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sweatshirt soaked and stained, his glassy eyes staring up from that face, that face I’d known all my life. I knew I’d wake up soon and I’d no longer be looking at my brother, Jake, lying dead and forgotten by society, by everyone who loved him but me, and maybe by me, too, because maybe I hadn’t done enough to find him, maybe I hadn’t looked hard enough, asked enough questions, followed the right leads, maybe I should have—
    “Geez, are you asleep?”
    I lifted my head from my desk and sat up in my chair. Angel Medina was peering around the nearly closed door to my office. “Nope. Just thinking.”
    “Oh. I thought maybe you were sleeping. But I guess not. You might want to pull that paper clip off your forehead, though.”
    I did, and said, “I thought I’d closed that door.”
    “When I first started working here you told me, ‘My door’s always open, Angel.’ I remember that well.” He came into my office, closing the door behind him, and dropped into the chair in front of my desk. “Even if I ignore that faint outline of a paper clip on your forehead, you look like shit. What’s up?”
    I shook my head to clear it. “Long night.”
    “Redekov? How late were you here working last night?”
    “Pretty late.” No reason he should know about my little stroll into the Boston netherworld. After I was mugged, or whatever you’d call it, by the street person from Boston College, I spent another couple of fruitless hours looking for anyone who might have some idea where the homeless guy might be before I finally dragged myself home and into bed around three a.m.
    “Where were you this morning?” Angel asked. “I was looking for you before lunch.”
    “Meeting with a witness,” I lied. I’d spent that morning ignoring my trial prep, choosing instead to roam Boston’s rougher streets again looking for my personal white whale in the Harvard sweatshirt.
    Angel frowned at me. “Man, you look beat. You should take a nap or something.”
    I rubbed my eyes. They felt puffy—not just the skin around them, but my actual eyeballs felt puffy. “Have you forgotten the paper clip, Angel?”
    He smiled, then turned serious. “Listen, Charlie, we both know this trial is big. You need to work hard on it, we both do, I guess, but if you kill yourself at the start, who’ll take over as lead counsel? Shit, they might turn to me, and then we’d all be in big trouble. So take it easy, man. Pace yourself a little, all right?”
    He was right. This was indeed a big trial. Blow it for the USA’s office and I could do real damage to my career, possibly losing my cherished spot on the Organized Crime Strike Force Unit, which is all I’ve wanted since Jake disappeared. And despite the recent distractions I’d faced, I couldn’t ask off the trial even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. That would have been career suicide. The problem was, I’d waited for a clue to Jake’s whereabouts for thirteen years. And I’d finally gotten one. How could I not do whatever it took to follow that clue wherever it led me, no matter how difficult it was to follow? But my work could suffer, without a doubt. It already had. Would Jake have wanted me to throw away everything I’d worked toward, maybe let a mob big-shot walk, on the mere chance that some crazy homeless guy might have something rattling around in his addled mind that might—just might —be relevant? I doubted it. And I’d worked too hard over the years to jeopardize my career now, starting with the long, hard hours of study in law school and continuing through the long, hard years working for the DA’s office and later for the Department of Justice.
    I had to find a balance. I had to find the homeless man without tanking the Redekov trial. If I could find the guy relatively quickly, I’d probably be all right. I didn’t have to be back in court until Monday morning, which left me two days and three nights during which to find the homeless man, get my