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friends from Matt, though I doubted I’d bother talking to any of them unless something else came up to point that way.
    ”Where does Kris go to school?” I asked.
    “Fillmore High,” he told me.
    “Call the principal. I want to talk to her teachers and they’ll need your permission, I’m sure.”
    Matt had nodded and written down my request. All of his actions were feverish and full of hope.
    Sitting in the gazebo, I touched the envelope in my pocket. It was folded over twice and contained one thousand dollars in fifties. The roll was hard and thicker than I would’ve thought. One hundred dollars a day plus expenses. That was what he demanded to pay. He’d handed me the envelope and asked me to count it. When I didn’t, he told me how much was in the envelope and broke it down for me. A hundred dollars a day. Straight eight hour days would net me twelve-fifty an hour. Less than half of what I made when I wore the badge. “One week in advance, plus three hundred toward expenses,” he’d said.
    I accepted the money without a word . It was more money than I’d held at one time in years and I felt like a fraud taking it. The envelope’s weight gave me a sinking echo in my stomach. I knew that he was counting on me to find his daughter; knew that in his mind, it was as good as done now that he had hired me. I wondered if he’d read the newspapers ten years ago. Didn’t he know how I’d failed Amy Dugger? Or was he just that desperate?
    My thoughts flashed to the cold eyes of other cops looking at me. That small form on the morgue table, one half the body bag folded underneath her.
    I closed my eyes against the memory .
    That was a long time ago.
    But that doesn’t change what happened , a voice argued.
    I can never change what happened.
    No, I can’t.
    But I can help it from ever happening again.

10
     
     
    The cold in the park felt good, but the stiffening in my joints from sitting outside finally forced me to head home.
    Inside my tiny apartment, I sat at the kitchen table and meticulously wrote out everything that Matt had told me about Kris Sinderling. I wrote questions in the margins to the left of my list of facts.
    Why’d she pull away from her friends?
    Why’d she run away?
    Is there a boyfriend?
    I studied the list and my questions, then pushed away the pad of paper. I went to the bathroom and took some aspirin , then spent the rest of the day staring at that pad of paper. I stared and I wished for a crisp new manila folder to neatly store the notes. I stared at the paper and at Kris’s glamour photo that Matt had let me keep and then back at my handwriting. I stared so long that ghosts abandoned their hiding places from behind the curves and strokes of my pen and emerged, fingers pointing, pointing, pointing.
    That night I slept.
    A little.
    And dreamt.

11
     
     
    Her eyes were open.
    Cold.
    But she was grinn ing, her small cheeks rounded as her lips turned up in a smile that might welcome a new lunch box or her favorite teacher. It might have been the smile she flashed in answer to the question, Do you want me to push you on the swing, Amy? It was a child’s smile, full of innoce nce and hope and it sat upon her face like the sun.
    Until she saw me.
    Then the smile faded. Her mouth slackened and finally hung open lifelessly. Then I was able to see her matted hair, splotched with black dirt and rust.
    But it wasn’t rust.
    I t is. It i s rust ! I screamed.
    B ut I knew it wasn’t.
    It was blood and I knew it and then the light faded from her eyes, fixing me with an accusing, silent cry.
    You’re too late , th ose eyes said.
    I’m sorry. I—
    But it doesn’t matter what I say.
    Her eyes were right.
     

12
     
     
    I put some of Matt’s expense money to use early the next morning. After a small breakfast of toast and coffee in my apartment, I slipped on my cowboy boots and my leather jacket and called for a taxi .
    The driver was a clean-cut white kid in a pressed white shirt and a thin