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her son.
    She got into the backseat and shut the car door. It felt good to get out of the cold. He put his head on her shoulder.
    “Fuck,” he said.
    She stared at him.
    “Nancy,” he said.
    “What?”
    “You’re not going to believe me.”
    “You lie to me all the time, especially at the beginning of a case.”
    His always-hyper body didn’t move. “For once in my life,” he said, “I’m not guilty.”
    In her head, she didn’t want to believe a word St. Clair said. But in her gut—that intangible thing that Parish knew made her a good lawyer—she could feel it was true.

8
    Morning was finally coming, and Daniel Kennicott hadn’t stopped working for a moment. Yesterday afternoon, when Detective Greene arrived at the Tim Hortons, he had quickly taken charge of the scene. With so many witnesses to deal with, he’d told Kennicott to bring Tim Hortons employees back to police headquarters to interview them.
    Kennicott knew Greene assumed they’d all been working behind the counter when the shooting happened and probably didn’t have much valuable evidence to give, so he was giving him the assignment more for the experience than anything else.
    Goes to show, you never know what you’ll find. He’d spent the night following up on what he’d learned and was glad was when Greene finally called.
    “Any luck with the employees?” he asked.
    “Yes. There’s more to the story than we realized,” Kennicott said.
    “Okay, come on over. You still in uniform?”
    “No, I changed.”
    “Good. The press are crawling all over this place, looking for coppers in police cars. Just walk down, and they probably won’t notice.”
    It was cold out, even though the sun was coming up, but Kennicott was glad to be outside. The fresh air felt good. He counted six television trucks parked across the street from the doughnut shop, nose to nose, like cattle at a trough. Technicians were outside, setting up their cameras and lights.
    Overnight a spontaneous shrine of cut flowers and cards of condolence, many of them clearly handmade by children, had burgeoned on the sidewalk and a tentlike police canopy had been erected to protect them from the elements.
    Greene must have been watching for him, because when Kennicott approached the big police mobile unit, he walked outside.
    “Let’s get out of here before the press sees us.” He blew warm air into his bare hands.
    “I brought you a hot tea, extra-large,” Kennicott said. He knew Greene didn’t drink coffee.
    “Thanks,” Greene said, cradling the paper cup. “You hungry?”
    “Sure, but—”
    “If we’re not going to sleep we need to eat,” Greene said. “We’ll walk and talk. How did you do with the employees?”
    “Four staff were working when this happened. Three were serving customers and didn’t see anything. Fourth was a baker in back named Jose Sanchez. He didn’t stick around.”
    Greene stopped in his tracks. “He left?”
    “Gone.” Kennicott had been a cop long enough to know that it was highly unusual for people to not stay to help the police when something horrible like this happened. Especially employees.
    “Any idea where he went?”
    Kennicott shook his head. “No. I interviewed the owners of the Tim Hortons, a Chinese couple named Yuen. All their employment files were in the office. I got Detective Ho to retrieve them for me. This Jose Sanchez only gave one phone number. A cell.”
    “And?”
    “Line’s out of service. One of those cheap throwaway phones like all the drug dealers use. He could have bought it anywhere. Impossible to trace.”
    “Address?” Green started walking again, east from the hospital down an alley by a parking lot.
    “He gave the Waverley Hotel.”
    “Great.” The Waverley was a flophouse that rented rooms out weekly, for cash. “Let me guess, the hotel has no record of a ‘Jose Sanchez.’”
    “None.”
    “Does Tim Hortons pay his salary into his bank account?”
    “I asked that. He just takes a