“You’re on speaker, Dolan. And Murph is in the room with me.”

“I knew that,” Dolan said unpersuasively after a brief pause. “You don’t think I knew that?”

“Hello, Agent,” Murph said, apparently untroubled by the dig.

“Hello, Marshal,” Dolan replied. “You in?”

“Agent Dolan,” Murph said, “despite your confidence that Bolton Crutchfield is harmless and that Xander Thurman is dead, I’m not entirely certain of either of those things. Until I am, I think it would be inadvisable to go on a bender.”

“I get where you’re coming from, Marshal. But I think a celebratory toast isn’t going to do any harm. You all can go back to wherever that safe house is afterward and I’ll stick around. We can go to the same bar as before. Only this time you can have people encircle the whole place, maybe even stand on manhole covers. You can search everyone who walks in. Considering they’d all be cops, I doubt there would be a problem. What do you say?”

Jessie looked over at the marshal. Whether it was the long day, the solved case, or her dead father, he looked tempted. He seemed about to cave for a moment. But then his face hardened and Jessie knew it wasn’t going to happen.

“It’s not looking good,” she said into the phone. “He’s got that humorless look, Dolan.”

“I’m sorry, Agent,” Murph said, verifying her suspicions. “We’ve had enough close calls for one day. Perhaps another time.”

There was such a long silence on the other end of the line that Jessie thought he might have hung up.

“You, Murphy,” Dolan finally said, “are what the experts call a bummer. And for that reason, I will not have a drink in honor. No sir!”

“I’ll have to find a way to muddle through,” Murph muttered.

“However,” Dolan continued, either not hearing him or not caring, “I will down one on your behalf, Jessie Hunt. You’re good people.”

“I’m humbled,” she said, not entirely sure he hadn’t started already.

“As well you should be,” he said.

A second later the line went dead.

“I think you hurt his feelings,” Jessie said to Murphy, only half-joking.

“I think you may be right,” Murph agreed.

Jessie’s phone pinged.

“Maybe he’s trying again,” she said as she opened the text.

The words on the screen sent a wave of adrenaline coursing through her body.

“Is it him?” Murph asked.

“No. It’s the CSU supervisor. They verified the DNA in the blood samples from the hospital courtyard. It’s my father’s.”

*

Jessie couldn’t control the thoughts swimming in her head.

Sitting in the backseat of the Marshal Service car, with Toomey and Murph, she barely saw the buildings passing by. The sprinkles from the hospital courtyard had turned into full on rain. But she barely acknowledged it as it battered the sedan roof.

Her father was actually dead. Somehow she’d been certain that if he ever died, it would be at her hands. She’d counted on it, in fact. As a result, mixed in with the relief she now finally allowed herself to feel at his death was the strange sense that she still had unfinished business.