Almost to himself, Pat said, “Every cop has one of those cases.”

I walked in a small circle, my hands in the air. “But what was it? Vincent Colby’s the common denominator, but appears to just have been on the periphery of those things.”

“‘Those things,’ Mike, are called homicide investigations. And, judging by what little I know, both of those deaths are tied to Colby, Daltree & Levine.” He waggled a finger at me. “I don’t know the details, but I will very damn soon, my friend, that I promise you.”

Right on cue, Chris Peters burst in, tramping through the entryway, the badge he’d used to get past the two cops at the door still in hand.

“I heard the call in my car,” he said, breathless. The slim blond detective, who’d been Shannon’s last partner, reminded me of the young Patrick Chambers. His eyes went white all around. “Jesus! Will you look at him.”

He almost ran to his fallen colleague, then stopped short, the cop in him not wanting to disturb anything. Then he dropped to his knees, as if at a shrine.

Swallowing hard, he said, “What happened to him?”

“I don’t know,” Pat admitted, putting a hand on the detective’s shoulder. “Somehow someone crushed his chest in. The M.E. can tell us more, after the autopsy.”

Then the young man hung his head, mirroring the corpse nearby. They might have been praying together, but only one of them was crying, the other way past that.

Pat let this go on a while, then helped the boy to his feet. “We’ll find who did this. He’ll pay.”

“He or she,” I reminded them. “There’s always those two possibilities.”

I knew that too well.

Pat walked Shannon’s heartsick partner away from the body and positioned the young man and himself so that their backs were to the grim tableau. I came along.

Pat told him, “Mike is working the Colby hit-and-run.”

I said, “I’m working for the father’s client. Old man Vance Colby.”

Of course, Chris had been there that night.

“Well,” Peters said, “that whole hit-run thing threw Casey for a curve.”

“How so?”

His expression grew thoughtful. “He was at least a little suspicious of Colby’s role in those two other homicides. One was a low-level broker at the Colby firm, the other a secretary there.”

“Vincent Colby’s secretary?”

“No, not exactly. He doesn’t have a secretary, even though he’s all but running the place. They have a secretarial pool. But the young woman had been in frequent contact with him, taking dictation and such.”

As good-looking as the women at that firm seemed to be, I wondered exactly what kind of dictation she’d taken.

“Attractive girl?” I asked.

“Very. Tragic circumstances. She was found raped and strangled in her apartment. Her roommate was away for the weekend and found the body when she got back late on a Sunday night.”

Just the kind of thing that could get its claws into a detective, even one who’d seen everything—like Casey Shannon.