paraphernalia and college books were scattered over every available surface of the four-room apartment, telling me that Danny had moved on and other tenants taken his place. I examined a terry-cloth duckling that a chubby fist had flung to the floor. The orange bill was frayed from where it had been gnawed on by tiny baby teeth. It pierced my heart. One of my sons had a duckling just like it when he was a baby. I remembered using it to scrub him in the tub at night. Yet I could not remember which son it had been. How was it possible to forget such an important thing as that?
Enough of the past. I had to keep my mind on the present. I had to keep my mind on the case. Maggie was in danger.
Why would Danny be so willing to hurt Maggie? Why would he be so willing to work with Alan Hayes? Surely it wasn’t because of her rejection of his clumsy advances. The way Danny drank, the terrible care he took of his body—I don’t think he had actually felt desire for anything but another shot of whiskey in years. And though his pride may have taken a hit, he lacked the energy to follow through on defending its honor. I was certain of that.
And did he really care about the Hayes case and being proved wrong? I was certain he had not cared about it even back when it was new. Why would he care about it now? What did he hope to gain? The past? Oh, Danny—to think you could return to the past and reclaim it in some way. Only someone who had given up on the present would ever think in such terms.
I thought back to the days when we had first investigated the murder of Alissa Hayes. Neither Danny nor I had been in good shape; we were both beginning our final slides into the bottle. Danny was still reeling from the breakup of his family, though it had happened a good five years before. And I’d had my own excuse for drinking then, as well, though I could hardly remember the details. It was a promotion of some sort that I had coveted in the more sober recesses of my heart and not gotten. Of course, looking back, I was barely holding on to my present job at the time. There was no way anyone would ever have seriously considered me for more. But we have such power to delude ourselves and I had been deep into delusions back then.
With neither one of us sober or focused enough to work the Hayes case properly, we had simply followed the path of least resistance, one that had ended in an innocent man sitting in a jail cell. Yet, that was neither the first nor would it be the last case of injustice caused by incompetence, or even by our incompetence. It wasn’t like Danny had intentionally steered us wrong or had anything to do with Alissa’s death.
So why would he want to stop Maggie from doing her job?
I had no way to find Danny to ask him, no way to move forward in figuring out what it all meant. And so I returned to Maggie for the afternoon. She would have someone to watch over her.
Maggie was working furiously on a warrant application, entering paragraph after paragraph into the computer. A cold cup of coffee and forgotten salad sat unnoticed beside her as the hours passed. Occasionally, she would pick up the phone and speak to Peggy upstairs in the lab, double-checking the spelling of some of the more technical terms before entering them into her report.
By three o’clock she was ready to submit the report to Gonzales. She walked it upstairs herself. Seeing her approach, he waved her inside. I followed like an invisible puppy, watching the two of them intently, wondering if Danny’s suspicions had been right, fearing they had something going on.
But Gonzales did not give her a second glance when he took the papers from her. There was nothing between them but professional respect. I was ashamed to have thought like Danny, even if for only a second.
Gonzales read through the application and the file beneath it quickly, frowning the entire time. When he was done, he stared at Maggie intently.
“What?” she asked defensively, her fatigue starting to show.
“Where’s Bonaventura?” he asked. “He’s AWOL and I’m pissed off about it. When’s the last time you saw him?”
“Last night,”