the door. Sloppy weather, cemetery conditions: not ideal for someone recovering from a gunshot wound.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said, with a terrible pang of anxiety. “You don’t do anything. I mean, get back in bed and watch TV. I’ll call you if anything happens, all right?”

Tolliver was as stricken by the belated realization that I was going out on a work call alone as I was. “Get some candy out of my jacket pocket,” he said, and I did. “Don’t do anything that’s going to hurt you,” he said severely.

“Don’t worry,” I said, and then I told Rudy Flemmons I was ready to go, though that was far from the truth.

On the ride through the misty rain, in the heavy morning traffic, we were silent. Rudy called someone on the radio to tell them we were on the way, and those were the only words spoken in fifteen minutes.

“I know you charge for this,” he said suddenly, as he pulled in behind a long line of cars on a road through a huge cemetery, the modern kind that forbids headstones. I was being bombarded by the vibrations of the corpses, coming from all directions. They were all intense, since this was a relatively new burial ground. I thought the oldest was maybe twenty years in the ground.

“Not an issue. Please don’t mention it again,” I said, and got out of the car. The last thing I wanted to do was debate prices while I was looking for this sad man’s girlfriend.