FOR THE SECOND TIME in my life I understood what it felt like to be a victim of a terrible crime rather than the detective investigating it. I was disconnected and out of it. I needed to be doing something positive on a case, or get back to volunteer work at St. Anthony’s — anything to take my mind off what had happened.

I had to be busy, but I knew I’d lost my ability to concentrate, something that had always come so naturally to me. I came across a pair of shocking murders in Maryland that bothered me for some unspecified reason. I didn’t follow up on them. I should have.

I wasn’t myself; I was lost. I still spent endless hours thinking about Christine, remembering everything about our time together, seeing her face wherever I went.

Sampson tried to push me. He did push me. He and I made the rounds of the streets of Southeast. We put the word out that we were looking for a purple and blue cab, possibly a gypsy. We canvassed door to door in the Shaw neighborhood where Tori Glover and Marion Cardinal had been found. Often we were still going at ten or eleven at night.

I didn’t care. I couldn’t sleep anyway.

Sampson cared. He was my friend.

“You’re supposed to be working the Odenkirk case, right? I’m not supposed to be working at all. The Jefe would be livid. I kind of like that,” Sampson said as we trudged along S Street late one evening. Sampson had lived in this neighborhood for years. He knew all the local hangarounds.

“Jamal, you know anything I should know?” he called out to a goateed youth sitting in shadows on a graystone stoop.

“Don’t know nothin’. Just relaxin’ my mind. Catchin’ a cool night breeze. How ’bout yourself?”

Sampson turned back to me. “Damn crack runners working these streets everywhere you look nowadays. Real good place to commit a murder and never get caught. You talk to the police in Bermuda lately?”

I nodded, and my eyes stared at a fixed point up ahead. “Patrick Busby said the story of Christine’s disappearance is off the front pages. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s probably bad.”

Sampson agreed. “Takes the pressure off them. You going back down there?”

“Not right away. But yeah, I have to go back. I have to find out what happened.”

He looked me in the eye. “Are you here with me right now? Are you here, sugar?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Most of the time. I’m functioning okay.” I pointed up at a nearby redbrick building. “That place would have a view of the front entryway into the girl’s building. Any of those windows. Let’s get back to work.”

Sampson nodded. “I’m here as long as you want to be.”