“What if there’s a problem? What if you two get arrested for interfering and I’m sitting here, useless, when I could be inside helping? What if Simon’s being disagreeable—”

“Simon’s pretty much always disagreeable,” Emma points out.

“But that’s something I can help with!” Kristin’s scowl becomes stubborn. “If you’re not going to take me with you, I’ll… I’ll follow behind you anyway! You’ll have to tie me up to make me stay in the car!”

Emma sighs. This is wasting time they don’t have. “Bell, let her come. We might need help with Simon, she’s right.”

“Lewis—”

“Talk with me.”

Emma walks toward the ballpark. She hears Bell exit the car, then his heavier tread as he catches up to her near home plate.

“Having Kristin come with us is a bad idea,” he grumbles.

“What do you want to do, Bell, lock her in the trunk?” Emma folds her arms, holding herself together. “It’s less dangerous to have her with us than chasing along behind.”

“Shit. Fine. Scott gave you the keys? Okay, so what are we waiting for?”

“Night.” Emma breathes in deep, looks around. A poisonous orange tints the sky, and the air is still and heavy. “Travis, are you okay? You just met your dad’s murderer.”

Bell focuses off toward second base. “I’m okay.”

“Is that the first time you’ve met him in person?”

“Yes.”

She can see in his face that this is all he’s going to say. Better to stop tapping this vein. “Okay. There’s something else I need to tell you, and it’s the most important thing.”

“What’s more important than—”

“Simon Gutmunsson knows who the Butcher is.”

Bell’s head turns so fast she fears whiplash. “He what? How is that possible?”

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me more than that.”

“He could be bluffing. He could be goading you—”

“To what purpose? Bell, I’m starting to think we’ve read this situation all wrong. Simon and the Butcher have been communicating, maybe for longer than we realized. I think they’ve been playing a kind of game, and we’ve let ourselves get caught in the cat-and-mouse between two sociopaths.”

“Fuck.” Bell’s hands are hooked on his hips, his jacket pushed back in the same way as the day they first met. “That’s great.”

“Tonight is the endgame, and whoever makes it out alive is the winner.” Emma lets her arms drop. “But Simon’s in a cell—that’s an obvious handicap. And Raymond using him as bait like this is wrong.”

“You feel sorry for Gutmunsson?”

“In a way.” She concedes it reluctantly. “But what matters is that Simon knows the Butcher’s identity. Simon is being transferred tomorrow—when he goes, his information goes with him. And if this operation goes bad, like Annandale, and the Butcher escapes again, goes to ground…” She pauses to give the idea the weight it demands. “We need Simon’s information, Bell. Now more than ever. And Raymond has no idea what Simon’s capable of. If he gets free, we’ll be wishing like hell we only had the Butcher to worry about.”