For Frames, the most frustrating part of working with Wiggins was not that he talked incessantly but that he had beaten Frames to it. Frames was known in Violent Crime as the talker. It was his signature. But here Wiggins had been first off the mark and grabbed the play. Now, with the earpiece, it was like Wiggins had gotten inside Frames’s brain. Or, had become his brain.

“Okay. De-tec-tive Frames, tell me this. What’s the longest surveillance you’ve been on?”

“This one,” Frames said. He wanted to say any surveillance with you would seem longer.

“Really? I had one last year that was ten days. How about you, Buckminster?”

“2012. A whole month.”

“You’re kidding. Department had the budget for that? Hey, Frames, somebody said you were a jarhead. Anything this boring in the Corps?”

Frames debated not answering, but he knew Wiggins wouldn’t give up. A few weeks earlier, Frames had seen an anonymous list on Twitter. Five most irritating SRPD officers. Wiggins was number three. Frames had never met numbers one and two, but he was impressed two officers were more irritating than Wiggins.

“Guard duty. Fallujah. First Battalion, Third Marines.” Frames remembered the adrenalized mindset of Iraq. “Stood all night in a doorway of the house where guys in the platoon were sleeping. Had to be on your toes. Local paramilitary came out after dark.”

“Nothing like guys coming to kill you to keep your eyes open, right?”

In an instant, Frames felt the M16 in his hands and smelled the decaying bodies in the desert night air. “That’s just it,” he said. “There were always lots of sounds—dogs barking, gunfire on the perimeter—but not much to see. From where I stood, the only light came from a window a block away.” He saw the little square of light again at the end of a dark street.

“I couldn’t look inside, obviously, but I kept myself awake imagining the family living where that light was. Father, mother, couple kids. Going about their normal life in the middle of a war zone. Every day you had bodies in the street, helicopters just over the housetops, bombs going off. But this little family went on with life. I made up this whole thing. The father drove a taxi. He met his wife when they were teenagers. The boy was the oldest, just starting to read. The little girl was afraid of the gear the American soldiers wore.”

“At night, the father told a story before the kids fell asleep. The story was always about a beautiful flying woman. She was, the father said, as beautiful as their mother, and she flew through the air and rescued the people of the city. Every night was a new story of rescue.”

When Frames finished, the mikes were silent. “That’s what I imagined anyway,” he said.