I was still processing all that Ray had relayed in the car, a veritable avalanche of personal information, followed by his intention to return home again. It was as if he’d been in a race to tell everything to me before it was too late. The past week had made us comrades, professional but true to each other. But after this morning, there were more dimensions to Ray—the grieving, frustrated brother, the loving uncle—to mix in to the image I’d constructed of him as the bottled-up detective who kept appearing in my life. I didn’t like Ray suddenly evolving into a cocktail of confused selves, especially one who seemed to have feelings for me. I liked how he’d been the first night, when we’d gone to see Davi play, and he’d cruised through the whole evening with the certitude that he would get the information he wanted. Vulnerable Ray made me pity him. No, not pity. Ray was leaving L.A. behind for good reasons. I saw that. Pity meant charity, forced sympathy, and not this soft, achy, deflating sadness, like something I’d held taut inside me had sprung a tiny hole.

I dreaded the car ride home with him—what would we say to each other now?—but here, at LAAC, we had a job to do.

We entered the main building through the glass doors. Beyond was a cavernous chamber. The ceilings hung high over a two-story lobby lined with theater lights. Corridors stretched off in all directions. I could hear dim sounds of music and thumping feet, but I couldn’t tell where they were coming from. The architects had designed the space so that students from all the different disciplines—art, music, dance, film, criticism, and more—would cross one another’s paths, cross-pollinate, collaborate. Later in the day, the space would be bursting with commotion.

Empty this morning, however, the surfaces looked old: the paint faded, the tile worn, the room lacking the alabaster glow of newer Los Angeles locations. Hal had erected a castle, but after a couple of decades in this city, all castles eroded. You weren’t supposed to erode with them, though. Not if you were a genius. You were supposed to go out and build another. I understood Hal’s career motives. And why should he care about the Rocque’s future? Bunker Hill was fair game to him. Not to me. It was irrational, I knew, but I hoped Ray would find exactly what we needed to nail Hal today. Some clue that Brenae had left behind.

The campus welcome office wasn’t open yet, but Janis jabbed at her phone and spoke into it, then nodded at us. “Someone’s coming.”