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going to win in this county. If he knocks you out and the D’s splinter and Flanagan gets into the runoff, he gets crushed. So if Hal’s rational—”
    “He’s not.”
    “OK,” said Ray, “but let’s pretend. Common sense says that to go public with this kind of accusation, he has to have something to back it up. So you tell us, Paulie. Does he?”
    “Not that I know of,” Paul answered. Horgan, who’d done criminal defense work for decades, had asked the question so casually that Paul had responded with equal nonchalance. But Ray was still a sly cat. Only now that his steel blues stayed put on Paul did he realize that Ray had been asking the same thing for ten minutes, in hopes of an unequivocal response.
    But Crully wouldn’t let him answer. Mark stood up, all five-six of him, but still looking, from the hard set of his face, like somebody you wouldn’t want to mess with. He was done wasting time.
    “You have to sue. Period. Personally, Ray, I’m not spinning my wheels asking what Hal’s got. Because if he’s got anything real, Paul’s not gonna be mayor anyway.” Crully turned toward his candidate. “So, Paul, either quit now or sue.”
    Crully flipped his pencil in the air and let it bounce on the table and left the room.

4.
    Tim’s House—January 11, 2008
    T im Brodie lived in the same Kewahnee neighborhood in which Paul and Cass Gianis had grown up, and where Hal had started out. The little hip-roofed bungalows, all of them built of brick before the Second World War, sat squat as toads on forty-foot lots, with huge old trees in the snowy parkways. When Tim bought his house in 1959, not long after he’d made detective, he felt he’d done whatever people were talking about when they had told him to grow up and make something of himself.
    Now he awoke with a start. He was on the plaid family room sofa, a heavy volume on his chest. He sat up with an ominous grunt and waited until his body and his head came back to him. His leg ached unbearably just for a moment whenever he awoke. Tim didn’t know if the pain subsided or he merely got used to it. He had waited all his life for time to catch up to him and now it had.
    He recognized the doorbell. When he could move, he made his way to the front door. Ordinarily, he’d expect it to be his granddaughter, Stefanie, but he’d been over there with her and her funny little husband last night. Instead, he saw a woman on his stoop, breathing fog in the cold. She was someone he knew, he realized, but he just couldn’t place her.
    He opened the front door but not the glass storm.
    “Evon Miller,” she said, and offered her hand. “From ZP.”
    “Oh, hell,” he answered. He stepped back at once to welcome her. He’d met Evon a few times, the first when she took the position at ZP of his pal from the Force, Collins Mullaney. Collins had liked the job, but had to fall on his sword because a ZP real estate manager in Illinois was paying bribes to lower the company’s property taxes. Collins parachuted out with a big package and had no ill will toward Evon. She was a good egg, a bandy little gal, a former FBI agent who years back had busted several state court judges. She’d been in the Olympics, too. Field hockey was Tim’s memory. Also didn’t make any secret of the fact she was gay, which was something Tim had gotten over early in his life when he tried to make a go of it playing the trombone. What the hell did he care who you slept with, if you had good pitch and kept time?
    “To what do I owe the honor?” he asked, once he had her inside. He told her to take off her coat. She was OK-looking, thick-built but with a little bit of a stylish way about her and short blondish hair. Her face was wide, and in the strong daylight, he could see she had kind of pebbly skin.
    “Need to talk to you about something,” she said. “I’ve been calling your cell for three days.”
    “Really?” Tim saw the contraption on the table in the foyer where he’d