“How do you mean?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. You look like you hurt.”

“Well, I do. He was a rough man.”

“I don’t mean that kind of hurt. I mean inside. Parnelli. You feel it was your fault? Because you kept pushing?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

Hook strained to keep the anger out of his voice. “Should I?”

For five or six long seconds Rider stood there looking at him, and then he shook his head. “Never for a moment, Mr. Hook. It was the wop’s fault.” Now the sergeant looked across the bullpen again. “And theirs. And the sexy Miss Madera’s. And if anybody else should feel guilty, I guess it’s me, for letting you do my job. So don’t sweat it. Ever. You did what was right.”

A feeling of gratitude as sharp as anger struck Hook and he looked away from the burly law officer’s bloodshot eyes.

“You can go anytime you want,” Rider told him. “Just don’t leave town before I see you again, okay? There’ll be loose ends to tie up, details, you know.”

Hook nodded, still dumb, shaken.

“Well, I got some more work to do,” Rider said. “Call it divide and conquer.”

Hook watched as the sergeant made his way across the bullpen toward the small room where Douglas and his attorney were conferring. As Rider entered, Douglas straightened up and for some reason looked out through the window at Hook. Their eyes met. But all Hook could see of the man was a politician’s mask, a blandly handsome face poised and ready, as if he were about to smile absently at a stranger. Then he looked away.

Hook left the courthouse.

Back at his motel, he thought of calling home and telling Marian that he would be flying in the next day. But he did not want to talk with her or the children either, not this night. And anyway it was late, after midnight in Illinois. They would all be in bed. He would call in the morning.

Because he knew he would not have an easy time sleeping, he went downstairs to the Galleon bar and had three drinks of scotch among the fishnets and harpoons before he dragged his aching body back upstairs and went to bed. In a week’s time he had not had one good night’s sleep in the motel and he knew this night would be no exception.

But he was wrong. It was worse. He lay awake hour after hour. And he thought. He worried. He went through the day over and over in his mind. And often during those interminable hours the memory of Douglas in the courthouse, that last brief look that passed between them, would click like a slide across Hook’s mind and he would wonder what had been behind that politician’s mask, what the man was truly feeling on this dark night of his life.

Hook got his answer at five o’clock in the morning, when the ringing of his bedside phone brought him gasping up out of a shallow pool of sleep, one of the few he had found all night long.