“Petra! Oh my God, you’re safe, Petey … Petey …” He was at her side, clinging to her, but she pushed him away.

“Daddy, don’t touch me, don’t come near me … not until you explain what you did.”

“Don’t talk, Warshawski,” Dornick growled.

“No, you don’t need to talk, Mr. Warshawski,” Bobby agreed. “I’m going to do that. You just take one of those empty seats.”

He laid a slim file on the table: the photo book I’d sent him this afternoon. “We’re going to start at the beginning: Marquette Park, 1966. I was a rookie, and that was a hell of a time to join the police force. Another rookie in my class was Larry Alito. He had the great good luck to be partnered with Tony Warshawski … the best cop who ever wore this uniform.”

Bobby looked directly at me for the first time when he said that. I bit my lips together.

“Alito’s badge number was 8963. You can see it here, on the chest of the man picking up a baseball. That ball was a murder weapon used to kill a black girl in the park that day. Harmony Newsome, pride of her family, marching next to a nun. A black kid named Steve Sawyer confessed to the murder, we all know that.”

“Good police work,” Dornick said. “Case closed.”

“Bad police work,” Bobby snapped. “Case reopened. No proper forensic evidence was presented at the trial. We didn’t have the murder weapon then, but it should have been possible to tell from the bruising and contusions and so on that she’d been struck by a projectile, not by someone stabbing her in the eye at close range.”

He tossed the photo book across the table at my uncle. “You and someone else are in these pictures. He throw that ball or you?”

Peter licked his lips, but he looked at the pictures. “Harvey. He told me Dornick said that someone at the march had taken pictures. Damn it, did Tony have them all along?”

Petra was looking at her father, her face strained, very white underneath its layer of grime. When he saw her expression, he winced and looked away.

“Harvey Krumas?” Bobby said.

Dornick interrupted Peter to warn him again not to talk. “They’re recording all this, Warshawski, so shut the fuck up.”

“Lamont Gadsden had the negatives all along,” I said quietly. “He took the pictures with his Instamatic. He’s been missing since the night of the big snow of ’sixty-seven. Three months ago, his auntie hired me to find him. She filed a missing persons report all those years ago, but George and Larry or their friends treated her like scum and didn’t try to find Mr. Gadsden. Now his aunt is dying, and she wants to see him, or know where he’s lying, before she can rest.”