“Show him the picture,” Cherry prompted me.

It was nighttime, but we were under the spotlights. I got out the picture from the Suburban and handed it to Bruce Wingstaff. He looked down, squinted, reached into his pocket for a pair of reading glasses and slid them on.

“Nice looking,” he said. “But I don’t know…” He glanced up at the field, looked again at the picture. “You know who it could be?”

I felt my pulse quicken. “Who?”

“Well, maybe not, the hair color’s not right, but it looks a bit like maybe it could be Candace.”

“Candace?” I said.

“Yeah, what was her last name…Shit. She got knocked up by Eldon Swain. Remember him?” He was asking Cherry.

“Oh yeah.”

“Car pushed in front of the train, with him in it?”

“I remember.”

“And I would like to state, once again, that we had nothing to do with that,” Wingstaff said. “Given half a chance, we mighta, but we didn’t.”

“Sure, Bruce,” Cherry said. I was having some difficulty getting used to this, a bike gang leader and a cop having a casual chat, talking about old murders like they were reminiscing about somebody they’d known in high school.

Wingstaff was on his feet again. “Go, Blake! Go! Go!” I turned and looked at the field. A blond-haired boy was moving up the field, then tripped himself up on the ball, without any interference from an opposing player, and landed on his face.

Wingstaff winced, made a face.

“So you think this woman might be Candace,” I said. “And that she had a child.”

“Little girl, I think,” Wingstaff said.

“Whatever happened to them?”

He looked up at the stars for a moment, as though the answer could be found in them. “After those three got shot, I don’t remember ever seeing her, or her kid, again. Kid couldn’t have been more than a year old at the time, anyway. But come to think of it, she did just seem to disappear. But then, so did a lot of the girls who worked at the Kickstart—they’d come and go—’cept for those that came to work for me.”

“She was a stripper? Or a prostitute?” I asked.

“Uh, I don’t think she did much hooking. Started out dancing, I think, but then she started working in the office. Had a head for figures.” Wingstaff cocked his head at a funny angle, half smiled. “Fuck, now I remember.”

Cherry and I glanced at each other, then studied Wingstaff.

“After that little massacre, Pick arranged a meeting with me. We had to set it up, careful like, because we figured Pick thought we’d put the hit out on his guys. Found some neutral ground, which actually turned out to be a Starbucks on Elmer Street. Anyway, we had this sit-down, and I expressed my condolences, and I figured he’d be accusing me of offing his boys.”