“Why did you pay his legal fees?” Kateri asks then.

“I didn’t,” Bear says, putting his drink down and making a steeple of his fingers.

“Really,” Kateri says. “Who did?”

“What makes you think he didn’t pay them himself?” Bear asks.

Kateri shrugs a shoulder, soft, cool. “That’s more money than that kid has,” she offers. “You have a vested interest in him.”

“He’s a kid in trouble,” Bear says.

“So what?” Kateri asks.

“I was a kid in trouble,” he says, and smiles at her. “A long time ago.”

She’s found nothing that indicates trouble. Which doesn’t mean he hasn’t paid his way out of it.

“I don’t know,” Kateri says. “If anyone had a reason to harm Pearl Jenkins, he did. Have you ever heard him talk about his mother?”

“No,” Bear says. “I’ve barely heard him speak.”

“No … siblings, or any other family members?” Bear shakes his head. “Do you know where he’s staying?” she asks.

“No,” he says.

“But he works for you,” she says. “You don’t know where he lives?”

“I reach him by phone,” Bear says.

“Is he a good worker?” Kateri asks.

“Very.” Bear leans his arms on the bar. “How’d you end up here?” he asks.

“I could ask you the same,” she says.

“You got a place in town?”

“Outside,” she says. She watches his eyes, soft at the corners, crow’s feet from smoking, but mostly just the whiskey blurring all his edges.

She hadn’t wanted to live in town, where she saw everyone every day. Joel Hurt. The captain. The lady secretaries. The younger officers. She needed a retreat. A backyard. To be close to the river, the trees. Where she could lie in bed at night and hear the train, the rush of water. Where it was dark.

At her grandmother’s house in Syracuse, even in the city, there were trees. The backyard under a dense canopy. There were birds and squirrels, deer, creeping in from the outskirts, ravaging everyone’s flowers.

“How old are you?” Bear asks, and it catches her off guard.

“How old are you?” she shoots back, and he laughs, which disarms her a little.

“Fair,” he says. “Older than you,” he answers.

“We both have weird names.”

She hands him a card, even though she knows he already has her number. “I’d like you to come in for an official statement,” she says, and shrugs to soften the sound of it. She knows that coming from a man, that sentence has weight, the kind of request you listen to and comply with. And coming from her, authority sounds like bitchiness.

“We’ve asked everyone he works with,” she explains, but then she also stands with her hand in her pocket, her weapon slightly exposed. She leaves a five-dollar bill on the bar. She asks one more question.

“Is Kerpak interested in the house on Hidden Drive?”

Bear sniffs and looks down at his empty second drink, her card on the bar. He licks his top lip, thinking, and then simply says, “Yes.”