“Don’t need a man to fix me. Don’t need a man to save me.”

“I’ve noticed.”

She grimaced. “I hate my fucking pager.”

He smiled. “I love working at the Academy.”

“Not gonna give it up for all this glamour?” She spread her hands over their piles of notes and reports.

“No. Visiting the field is good. Don’t need to live here. ’Course, it helps me to be more understanding of a fellow investigator’s crazy schedule.”

“Nothing regular about this job,” D.D. agreed.

“Plans get made and unmade. Dinners could be prepared that sadly grow cold.”

“Very sadly,” she assured him.

“I’m good at my job,” he said.

“I’ve noticed.”

“Don’t need a woman to wait on me. Don’t need a woman to stroke my ego.”

“I’ve noticed.” She paused, regarding him more seriously. “So what do you want?”

“Let’s start with dinner.”

“Really?” She didn’t mean to sound disappointed.

“But I’m open to all possibilities,” he added hastily.

“Because I saw this ad—” D.D. realized what she was about to say, and broke off, mortified.

Alex grinned. “‘Cool chills, warm thrills’?”

She leaned closer. “I’m dying to know,” she admitted.

He leaned closer. “I’m dying to be of service.”

They both sighed. Heavily. Then leaned back, and returned to work.

“So,” D.D. said after a minute, clearing her throat, forcing herself to sound brisk. “Where are we at? We got a drug dealer, a welfare mom, a truant teen, a brainy preteen, and two unknowns. High-risk lifestyle. Isolated mother and kids. What are the odds that Hermes smoked too much dope, tried a new product, and went postal on his own family?”

“Don’t like the knife,” Alex remarked. “If he starts with the knife, he should end with the knife.”

“Maybe stabbing Audi was the impulse part. They got into a fight in the kitchen, he took it too far. Ishy saw him, started to run, and Hermes realized he’d better do damage control real quick. Hermes gets out his handgun and goes to town.”

“Then, once he realizes what he’s done …”

“Decides to finish it all. Suffocates his own baby, then lies down on the sofa and blows out his brains.”

“You’re wrong.”

D.D. and Alex looked up sharply. Neil had appeared in the doorway, his pale face so lit up his freckles glowed. “I got news, straight from the ME,” he burst out. “Hermes wasn’t shot. I mean, well, okay, he was shot. But it doesn’t matter, because at the time he was shot, he was already dead. Whole sofa scene—totally staged.”

There were moments D.D. didn’t like her job. The stress of working too many hours without a break. The tedium of poring over investigative reports. Her damn pager going off at precisely the wrong moment …