The officers attending the scene had festooned blue and white police tape across the entryway to designate the inner cordon. There was an older, gray-haired man pacing the edge of the outer cordon, head down, watching his feet. As I crossed the dirt road and ducked under the tape of the outer cordon Amanda appeared from the side of the bar in denim shorts and a faded cotton singlet. Her only forensic efforts were a pair of cotton booties over her sneakers and a cap of the same material pulled down over her shaggy black and orange hair. She’d called me that morning and given me the address, waking me from a painful half slumber on the couch on the porch. She came to me and inspected the work she’d done on my slightly less puffy and bruised cheek. In the dim light of the cloudy morning her scars were obvious, running down her arm and shoulder, along her lean legs, crossing hundreds and hundreds of individual tattoos, slicing through inked faces, cutting objects in half. A crocodile had tried to make her its evening meal once, and now her colorful body was cracked with these baby pink lines and cracks. She was fun to look at, Amanda.

“Did you catch up with the prize fighter?” she asked.

“I did.” I walked with her to where her yellow bike was leaning against another ancient tree. “I gave him the leads you gave me. He can do what he wants with them.”

“That was pretty ballsy.”

“Well, I’ve still got ’em. Might as well use ’em.”

“He didn’t try to thump you again?”

“I think he might have, if I’d pressed any harder,” I said. “What’s this all about?” I gestured to the officers under the tree, the shadows of more inside. I didn’t think there were this many cops this side of Sydney.

“Happened this morning, about three, they think, though we don’t have any ear or eye witnesses. Last text message from one of the victims was at two forty-seven a.m. telling Dad he was just about to head home.”

One of the victims. All Amanda had told me that morning was that people were dead inside a bar, not how many. I could have been about to walk in on a full-scale massacre or a lover’s spat gone wrong.

“Who’s hired us?” I asked. Amanda nodded over my shoulder at the stocky man with gray hair standing by the outer cordon, looking at the bar. As we walked toward him I recognized the stranglehold of grief on his otherwise powerful frame, the shoulders hanging and arms limp by his sides, all the effort he could muster going into keeping him upright. I knew the feeling, the incredible weight on the back of the head, as though the hurt has lodged there like a lead ball in the back of your skull. I put my hand out.

“Ted Collins,” I lied.