Department statisticians were happy to file his solves in the Assets column but the brass continued to retard his progress and made periodic attempts to get rid of him. Milo had collected secrets of his own along the way, finally managed to leverage his way to relative job security and seniority. He’d turned down the offer to take the lieutenant’s exam twice because he knew the department’s real intention was to shunt him to some desk job where they could pretend he didn’t exist, while boring him to the point of voluntary retirement. Instead, he’d stayed on the detective track, had taken it as far as it would go: to Detective-III.

Maybe Pierce Schwinn had followed all that, come to respect Milo for holding his own. Offered Milo a perverse gift.

Normally, nothing heated Milo’s blood like a good cold case. But this was a rethaw from his own past, and perhaps he’d gotten careless and turned himself into prey.

I thought of how Paris Bartlett had targeted Milo, ignored me.

Meaning I had room to move.

The timing was perfect, the logic exquisite: What were friends for?

CHAPTER

21

Alone, at his crappy little piss-colored desk, the washer churning the clothes he’d just loaded for background noise, Milo felt
better.

Free of Alex, he felt better.

Because Alex’s mind could be a scary thing—cerebral flypaper; stuff flew in but never left. His friend was capable of sitting quietly for long stretches when you’d think he was listening—actively listening the way they’d taught him in shrink school—then he’d let loose a burst of associations and hypotheses and apparently unrelated trivialities that turned out too often to be right-on.

Houses of cards that, more often than not, withstood the wind. Milo on the receiving end of the nonstop volleys, felt like a wobbly sparring partner.

Not that Alex pushed. He just kept supposing. Suggesting. Another shrink tactic. Try ignoring any of it.

Milo had never met anyone smarter or more decent than Alex, but hanging with the guy could be draining. How many nights’ sleep had he lost because one of his friend’s suggestions had hooked a barb in his brain?

But for all his bloodhound instincts, Alex was a civilian and out of his element. And he’d failed to mature in one regard: had never developed a proper sense of threat.

In the beginning, Milo had attributed it to the carelessness of an overenthusiastic amateur. It hadn’t taken long to learn the truth: Alex got off on danger.

Robin understood that, and it scared her. Over the years she’d confided her fears to Milo—more nuance than complaint. And when the three of them were together and Alex and Milo lapsed into the wrong type of conversation and her face changed, Milo caught it quickly and changed the subject. Strangely enough, Alex, for all his perceptiveness, sometimes missed it.