They did so, not speaking, just breathing audibly as they waited, the breaths like marking time. But when, at a little past six, DeSouza appeared at the desk and waved to the clerk, he walked past Olive and Sharkey, his workday done, with an air of someone fleeing.

“Excuse me.”

DeSouza compressed his lips in impatience, and before Olive resumed he was already backing away, as though hoping to avoid a further question, straining to go home.

“I’m off-duty,” he said in a peevish voice.

“Joe Sharkey,” Olive said.

The name stopped him. He cocked his head in concern and leaned closer to Sharkey’s expressionless face.

“Shark?” He still looked uncertain, as though the name might wake Sharkey and make him familiar.

Instead of speaking, Sharkey slowly nodded.

“You been sick, brah?”

In a whisper, his head bowed, confiding to the policeman, Sharkey said, “I’m drowning.”

Alarmed—she had last heard him say that in a panic to the grommets at the community center—Olive took charge, saying, “We need to talk to you.”

DeSouza took them to the outer lobby, where they sat in a corner, Olive showing DeSouza the accident report with his signature on it, DeSouza tapping the lines with his fingers, saying, “Sure I remember. Waimea. All that rain. The guy on a bike. The fatality. No ID. Open case—there was no follow-up.”

“We found out his name. You can fill in the blanks now.”

“This report’s already been filed. We’d have to make out a new report, refile it, or maybe file a supplement. Try come back tomorrow.”

“It was a man named Max Mulgrave.”

DeSouza sat up straight, jerked his head back, then smirked in disbelief. He said, “You’re joking, right?”

“For real.”

“That was Max?” DeSouza said. “You sure?”

“The mortuary ran a check on his prints.”

“He’s still in the morgue?”

“He’s ashes now,” Olive said. “We’re looking for his next of kin. We went to the mainland—his hometown.”

“Better off looking in Wai‘anae.”

“How do you know that?”

“Max was famous there.”

Sharkey said, “Famous for what?”

“Famous for being a good guy,” De Souza said. “But he kept a low profile. We knew he was down on his luck, but we didn’t know he was on the North Shore.”

“You told us you’d seen him—you’d picked him up before. That’s what you said at the time.”

“The guy you hit, yeah—he had no ID. How was I supposed to know? I seen him around the camp near the bypass road, but it was just vagrancy, looked like a bum. Not worth the trouble of a ticket. And that night, the rain, the guy lying all bust up.”

“But the prints,” Olive said.

“That’s the medical examiner’s thing, at the morgue. We sent them the remains.”

“I killed him,” Sharkey said in the same confiding whisper.