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quizzically, he pointed up toward the sky. “It already is morning.”
    “Then I’d better go home and start typing,” she quipped.
    “Type later,” Lawrence ordered. “Sleep now.”
    “Anyone ever tell you that you’re a nag, Captain Lawrence?”
    “My wife,” he answered without skipping a beat. “But then, what does she know? Besides, compared to Martha, I’m a novice. You ever want to hear a pro, just stop by the house. I’ll drop some socks on the floor and have her go at it for you.” He looked at her. “I don’t want to see you until at least midday.”
    “‘O, Captain! my Captain!’” Throwing her wrist against her forehead in a melodramatic fashion, Kansas quoted a line out of a classic poem by Walt Whitman that seemed to fit here. “You’ve hurt my feelings.”
    He gave her a knowing look. “Can’t hurt what you don’t have.”
    “Right,” she murmured.
    She’d deliberately gone out of her way to come across like a militant fire investigator, more macho than the men she worked with. There was a reason for that. She didn’t want to allow anything to tap into her feelings. By her reckoning, there had to be an entire reservoir of tears and emotions she had never allowed herself to access because she was sincerely afraid that if she everdid, she wouldn’t be able to shut off the valve. It was far better never to access it in the first place.
    Heading to her car, she put her hand into her pocket for the key…and touched the cell phone she’d discovered instead. She took it out and glanced down at it. She supposed that she could just drop it off at O’Brien’s precinct. But he had looked concerned about losing the phone, and if she hadn’t plowed into him like that, he wouldn’t have lost the device.
    Kansas frowned. She supposed she owed O’Brien for that.
    She looked around and saw that there was still one person with the police department on the premises. Not pausing to debate the wisdom of her actions, she hurried over to the man. She was fairly certain that the chief of detectives would know where she could find the incorrigible Detective O’Brien.
     
    “I could drop it off for you,” Brian Cavanaugh volunteered after the pretty fire investigator had approached him to say that she’d found Ethan’s cell phone.
    She looked down at the smoke-streaked device and gave the chief’s suggestion some thought. She was bone-tired, and she knew that the chief would get the phone to O’Brien.
    Still, she had to admit that personally handing the cell phone to O’Brien would bring about some small sense of closure for her. And closure was a very rare thing in her life.
    “No, that’s all right. I’ll do it,” she told him. “If you could just tell me where to find him, I’d appreciate it.”
    “Of course, no problem. I have the address right here,” he told her.
    Brian suppressed a smile as he reached into his inside pocket for a pen and a piece of paper. Finding both, he took them out and began writing the address in large, block letters.
    Not for a second had he doubted that that was going to be her answer.
    “Here you go,” he said, handing her the paper.
    This, he thought, was going to be the start of something lasting.

Chapter 4
    E than wasn’t a morning person, not by any stretch of the imagination. He never had been. Not even under the best of circumstances, coming off an actual full night’s sleep, something that eluded him these days. Having less than four hours in which to recharge had left him feeling surly, less than communicative and only half-human.
    So when he heard the doorbell to his garden apartment ring, Ethan’s first impulse was to just ignore it. No one he knew had said anything about coming by at a little after six that morning. and it was either someone trying to save his soul—a religious sect had been making the rounds lately, scattering pamphlets about a better life to come in their wake—or the neighbor in the apartment catty-corner to his