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wasn’t always something specific. A name or image from the files would come to him out of the blue, as if he was being reminded not to forget that the little girl and her family were waiting. Other cases would come and go, but Roxann’s unsolved murder hovered on the edge of his consciousness like a bad dream.
    However, the time wasn’t wasted. He didn’t know it yet, but every day he spent as a detective, each case he solved, every criminal he caught, was preparing him for the day when he would begin to pursue Roxann’s killer.
    As a detective in the Garland PD Crimes Against Persons Bureau, his caseload involved a wide spectrum of violent offenses. But of those, murder—the taking of a life—was the ultimate crime, the one that could not be undone or from which the victim could not recover. Yet, even homicides came in shades of gray.
    He hated to think of any murder as “routine,” but some were just plain darker than others and would have greater impact on him as a man and as a detective. One of those was the murder of Smiley Johnson, an 80-year-old woman, who was viciously attacked in 1996 shortly after he looked at the Roxann Reyes case files.
    The old woman was assaulted in the early morning hours in the bedroom of her house, where she been slashed and stabbed eighteen times in her torso. The onslaught was brutal; blood was everywhere, soaking into the red shag carpet of the room. Her stomach had been sliced open so that her intestines protruded. But Johnson hadn’t died right away.
    After her assailant left, she’d staggered out to her living room and called a neighbor, who lived across the street. The woman hurried over and found her friend collapsed in a growing pool of blood but still conscious. It was the neighbor who then dialed 911.
    When the dispatcher learned that the victim was still alive, she asked to speak to Smiley Johnson. “Do you know who attacked you?”
    “He came to the back door,” Smiley replied. “I thought it was my nephew, so I let him in.” But then she said she wasn’t so sure that it was her nephew; all she knew was that the intruder was a small, white male.
    The tough, old woman was taken to the hospital by helicopter, but not in time to save her life. Assigned to the homicide case, Sweet and his partner, John McDonald, didn’t have much to go on, except the general description of the killer. They started by trying to find out everything they could about the victim by talking to her family.
    The detectives learned that Smiley had a daughter, who was in prison on drug and forgery charges; and that the old woman had pretty much raised her daughter’s two boys, both of who were also well-known to the Garland Police Department, though mostly for petty crimes. The victim doted on her grandsons and didn’t think much of the police, especially when it came to protecting her family from them. One of the older Garland detectives told Sweet that he’d gone over to her house once to arrest one of the grandsons and the tiny old woman had planted herself between the detective and her boy; so he’d had to arrest her and the young man. Even if one of the grandsons was her killer, the detective warned Sweet, she would have lied to protect him.
    Apparently, the grandsons felt the same about her and were devastated by her murder. Or so they said, but they still needed to be cleared. In fact, one of the grandsons was small-statured and had immediately become a potential suspect. Sweet flew to Atlanta, where the man lived, and questioned him, but he had an alibi that crossed him off the list.
    The other grandson lived in Florida. He seemed particularly upset over her death and often called Sweet to check on the investigation’s progress. He had given the two detectives an important clue early in the investigation when he told Sweet that his grandmother owned a big, mean dog who wouldn’t have allowed just anybody to come in through the back door. If the killer was a stranger, the dog