He shook off the thought with the ease of long practice. As much as he couldn’t stand pity from others, he hated self-pity more, and had fought it down more times than he could count. The only thing stronger was the guilt he felt, for which there was no way out. There was no adapting to it, no altering it. It was simply a fact of his life now.

“You know what I’ve never understood?”

Amanda’s voice snapped him out of it again. For an instant he thought she was going to come at him again with this newfound gentleness, which he knew was born of that hated pity. He didn’t think he could take much more of that. But then he saw that she was studying the map they’d pinned up next to the whiteboard, and on which he’d marked the locations of every one of the contacts he knew about that were mentioned in Greg’s secret, encoded file.

“What?” he asked cautiously.

She pointed at the map. “Why was he where he was?”

Adam’s stomach knotted up when he realized what she was talking about, that she had been pointing at the spot on the map he hadn’t bothered to mark because it was etched into his mind more permanently than if it had been done with acid.

The spot where Greg Bonner had died.

And it was a question he had asked himself more than once.

“I mean, why on the side of the building?” she said with remarkable calm, as if it were just another part of a puzzle. “I get that it was dark and he wouldn’t be seen, but...”

“You can’t see all of the front of the store from there.”

“Exactly,” she said, and he wondered if she, like him, had gone back there and stood in that spot, trying to understand. He’d done it more times than he could count.

“They’re probably right,” he said cautiously.

“You mean that he was checking the back of the building?”

For us. “We did park there sometimes, for the view down the street and that stop sign everybody blows.”

“I guess that makes sense, but wouldn’t they have done that first? By the time you got there the clerk thought they were gone, so wouldn’t he have already checked?”

Yes. “Maybe it was an afterthought, like they said.”

This was old ground to him, and probably her, too, but he’d never been quite able to let it go. Not that he didn’t believe the reasonable conclusion the exhaustive investigation had come to, but it just nagged at him a tiny bit. Not that it made a damned bit of difference to anything. It had still happened, and Greg was still dead, and nothing ever changed about that.