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child delinquent; but, like the rest of us with half a brain, the judge believed that the kid had probably done a public service and so let him off with juvie probation, a punishment designed to straighten out the parents as much as the kid. For me, it was standard fare. The kid needed help.
    The assistant DA smirked. He walked to the defense table, pulled his lips back from too-large teeth, and told me he’d heard about my father. He flicked at those teeth with a purple-bottomed tongue and observed that Ezra’s death raised as many questions as my mother’s had.
    I almost decked him, but I realized just in time that he would love it. Instead, I gave him the finger. Then I saw Detective Mills; she stood in the shadows near the exit, and I realized, once I saw her, that she’d been there for some time. If I hadn’t been numb, that might have freaked me out; she was the kind of person you liked to keep track of. When I packed up my briefcase and walked to meet her, she gestured curtly.
    “Outside,” she said, and I followed her.
    The hall was packed with warm bodies, and the lawyers stopped and stared. Detective Mills was lead investigator. I was the son of a murdered colleague. I didn’t blame them.
    “What’s up?” I asked her.
    “Not here,” she said, seizing my arm and turning me against the flow of people, toward the stairs. We walked in silence until we turned down the corridor leading to the DA’s office.
    “Douglas wants you,” she said, as if I’d asked another question.
    “I guessed as much,” I responded. “Do you have any leads?”
    Her face was all sharp angles, making me guess that the previous day still bothered her; but I knew the drill. If anything went wrong, Mills would catch the heat, and I guessed word was already out about my visit to the scene. It broke all the taboos. Cops did not allow defense lawyers to walk through the crime scene and possibly contaminate evidence. Mills, bright as she was and no stranger to cover-your-ass politics, had probably papered the file with testimonials from other cops as to exactly what I had and had not touched. Douglas, too, would be prominently mentioned.
    Her silence was thus not surprising.
    Douglas looked like he had not slept at all.
    “I don’t know how the damn papers got hold of this so fast,” he said as soon as I stepped through his door, coming half out of his seat. “But you damn well better not be involved, Work.”
    I just stared at him.
    “Well come in,” he continued, dropping back into his chair. “Mills, close that door.”
    Detective Mills closed the door and moved to stand be-hind Douglas’s right shoulder. She jammed her hands into the pockets of her jeans, pulling back her jacket to show the butt of her pistol in its shoulder holster. She leaned against the wall and stared at me as if I were a suspect.
    It was an old trick, probably done out of habit, but standing there she looked every inch the bulldog she was. I watched Douglas settle back in his chair, deflating as if shot with a dart. He was good people and knew that I was, too.
    “Do you have any leads?” I asked.
    “Nothing solid.”
    “How about suspects?” I pressed.
    “Every fucking body,” he replied. “Your father had a lot of enemies. Unhappy clients, businessmen on the wrong end of the stick, who knows what else. Ezra did many things, but walking lightly was not one of them.”
    An understatement.
    “Anybody in particular?” I asked.
    “No,” he said, tugging at an eyebrow.
    Mills cleared her throat and Douglas let go of his eyebrow. It was obvious that she was unhappy, and I guessed that she and the DA had exchanged words on how much to tell me.
    “What else?” I asked.
    “We believe that he died on the same night he disappeared.”
    Mills rolled her eyes and began to pace the office like a man ten years in the same cell.
    “How do you know that?” I asked. No way could the medical examiner have been that specific. Not after a year and a