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grabbed a bag of peanuts in the shell.
    Overhead, a door slammed.
    “As you aren’t using it, Molly can take your car to get back to town. I have to go.”
    “We have to talk, Andy,” Lucky said. “About Moonlight.”
    “Okay. Later. Bye.” He ran out, clutching the peanuts.
    Lucky looked at Miller. Although the baby resisted, his eyes began to close. Andy’s car started up and pulled out of the driveway.
    Moonlight slammed another door.
    After she’d been injured in the horrible conclusion to the Montgomery murder last month, Moonlight had gone back to work as soon as possible. She’d reluctantly visited the psychologist the police department used for officers who’d experienced trauma on the job. After a week, she’d blown the therapist off as a waste of time, taken leave, and gone to Vancouver. To visit friends, she told her mother. Lucky knew that Moonlight had no friends in Vancouver. Graham’s grave was in Calgary, where his parents lived. She suspected her daughter had gone to visit the spot where Graham died. An alley in the Downtown Eastside. Lucky called Terry Richards, a good friend who’d recently moved to the coast, and asked her to go down to the Eastside and look for Moonlight. Terry had found the girl, squatting in the alley, holding a bouquet of deep purple roses, amid the detritus of Canada’s most notorious neighborhood. Lucky’d asked her friend merely to check on Moonlight, but Terry stepped forward and, not saying a word, held out her hand. Moonlight gripped it and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet and led toward the lights of the street. She dropped the flowers into the alley behind her.
    Graham and Moonlight had been engaged, waiting until she got her Masters’ degree in Social Work from the University of Victoria before getting married. But Graham had died, in a totally preventable incident, working Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Moonlight quit the MSW program, drifted aimlessly for a while, and then suddenly announced that she was going to become a police officer.
    As much as that career decision had horrified Lucky, she’d been slowly, and somewhat reluctantly, coming to realize that the choice might have been the right one for her daughter. Moonlight was regaining her confidence, her strength. And, to Lucky’s delight, the girl had begun to think about dating again. Encouraged by Lucky herself into a catastrophic situation, Moonlight went on her first date since Graham, only to be horribly betrayed. At first she appeared to handle it well, and Lucky breathed a sigh of relief. But then Moonlight had her hair cut: the new look startling, dramatic. Andy told her she looked good, but Lucky feared the cut was a sign of something deeper. And then Moonlight went to Vancouver.
    To mourn at the site of Graham’s death.
    Terry had gathered the girl up, walked her to her car, and driven ten hours to Trafalgar to deliver her to her parents’ door.
    For two days, Moonlight played with Sylvester in the garden, took long walks along the river, listened to music in her room.
    On the third morning, Constable Smith put on her uniform, the one with the blue stripe down the pant leg, the badge of the Trafalgar City Police (since 1895) on the shoulder, Kevlar vest, belt heavy with equipment, including the black gun her mother hated so much, and went back to work.
    Nothing, Lucky knew, had been resolved.

Chapter Four
    As John Winters walked into the GIS office, his partner, Detective Ray Lopez, was carefully removing a few dead leaves from the row of African violets he tended on the sunny windowsill overlooking George Street. He had not been happy to return from his daughter’s wedding to find that Winters hadn’t bothered to water them. Two of the plants almost died, and Lopez was carefully nursing them back to health, tossing angry glances at Winters every time he did so.
    Looking nothing like his name might suggest, Ray Lopez was blue-eyed and redheaded, pale with a splash of freckles