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no way I’m even looking at that.”
    “I know. I just want to see.”
    She gave up and pulled over to the curb. I hopped out of the car and grabbed a flyer.
    “Five bedrooms. Four and a half baths. Open kitchen and great room. Swimming pool and large landscaped—”
    I hadn’t come close to finishing reading the glossy flyer when she interrupted me. “How much?”
    “You’re missing the point. You can’t put a price tag on”—I looked down at the brochure to make sure I got the phrasing just right—“‘luxury living at its finest.’”
    “How much?”
    “Two million, four hundred fifty thousand.”
    “I knew I shouldn’t have told you until I actually found something.”
    “No, come on. I can help. I’ll be good at this.”
    She gave me one more wary glance at the stop sign on Sixth and Havana before looping back up to Seventh and our route back downtown.

Seven
    “N O BIG SURPRISES ,” Paula said to Jen and me, looking down at her clipboard over the top edge of her glasses. Carter had called it correctly at the crime scene. Sara had died of blood loss, although she had a subdural hematoma that would have done the job itself if she hadn’t bled out first. Bailey and Jacob had died of gunshot wounds. “There is some good news,” she continued. “Sara fought back. We found skin under her nails—enough for a DNA match of at least one of the suspects. We’ll run it.” Theoretically, at least, if a match were found, it could break the case and give us one or both of our murderers. With even the highest priority, though, the lab’s backlog would mean waiting weeks or even months for the results. I’d worked on a dozen cases in which the suspect was already convicted by the time the DNA came back. Still, the results could help us to confirm or eliminate suspects we came up with through other leads. The latter was the most likely. Even on a high-profile case like the Bentons’, we knew we’d have a long wait on our hands.
    But still, things were moving.
    It was a simple and straightforward autopsy report. It had seemed that way as we watched. Often, Paula would explain things we’d had no hint of during the procedure. Not this time. The bodies still lay covered on three parallel tables, Sara on the far left, then Bailey, then Jacob. Their shapes under the cleanwhite sheets troubled me more than most of the victims that I had seen. The smallness of the children’s outlines on the large tables left a knot in my stomach. “Thanks, Paula,” Jen said. She watched me stare at the bodies. “Ready?”
    “Not quite.” I stepped in next to Sara and turned down the sheet to expose her face. Then I did the same for each of the children. They were purple white in the fluorescent glare. Sara’s face was bruised and swollen, but Bailey and Jacob looked surprisingly peaceful. Troublingly so, in fact. A sharp pain ran up my arm, and the air-conditioning felt suddenly too cold.

    During one of my sessions with the pain psychologist, I had said, “Sometimes it seems like I just can’t get out of my own head.” She’d nodded in understanding.
    Jen drove as we left the morgue and headed back down the 110 to the squad. I looked out the window. The bright sun reflected off of an Infiniti in the next lane, and I squinted behind my sunglasses.
    “What’s up?” Jen asked.
    I thought again of telling her about my previous night’s epiphany, about my temporary escape from the pain, but I was still afraid to speak of it out loud, as if giving voice to the experience might break the spell. Undo the magic. I needed to see if I could find that place again. Something in me resisted, but I forced my mind back to the autopsy room and to the faces of Sara Benton and her children. The more I focused on them, the less I focused on myself.
    “I’m trying to get out of my head,” I said.
    She looked like she understood what I meant, but she didn’t say anything more.

    “This is Special Agent Young,” the feeb said,