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up in this place for weeks with only my thoughts and my cigarettes. When I went back to work after the suspension, they put me on sick leave and told me I was bad for the morale of the department. I miss her. Can you understand how much I miss her?”
    I thought of Sarah and noticed my hand on my abdomen. “I think I can. I really think I can.”
    “The cops won’t find her killer, will they?” she asked, wiping away the tears with her thumb.
    “I’m not so sure,” I said. “The detective in charge of the investigation—”
    “Fuqua?”
    “Yes, Fuqua. He strikes me as a stubborn motherfu—as a stubborn man who doesn’t give up on things so easily. Also strikes me as the kind of person who doesn’t give a shit about what other people think.”
    “That’s good?”
    “In a detective, yeah. Carmella is like that.”
    “And you?”
    “Me too, I guess.”
    “Did Alta have any enemies, spurned lovers, anyone you can think of who might have wanted her dead?”
    Maya Watson broke into a jag of manic laughter so removed from joy that I was frightened for her. All this time alone was doing her a lot of harm.
    “Enemies! You want to see some enemies?” She disappeared from the room and came back carrying two cardboard boxes stacked in her arms. She dropped them to the floor, sheets of paper spilling onto the tiles. “You talk about hate mail.”
    I picked up the sheets that had fallen out of the boxes and looked at the top one. The author had managed to use the words
nigger
,
spic
, and
cunts
in the first sentence. I stopped reading. I was quick on the uptake.
    “Not exactly love sonnets, Moe. No one comparing me and Alta to a rose or a summer’s day.”
    “You showed these to the police?”
    “Every single one. This is nothing. These are just the ones off the net that I printed out. The newspeople and the crowds of people are gone from outside since Alta was killed, but these just keep coming in. I used to think potential was the greatest untapped thing in the world, but it isn’t. It’s hate. People got all kinds of hate in them.”
    “I know it. Do you mind if I take some of these?”
    “Sure, go ahead.”
    The time had come, I thought, to broach the subject of Robert Tillman’s death. “Do you think Alta’s murder is connected to what happened with Tillman?”
    “I can’t talk about that.”
    “But—”
    “I can’t talk about it and I won’t.”
    Her face got hard and determined. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with her like this and didn’t want to risk alienating her. She’d given me some sense of Alta, enough of one to start with, at least, but I might need Maya’s insights again.
    “Okay. Thanks.”
    “I don’t know how much help I was,” she said.
    “I don’t know either, but it’s a start. Alta is real to me now and that’s something.”
    Maya showed me to the door, the box of letters in my arms unexpectedly heavy. Whether that was a matter of physics or hate, I couldn’t yet say.

NINE
     
    I had intended to head back to my house or to one of the stores’ offices to read through Maya Watson’s hate mail, but I didn’t feel like running into my brother Aaron. For all of his mishegas and obsession with the business, Aaron was an observant bastard and had recently commented on my weight loss and rather pale complexion. Besides, I had less and less patience for Aaron’s craziness these days. We were both getting old and old men get cranky. An indirect blessing of Sarah’s wedding was that I had three weeks off from work. No need, I thought, to risk having to lie to my big brother about the thing that was probably going to kill me. If he ever found out, he would just make me feel guilty for abandoning him and I already felt guilty enough for a thousand other things. And there was something else, something that stuck with me. Maya Watson had taken pains to mention how hard it had been for her and Alta at work.
    I remembered how women cops were hazed and abused and basically