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“you were a detective once yourself.”
    “That’s right,” Treanor said, and he gave me a look I thought best not to return in kind.
    “Okay. Then you know we got to play this lead. We got a dead girl with a known relationship with Wade, Wade’s missing, and he’s got a known pattern of violent behavior. Put that together, and it starts to look like a damn good suspect profile.”
    “The dead girl and her relationship with Wade are circumstantial,” Treanor countered, rather weakly. “As for the violent behavior, I don’t hire pussies on this shift.” He looked to me. “No offense, Lily.”
    Asshole.
“None taken, sir.”
    “Look,” Treanor said, “the whole reason this unit is necessary is because those research teams go out to some pretty fucked up places. I’m talking fighting in the streets, robbers, you name it. They need protection. That’s why they call guys like Ken Wade. Guys they know can take care of business.”
    I couldn’t resist. “Of course, that doesn’t explain why Dr. Bradley ended up dead. Doesn’t seem Wade was taking care of business there.” I waited a beat. “No offense, sir.”
    Treanor was not amused. He gave me a hard look and said, “He’ll explain himself to me tomorrow morning. After that, I’ll order him to contact you. Now, if you don’t mind?”
    He pointed to the door.
----

Chapter 7
    We went back to the Scar.
    There were endless reports to write. There was the initial offense report on Emma Bradley’s murder, the chain of custody reports for the body, and a whole slew of forms that would follow Emma Bradley’s body to the autopsy. Then we had to transcribe the witness statements we’d taken with our audio recorders. After that, we had to create a file on the Department’s Case Management system, where we summarized all the initial leads we’d worked. Finally, we had to write a report explaining the damage to the car we’d been driving.
    “Where do you want to pick up tomorrow?” Chunk asked me, after the last of the paperwork was done and we were walking out to the parking lot. It was almost nine o’clock, and night had settled over the Texas Hill Country. A hot breeze rustled the crowns of the nearby oaks and cedars, and the freeway that ran next to the Scar was silent, a dark ribbon stretching off into the hills.
    “First thing we need to do is talk to Ken Wade. We’ll call the office. Maybe go by his house if he doesn’t show. If we can’t find him…” I shrugged. I didn’t need to say the rest.
    “Yeah,” Chunk agreed. “I don’t want to think about where that would lead us.”
    We reached my car, a five year old Chevy Malibu with a ding in the driver’s side door. The hinges creaked when I opened it. A short ways off, at the edge of the parking lot, a cactus wren shook its head and hopped along the top wire of a barbed wire fence. They don’t usually come out at night.
    “I don’t care what Treanor says, Chunk. I got a bad feeling about Wade.”
    He rubbed a massive palm across the back of his neck. He was as tired as I was.
    I said, “Maybe after we check on Wade, we can try to find that van they were in.”
    “You mean go into the GZ?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You’re just full of great ideas, aren’t you?”
    “Chunk, don’t you think it’s the only way to follow up on the leads we’ve got. We might even get lucky and find that journal Myers was telling us about.”
    “I gave up on luck a long time ago, Lily.”
    I made it home, finally.
    Billy, my husband, and I lived with our daughter Connie on two acres north of town, about a mile from the containment wall that circled San Antonio and insured we obeyed the quarantine.
    It was good land, quiet, densely wooded with oaks and pecans. In the mornings we’d see white tail deer running across the lawn and fog rising up from Vespers Creek, which ran deep and slow along the eastern edge of our property. As I pulled into our driveway, I could just see the dark outline of the cypress