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she realized what Reed had left out. He hadn’t said he didn’t do it.
    She and Bonnie lived in Crestwood, a middle-class midtown neighborhood a fifteen-minute drive from downtown. At that time of night, it was ten minutes, long enough for her to imagine whom Dwayne Reed could have murdered in the twelve hours since he became a free man. Of all the images that came to mind, the one that she couldn’t shake was of Jameer Henderson in the courtroom, holding his children in his lap and comforting his wife.
    In a violent world where gangs were more heavily armed than police and teenage boys didn’t expect to live long enough to become old men and treated a stretch in prison as an inevitable rite of passage, revenge was both an ethic and a necessity to maintain street cred. Henderson had made himself and his family targets. That she had been complicit in exposing them to harm was a cruel irony that ate at Alex, her insistence to Judge West that their fate wasn’t her problem a boast she could no longer back up.
    Her fear for the Henderson family was enough to make her detour to their house before going to police headquarters. They lived on the east side, a part of Kansas City where the name of one of the long-defunct homeowners associations, Forgotten Homes, told the story of too many people who lived there. The promises of generations of politicians to root out the crack houses, revitalize the economy, and protect the law-abiding citizens who got caught in the crossfire had been broken more often than they had been kept.
    She drove east and north, passing rundown retail strips barricaded behind iron bars, untended and abandoned houses, and vacant lots choking with weeds and trash. The bright spots—well-tended homes, churches, schools, and businesses ready for the coming day—were muted in the darkness.
    The closer she got, the more she heard Jameer Henderson’s plaintive question echoing in her head. What am I gonna do now? Her creeping sense of dread went viral, and by the time she turned onto his block, her chest was pounding and her heart was breaking.
    When she didn’t see any squad cars or ambulances with flashing lights, she skidded to a stop in the middle of the street. There were no cops, crime scene investigators, or TV trucks set up for live remotes. If Dwayne Reed had murdered Jameer Henderson and his family, investigators would still be on the scene and neighbors would be holding a vigil. But there was none of that. There was only quiet.
    She sat for a moment, letting her pulse slow, wiping off the thin sheen of sweat that had blossomed on her face. Resting her head on the steering wheel, she clasped her hands and said a prayer.
    “Thank you, God.”

Chapter Eight
    POLICE HEADQUARTERS WAS LOCATED at Eleventh and Locust in a square-cut limestone building erected as part of the same Depression-era public works project that had produced the courthouse. It was one block from Alex’s office on Oak.
    A desk sergeant looked up from his newspaper long enough to grunt and point her to the stairs leading to the second floor, home to the Homicide Unit . Homicide was organized into three squads, 1010, 1020, and 1030, all sharing the same cramped bullpen, battered desks shoved against one another and stacked with open cases, some of them hot, some of them cold.
    Detective Hank Rossi was waiting for her, nursing a cup of coffee, the only one in the bullpen. Tall, rangy, and dark eyed, he was rumored to have a drinking problem. Whether it was true or not, he kept up a perpetual head of steam. In twenty years as a homicide detective, he’d skated past accusations that he’d planted evidence and strong-armed confessions. Quick to use his gun, he’d been involved in more shootings than most detectives over their entire careers, killing four suspects and wounding six others, the prosecuting attorney ruling that each shooting was justified. Criminals were his least favorite people, but defense counsel ran a close second, a