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I’ve got a woman here to see you about Father Michael Joseph’s murder.”
    “Yeah?” He looked as harassed and as impatient as every other man in the room. Then he grew quiet, his dark eyes on her face. She knew what she looked like. Was he going to sneer at her? Tell her to get lost? No, he just sat there, staring at her, fingering his mustache. He didn’t say anything else, just waited.
    “Yes, I need to speak to you, sir.”
    The man seated in the side chair rose and turned to face her. She stared at him, unable to take it in. She had to be dead, there was no other conclusion. She didn’t feel dead, but who knew? Here he was, looking at her, and he was dead, she had seen the bullet hole through his forehead, seen his eyes.
    She squeaked, nothing more than that, and folded up on herself, fainting for the first time in her life.
    Dane caught her before she cracked her head on the edge of the desk behind her. The inspector sitting there jerked back and said, “Hey!”
    “I’ve got her, it’s okay,” Dane said.
    “What the hell’s wrong with her?” Delion shoved back his chair, splaying his hands on his desktop. “Damnation, it’s only eight o’clock in the morning. Here, Dane, take her into the lieutenant’s office. She and the captain are in a meeting with Chief Kreider, so it’s free.”
    Dane hauled her up in his arms and carried her into a small glass-walled office. Like every other free space in the area, it was lined with old gray file cabinets that had seen better days a half century before. He laid her on the rattiest, ugliest old green sofa he’d ever seen. No, there was one just as ugly in the rectory at St. Bartholomew’s.
    “You got some water, Delion?”
    “Uh? Oh yeah, just a moment.”
    Dane went down on his haunches next to her. He gave her a cop’s once-over, quickly done, assessment made. She looked homeless—torn jeans, three different sweaters, one on top of the other, all of them on the well-worn side, not dirty, just old and tattered. She wore no makeup, not a surprise. Her hair was a dirty blond with a bit of curl, longish, tied in the back with a rubber band. Even with all the bulky layers of sweaters, it was easy to tell she was thin, pale, no more than twenty-seven, -eight, max. Not doing well in life, that was for sure. She looked like she’d been in a closet for too long without a glimpse of the sun, or tucked away in a homeless shelter. She also looked like she needed a dozen good meals. She’d been carrying a wool cap. Even unconscious, she still clutched it in her fingers.
    They had a homeless woman for a witness?
    Of course, that was just the outside. What a person was like on the inside was what was important, what was real. But if her outsides gave any clue at all, it was that something bad had happened to her. Drugs? An abusive husband? Alcohol?
    Why did she faint? Hunger?
    “Here’s some water. She show any signs of life yet?”
    “Soon.” Dane lightly slapped her cheeks, waited, then slapped her again.
    A couple of inspectors stuck their heads in. Delion waved them off. “She’ll be okay, don’t call the paramedics, okay?”
    A woman officer said, “She looks really down on her luck. The last person she should want to see is you, Delion.”
    Her eyelashes fluttered. Slowly, she opened her eyes, blinked a couple of times, and focused on Dane’s face above her.
    “Oh no,” she said, so low he could barely hear her. She tried to get away from him by pressing herself against the back of the sofa. “Oh God, am I dead?”
    Dane said, “No, you’re not dead. I’m not dead either. You knew my brother, didn’t you? Father Michael Joseph?”
    “Your brother?”
    “Yes, my twin brother. We’re identical twins. My name is Dane Carver.”
    “You’re not a priest?”
    “Nope,” said Delion. He brought his face down close to hers, which made her shrink back even more. Delion backed off, said, “He’s the other end of the scale.”
    “You’re a