“Not for me.” He was about to say that it was time for him to get going, but he realized he hadn’t been there very long at all. It was one of those constitutional tendencies of his that had gotten worse over the past six months—the desire to minimize the amount time he spent with other people.

Holding up the shiny blue folder, he said, “I’m not sure I can go through this whole thing right now. It looks pretty detailed.”

Like a fast-moving cloud on a bright day, her look of disappointment came and went. “Maybe tonight? I mean, you can take that with you and look at it when you have time.”

He was oddly affected by her reaction—“touched” was the only word for it, the same feeling he’d had earlier, when she was telling him how she’d narrowed her focus to the Good Shepherd murders. Now he thought he understood what the feeling was about.

It was her wholehearted commitment, her energy, her hopefulness—her bright, determined youthfulness. And the fact that she was doing this alone. Alone in an unsafe house, in a desolate neighborhood, pursued by a mean-spirited stalker. He suspected that it was this combination of determination and vulnerability that was stirring his atrophied parental instinct.

“I’ll take a look at it tonight,” he said.

“Thank you.”

The throbbing sound of a helicopter again emerged faintly from the distance, grew louder, passed, faded away. She cleared her throat nervously, clasped her hands in her lap, spoke with evident difficulty. “There’s something I wanted ask you. I don’t know why this is so hard.” She shook her head sharply, as if in disapproval of her own confusion.

“What is it?”

She swallowed. “Could I hire you? For maybe like just one day?”

“Hire me? To do what?”

“I’m not making any sense, I know. This is embarrassing, I know shouldn’t be pressuring you like this. But this is so important to me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Tomorrow … could you maybe sort of come with me? You don’t have to do anything. The thing is, I have two meetings tomorrow. One with a prospective interviewee, the other with Rudy Getz. All I would want you to do is be there—listen to me, listen to them—and afterward just give me your gut reaction, your advice, I don’t know, just … I’m not making any sense at all, am I?”

“Where are these meetings tomorrow?” he asked.