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was getting dinner ready. She smiled when I walked in, and she came toward me, drying her hands on a dish towel. She took two steps and paused, studying my face.
    “What is it?” she said.
    “Weird day.” I told her about the gun, about the prints and ballistics.
    It seemed to deflate her. “Wow,” she said sadly, her eyes darting over my shoulder at the front door. The scene of the crime. “So Miriam did it?”
    I was struck by the way she called her by name, like she knew her. She’d never laid eyes on the woman. I’d barely seen her myself—a second or two at most—but it seemed like I was so determined to figure out how she could be innocent, I’d not only talked myself into it, I’d convinced Nola, as well.
    “I don’t know,” I said, pulling her toward me. “I don’t think so.”
    I told her about how the gun and the rounds were customized. About the fertility treatments. About the anonymous tip. “And no one can say why they were coming to our place.”
    “But the gun had her fingerprints on it, right?” she said. “And they found it at their building, right?”
    “That’s another thing.” I told her about going to the apartment, about the cash by the front door, Miriam’s anxiety meds left behind. “If she’s going on the lam and she goes home first—and for some reason she hides her gun there—why doesn’t she grab her cash? Why doesn’t she grab her anxiety pills? If she suffers from anxiety, now would be the time she’d need them most.”
    “Maybe she wasn’t thinking straight.”
    “Yeah, maybe.”
    *   *   *
    I couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about all the ways the case was going wrong, all the ways it was tricky, all the ways Mike Warren was trying to keep it simple.
    All the ways I was getting myself in trouble over it.
    I’d said I was dropping it, and maybe that was what I needed to do. Sometimes things were that simple. You hear doctors talking about looking for horses before zebras. Maybe this was a horse. A wife killed her husband. It happened all the time. Maybe Warren was right. Yes, there were loose ends, coincidences, but maybe there were explanations for all of them. Explanations that had nothing to do with anything other than the fact that a woman murdered her husband. Maybe he was banging on my door because that’s just where it happened. Maybe he had my address by accident. As I finally drifted off to sleep, I convinced myself that maybe if Nola and I were going to get over it, maybe I needed to drop it like I’d said I would and let Mike Warren work his case.
    *   *   *
    First thing the next day, I went into Suarez’s office and closed the door. “I’m letting it go,” I said.
    He looked up at me from behind his desk. “The Hartwell thing?”
    I nodded.
    “It’s a pretty tight case,” he said.
    “Not my case. I’m letting it go.”
    “Good,” he said, as if the constant burning sensation I provoked in his chest had cooled a half a degree.
    “But,” I said, and he grimaced. “I just want to tell you a couple things. You can decide what to do with them.”
    He raised one eyebrow, waiting.
    I told him about the custom gun and ammo, about the fertility treatments, about what the coworkers had said about Ron and Miriam, how close they seemed. “And I haven’t looked into the angles or anything, the bullet trajectories and where the Hartwell woman was when I saw her, compared to where the bullet came from. Presumably, Mike Warren is all over that, right?”
    He didn’t move a muscle, staring at me stone-faced.
    “And the gun they found,” I said. “Remember I asked Warren if it had been an anonymous tip?”
    “The landlord found it, right?”
    I nodded. “The landlord found it. After he got an anonymous tip. Caller said he was a tenant but wouldn’t give a name.”
    His eyes slowly closed, and he winced before he opened them. “But you’re leaving it alone, right?”
    “That’s what I’m supposed to do, right? Isn’t