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said. “But you’d still have to deal with the helicopters. They’ve got heat sensing equipment on those things. They’d pick you off in the air before you ever got anywhere near the wall.”
    I thought about that for a second. I imagined getting shot out of the sky by a U.S. Army attack helicopter.
    “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
    “Besides, where are you gonna find a hang glider?”
    “True,” I said. “Okay, how about this? We dig a tunnel under the wall…”
    Lieutenant Tom Treanor had short blond hair that was going gray at the temples, but he still looked young for a lieutenant. He was 36, and at 5 ft 8 in was not a tall man, but he was built solidly. There was a picture on the wall behind his desk of him as a younger man, wearing a Marine officer’s uniform, and I got the feeling not much had changed since those days. Not much except the uniform. He still had the same hard look in his eyes.
    And he didn’t waste time on small talk, either. He hadn’t even finished shaking our hands before he started firing off questions. We filled him in on where we were at, the dead girl, the doctors on the WHO staff, the fight in the doctor’s lounge.
    “And you’re buying that shit?” Treanor said. “You really think Ken Wade has gone off and done something as stupid as kill the person he was assigned to protect?”
    Chunk handled it with Treanor. “We’re following down the leads as we get them, Lieutenant. We’re not saying nothing against Wade. All we want to do is talk to him about it.”
    “Yeah, well, he hasn’t come back yet.”
    “Don’t you think that’s a pretty good indicator something’s wrong?” I said. “We already know Dr. Bradley’s dead. If Wade didn’t kill her, then it’s probably pretty likely that something’s happened to him too. Wouldn’t you agree with that?”
    He just stared at me. Even before H2N2 started dropping people like flies, the Department was small enough you got to know just about everybody after being on the job a few years. I first met Treanor back when he was a junior Homicide detective. I’d gotten a call for a man barricaded in his room with his father’s vintage World War I rifle. When I got there, the front door was open and the father was crying against his son’s locked door, slapping it over and over again with the flat of his palm, begging his boy to open it.
    “I heard a shot,” the man said to me, his cheeks shining with tears.
    “Stand back,” I said, and hit the door with my shoulder. When it didn’t give I hit it again, and that time it flew open.
    There, sitting on the floor, his back against the side of the bed, the antique rifle across his thighs, was the man’s twenty-two year old son, his lifelong battle with psychosis and suicidal tendencies ending in defeat.
    The father wasn’t all that sane himself, and he flew into a screaming, hair-pulling fit that rattled me badly enough that all my training went right out the window. Rather than pull the man out of the room and secure the scene, like I should have done, I reached down, took the rifle from under the dead man’s hand, and walked out to the front porch with it, where I proceeded to work the action back and forth until I’d jacked all the rounds out of the magazine and spread them all over the chinaberry shrubs growing along the front of the house.
    When Treanor got there and saw what I had done to his crime scene, he went into a rage that rattled me worse than the father’s had. He grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me out the front door and down into the front yard. Neighbors had come down to the street to see what all the police cars were there for, and they all watched in slack-jawed disbelief as Treanor screamed at me, telling me what a fucking idiot I was.
    I was mortified, but we both formed opinions of each other that day that stuck with us over the years.
    Chunk asked, “Is it normal for the guys not to check in after their shift?”
    Treanor gave Chunk a