“You worked with the man. You worked with him on this case. Casey knew he was poking around in the dirty secrets of a powerful Wall Street firm. Politics stink sometimes, but they’re real and they have an impact on cops. The Commissioner says, ‘Drop it.’ When you don’t, the Chief of Police says, ‘We’ve got a nice beat for you to walk in Staten Island. You’ll love it.’”

His arms were folded but a hand was up rubbing his chin. “You mean, if anybody anywhere knows what Casey Shannon was thinking, in the weeks before…before this happened…it’s…”

“It’s you, kid.” I stood. Gestured toward the rest of the apartment. “Let’s look at the places the pros wouldn’t think of.”

He frowned. “There can’t be many of those.”

“Well, hell, let’s try anything that strikes you as a possibility. Then we’ll look everywhere else, harder than the pros did. You’re the one whose partner got killed, not them.”

We went through the cupboards. On our hands and knees, we sorted through the area under the sink where cleaning products were kept. Checked to see if there was a plastic bottle that was empty but had something rolled up in it. When that was a no go, we tried the refrigerator, where the dead man’s food was waiting never to be eaten. I figured maybe the box of frozen pizza, still in its plastic wrapper, might give up a prize, and it did.

A frozen pizza.

Back into the freezer it went, while we headed into the bedroom. We gave it a thorough going over, even though I knew everything we were doing had been done before by an experienced team and a certain captain of Homicide. We looked under the mattress and the bed itself, like maybe a cuckolded husband was hiding under there. Went through the nightstand, pulling out the drawer, checking every damn thing and place you could imagine.

A linen closet had us going through towels and sheets like Lawrence of Arabia after a new look. The bathroom had the usual supplies and bath towels and clothes; the medicine cabinet contained everything from a few prescription meds to razor blades and corn pads. A clothes closet gave us nothing special, just more of the specially-cut-for-a-cop suits and some sports clothes, including an ill-advised Hawaiian shirt. A cubbyhole above the closets had suitcases, which we dragged down and went through and found lots of empty.

All these closets reminded me I hadn’t bothered with the front one. We wandered back into the living room, feeling defeated, and I looked in at fall and winter coats and a shelf with a collection of hats that put Casey on the same dinosaur list as Pat and me, only Casey was already extinct.

In the bottom of the closet were galoshes and sandals, but also something else.