“But I think it’s time we try something different. Your idea of a trap is a good one, but I gotta say there’s a better way to do this. I spoke with Detective Christopher Lee, my ex-partner at VPD, while you were sleeping.”

“You told a cop about me.”

“Not everything, but some. I had to,” he adds, somewhat apologetic. “Did you see this?”

He pulls up the video Cristina Guerrero took in Indonesia and pauses it at the moment Dao jumps the wall. His shirt snags as he lifts himself over and his torso is briefly revealed. There’s a scar running down his abdomen, but his lower belly is oddly distended.

Brazuca zooms in and indicates toward Dao’s bloated stomach, an anomaly on his lean, muscular body. “Experts have pored over this video, and I even asked an ER doctor friend of mine to take a look. Judging from the scarring and the condition of his lower belly, he was in serious pain. She thinks he had a bowel obstruction from a previous gunshot wound to the abdomen. Something about adhesions and scar tissue . . . apparently it can recur with those types of injuries and it’s very painful.”

“And I shot him. I caused it.”

“Yeah, you did.” He hesitates. “Look, Nora. It didn’t seem like it at the time, but our play on Lombok worked. There’s a video of him committing murder, and he’s linked to the mines and Acosta through the protester he attacked. That’s what gets him arrested and out of your life. Edison Lam will make sure he pays for Bernard’s death. You have nothing to lose by getting the authorities involved. Nothing.”

My memory backlog of cops being shitty to me, not believing me, not helping when I needed it, looking at me as though I don’t belong on this land, comes back. After discovering Brazuca was talking to Lam and being ordered to end this by Lynn, I must have gotten reckless. But Brazuca is right. It’s time. “Okay.”

He looks relieved. “Okay. My old partner is willing to talk to us. It’ll extrapolate from there and more agencies will get involved, but I thought he’d be a good person to start with.”

“Alright, let’s go.”

He pushes a breakfast sandwich toward me but makes no move to unwrap his. “Eat something first.”

I shake my head. Suddenly I can’t wait to talk to the cops, for the first time in my life. To tell them everything, talk about the video, let them do the work for a change.

I grab my jacket and toss Brazuca his own. “We can eat on the way.”

That’s why my stomach is empty when the truck comes speeding into us in the alley behind the building, a huge souped-up pickup ramming into the rear end of Brazuca’s MINI.