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break.”
    Bina finished one roll.
    Roderick Young Jr., twenty-six, beaten to death in a schoolyard. Three men in dark jackets spotted fleeing the scene.
    “That narrows it down. More juice, Ima?”
    Bina finished her meatloaf.
    Antonio East, twenty, and Jarome Jaramillo, twenty-nine, shot to death during a liquor store robbery. No suspects.
    “Security footage?” Jacob said, paging to the end. “Height? Build? Clothing? Getaway car? Anything? Why should life be easy?”
    Bina started in on her string beans.
    “Okay,” he said, stuffing the East/Jaramillo file in his bag. “Next.”
    Right away he spotted a problem with the fourth folder: it was the wrong color, the date scribbled on the cover off by nine years, 2004 instead of 1995. Hollywood division in a stack of Ramparts files.
    Not the first example of clerical sloppiness he’d unearthed at the August M. Vollmer archive. But no less annoying. He’d be hunting for the correct box for days.
    “Wonderful,” he muttered, opening the folder. “Okay. So. Twenty-three-year-old black female, Marquessa Duvall; her son, five—”
    The air went out of him.
    Five-year-old black male, Thomas White Jr.
    Bina had finished her beans. The fork rested in her hand.
    She was looking at him.
    He shut the file. “Eat your potatoes. I’ll see if I can scare you up some dessert.”
    He found Rosario at the front desk, doing paperwork.
    “Any chance you have a cookie back there somewhere?”
    “Depends,” she said. “Who’s it for?”
    “My mom.”
    “In that case, maybe,” she said. “Cause you know you don’t deserve a cookie.”
    “That’s for damn sure.”
    She returned from the kitchen with a torn pack of Nutter Butters, two remaining.
    “Seriously?”
    She reached to take them back.
    “Fine, fine, fine.”
    “You’re welcome,” she said.
    In the dayroom, a handful of residents sat in chairs and wheelchairs oriented toward the television.
Jeopardy!
was on.
    “Luckily for us, Max Brod disregarded this man’s instructions to burn his writings after his death.”
    Jacob said, “Who is Franz Kafka?”
    “Who is Kafka?”
a contestant echoed.
    “Shaddap,” an old man said to Jacob.
    “Literary Ks for six, Alex.”
    Jacob stepped out onto the patio and said, “Oh, no.”
    Pages were strewn far and wide across the concrete, in the bushes, in the dirt.
    His mother had a folder open on her lap.
    “For God’s sake, Ima.”
    He crawled around, corralling the sheets before they could blow away. Big file, three hundred pages or more, now completely out of order.
    He got up, brandishing the papers in one hand and cookies in the other, and came forward to retrieve the folder from his mother. Stopping short as he saw what she had in her lap: a gruesome crime-scene photo of a woman and a young boy.
    Twenty-three-year-old Marquessa Duvall; her son, five-year-old Thomas White Jr.
    Bina was staring intensely at the photo. The focus struck Jacob sosharply that he paused, fascinated by the new acuity. Then he came to his senses.
    Gently, he said, “That’s not for you, Ima.”
    He extracted the photo from her grasp, surprised when she did not resist.
    “I’m sorry if that upset you.” He put the file in his backpack, tugged the zipper shut. “I hope you’re okay with these cookies—oh
come on.
”
    Bina had jammed her fingers into her mashed potatoes.
    “Ima. You’re gonna make a—
Ima.
Give it here.”
    But she wrested the tray from him and resumed working the gluey mass, rounding it into a bell; raising, pressing, plucking, roughing out, her fingers flying, a vein in the center of her forehead throbbing manically.
    Dumbstruck, Jacob watched the developing form. It seemed outrageous that it hadn’t collapsed under its own weight.
    Bina snatched up her fork and began carving out fine detail.
    Then, all at once, she stopped. She lifted her hands and, sure enough, the shape imploded.
    But the brief moment before it did was enough to demonstrate her gift. Enough