“You’re thinking that this girl just told him all this before the police got there and he heard it somehow and believed it. As much as he could understand.”

“Something like that.” Then I asked, “Are you going to arrest her?”

Pete Sunday blinked. “Arrest her? I don’t even know who she is yet.” If only I’d heard from her recently. I personally had called every one of those numbers and every one of them was disconnected. Could Pete find out who’d used them and how, in previous months? That depended, he said, on what kind of phones they were.

“This is important,” I insisted, just north of a whine.

“It is, but, Thea, it’s an old case, and yes, it’s a priority, but I have other cases. A guy who just robbed and beat up six women who’ll get away if I don’t find him. I don’t even work for that jurisdiction anymore, so I should just hand this box and your thoughts over to them. I just can’t bring myself to do that. So I’m going to have to ask my boss here if I can use my own time to chase this down.”

Frustrated, I asked him how long this would take. Conservatively, days if not weeks, he said.

The speech we were to give was in two days’ time. What if it wasn’t relevant at all anymore? Why should we do this?

Pete Sunday asked the substance of what we were to address and I told him that it was the challenges Stefan faced coming out of prison.

“Well, that’s still something you faced, right?” he said.

It was. With a promise to try to speed things up, Pete Sunday left, the box tucked under one arm.

It’s really almost over, I told myself. Almost really over for good.

We arrived at the hotel in Milwaukee early in the morning that weekend, although the speech was not scheduled to start until that night at six. I was practically teen-like in my relief when Jep was able to come with us. Curt Cowrie met us in the lobby of The Nines, the very kind of hotel I’d dreamed of last January when Stefan came out of prison, with a rooftop restaurant where we lunched on Thai barbecue until my stomach literally protruded. He said we were welcome to stay overnight in the suite booked for us, dine out, have brunch the next day, whatever we wanted, and we agreed to take him up on that. We went to the theater and did a sound check. How many seats there were, how long it took to walk from the back of the theater to the stage, these things literally nauseated me, or maybe it was all that barbecue. Forty minutes, an hour with questions, I told myself. It couldn’t last forever. Be brave and be seated.