Eden turned a page of the file. “Who made these notes in the margin?”

Rivas smiled. “Tom. He was old-school. Never stopped asking questions.”

Mahler watched as Rivas put the Hart binder aside. Since her murder, the dead girl had visited Mahler once a week, telling him stories of middle-distance running in the bubbly, fresh voice of a twenty-year-old still new to her death. He saw her now jogging on Fisherman’s Trail, through the winter-bare trees, back toward the boat launch, on the stretch of muddy trail she never reached. With each stride, her ponytail bounced back and forth. The way her hair moved was not in the file. For a moment, he thought of telling Eden about it.

Rivas picked up the next binder. “Irwin Carlton Partridge. Thirty-seven at the time of the last killings, forty now. In and out of the system since he was a teenager. Started out with theft, vandalism. Arrested for assault in his twenties and put on probation. Then attempted rape. Another attempted rape. No charges filed. Finally did eighteen months in Mule Creek for assault. Beat up his girlfriend, broke her eye socket.”

“What was the weapon?” Eden asked, writing.

Rivas frowned. “A bottle.”

Mahler felt himself suffocating. At this rate, it would take them hours to finish talking. None of this accumulation of detail would work. He and Woodhouse had gone over the same ground a thousand times, each new scrap holding promise until it didn’t. Had he really expected this untainted young woman to bring new magic to the case, to reach into the old file and discover the error, the slipup the killer had left behind two years earlier? The migraine, which lay momentarily quelled in the back of his head like a waiting wild beast, left him feeling for its onset, sensitive to every sound. Beside him, Eden’s pen slowly scratched across the page.

“The assault on the girlfriend—the broken eye socket—was that local?” Eden asked.

Mahler’s hands squeezed into fists.

“No,” Rivas said. “Vallejo, where he grew up. He moved here in—”

“STOP WRITING,” Mahler shouted.

Eden jumped and dropped her pen.

Mahler faced her, his voice still loud. “You don’t need to take notes. This isn’t a class.”

“Yes, sir. I didn’t know the…practice.” Eden’s face flushed. She looked down at the table.

“I’m sorry I raised my voice.” Mahler spoke quietly. “But your job here is to listen. You shouldn’t have any trouble remembering this.”

“Yes, sir,” Eden whispered. She fumbled with the steno pad, her hands shaking.

At Mahler’s outburst, Rivas had backed away. “Eddie, can we at least talk about whether we should go back to these cases right now?”

“You want to talk?”

Rivas took a deep breath. “I just want to be sure this is the right thing. We didn’t discuss it in the briefing with Martin and the others.”