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paperwork.
    I neared the pair. “I need a three-letter word for ‘organism,’” Danny said without looking up from a folded-in-half
Chronicle
. “Zoa,” he added, mostly to himself.
    Danny introduced the other cop as the Big Samoan, Officer Edward Velarde. He had a vise-grip handshake and he looked vaguely familiar. Near his left ear, by his hairline, was a red rash, the flaky scales indicative of psoriasis. As a medical student, you learn to identify people by their pathologies. I couldn’t place where I’d seen him before—maybe after the explosion. He asked for Sergeant Weller’s signatures on the paperwork he’d been working on, stuffed them in a briefcase. “See you back at the fruit farm, sweetie,” he said to Weller with a pronounced mock lisp, and excused himself.
    “What’s going on, Sergeant?” I said pointedly.
    “When I was a kid, my dad and I drove up Highway 80 almost every weekend. We’d fish in Sacto, or hike in Tahoe. The traffic was always terrible. So Dad would have me read him the crossword while he drove. He loved puzzles,” he said. “The art of the crossword is memorization, really, not analysis. I’ve been stocking away clues since I was twelve. Back then, if I used a word incorrectly in conversation, Dad would make me carry a dictionary around all day.”
    He was going to do this on his terms. I fought the impulse to demand answers.
    “Do you and your dad still fish?”
    “He’s living in Fremont, in a group home. Sick as a dog, the kind of dog that needs a new liver,” Danny said. “Hell, I shouldn’t be talking about tragedy to you, considering what happened yesterday. How’re you feeling?”
    Actually, I still wasn’t sure. I’d been experiencing such an adrenaline rush that I hadn’t paused to put it in any perspective. “Tired.”
    And mystified and frustrated. I wanted to know about the new developments the sergeant had alluded to on the phone, but I had learned over the years as a reporter that one of the most effective ways of eliciting information is to not let on about your desperation. Sources usually want to divulge something, tell the story, take the spotlight.
    One strategy to get people talking is to do the talking first, so I decided to tell Danny what I knew. It was a gamble, of course. Just because he had allowed me to call him by his first name didn’t change the fact that he was a cop, with his own allegiances and priorities.
    I told him the little bit I knew. About the note, and a bit about Annie—and her handwriting—about going to see Erin, her hostility, the brief story she told me.
    “She ducked into the bathroom—nice time for nature to call,” he said.
    “In a suspicious way?”
    He shrugged.
    “Nathaniel, do you believe that the woman who handed you the note was your ex-girlfriend?”
    It was the one question I hadn’t permitted myself to fully consider.
    “I don’t think so, Sergeant—how could it possibly have been?”
    I didn’t say aloud the rest of my thought: No way Annie was alive, or she would have contacted me long before.
    He studied me. The more he did so, the more resolute I felt. Annie was gone, end of story. But someone had singled me out, was messing with me on a grand scale, and it was time to try to get what I came for.
    “I need to know what’s going on, Sergeant.”
    He lifted his glass, dropped his neck, and finished off the last of his Coke. “The district attorney has reopened the investigation into the charges against Lieutenant Aravelo’s brother.”
    “What?” I said, quickly, sharply. “Why?”
    Timothy Aravelo was a first-class thug. He’d nearly killed a twenty-year-old woman, then conspired with a couple of other cops to cover it up. I’d come to suspect the corruption went high into the police department. That I could never prove. But I was damn sure the younger Aravelo was one badge away from being a gang member.
    “High-priced attorneys. They convinced an appellate judge to reexamine some