“All right, Alex, forget it. I’ve got this dead psychiatrist and this Gutierrez girl hacked up. I’ve got a seven-year-old who thinks she might have seen or heard something except she’s too damned scared to make any sense of it. I ask you for two hours of your time—and time is one thing you’ve got plenty of—and I get bullshit.”

“Hold on. I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it. You have to give me time to assimilate this. I just woke up and you barge in and drop double homicide on me.”

He shot his wrist out from under his shirt cuff and peered at his Timex. “Ten thirty-seven. Poor baby.” He glared at me and chomped into the pear, getting juice on his chin.

“Anyway, you might recall that the last time I had anything to do with police business it was traumatic.”

“Hickle was a fluke. And you were a victim—of sorts. I’m not interested in getting you involved in this. Just an hour or two talking to a little kid. Like I said, some hypnosis if it looks right. Then we eat gnocchi. I return to my place and try to reclaim my amour, you’re free to go back to Spaceout Castle here. Finis. In a week we get together for a pure social time—a little sashimi down in Japtown. Okay?”

“What did the kid actually see?” I asked and watched my relaxing day fly out the window.

“Shadows, voices, two guys, maybe three. But who really knows? She’s a little kid, she’s totally traumatized. The mother’s just as scared and she impresses me as a lady who was no nuclear physicist in the first place. I didn’t know how to approach her, Alex. I tried to be nice, go easy. It would have been helpful to have a juvie officer there, but there aren’t too many of those any more. The department would rather keep three dozen pencil-pushing deputy chiefs around.”

He gnawed the pear down to the core.

“Shadows, voices. That’s it. You’re the language specialist, right? You know how to communicate with the little ones. If you can get her to open up, great. If she comes forth with anything resembling an I.D., fantastic. If not, them’s the breaks and at least we tried.”

Language specialist. It had been a while since I’d used the phrase—back in the aftermath of the Hickle affair, when I’d found myself suddenly spinning out of control, the faces of Stuart Hickle and all the kids he’d harmed marching through my head. Milo had taken me drinking. At about two in the morning he had wondered out loud why the kids had let it go on for so long.

“They didn’t talk because nobody knew how to listen,” I’d said. “They thought it was their fault, anyway.”