“Listen, Paige.” I glance at her. “It’s Paige, right?”
“Yes, sir. Aysa Violet Paige.”
“I don’t want to hear your story. I don’t need it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I don’t need yours, and you don’t need mine.”
“Oh. Right. I mean—sure.”
Paige fidgets self-consciously in the shotgun seat, casting occasional nervous glances my way, otherwise staring out the window.
This girl is my opposite, and I darkly wonder if Arlo put her in my car purely for the physical comedy. She is short, neat, black, and fully earnest in her countenance. And here I am, this too-big creature, my pale face and my black pinhole, my thick fingers gripping the steering wheel, thick red beard like a bristling animal over the wool of the suit, and my irritation with the world—which is really an irritation with myself—like armor, a chain mail layer rattling across my broad chest. And I don’t know what it is, I can’t tell you, but this kid’s face, everything in her face is different from everything I feel: she’s excited, almost agitated with her own excitement, as if all the great days of her life still ahead of her are jostling inside, creating a field of energy. And she believes that I am someone worth looking up to, someone worth learning from. And if you want to hear something true—big true, deep true—that does not feel terrible. It doesn’t feel terrible at all.
“What matters is what happens now. In the field. What matters is how you marshal the abilities you’ve been granted, and how you harness them to real investigative skill. Okay?”
“Okay. Yeah.”
I drive a minute more. Dope shops and banks, coffee shops and dry cleaners.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be sorry.”
“I just—”
“I mean it, Paige. All of this?” I point at me, and then at her, meaning all of the interpersonal, all of the getting to know each other, all of the teamwork, the senior-junior BS, all of it. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens in the world. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I think that might be it for conversation—I hope it is—but no.
“So can you maybe tell me how it works?”
“How what works?”
“Oh, I just mean… where we’re going. Our interaction with the regular police, the different protocols. I mean, I know how it works, obviously. I’ve done plenty of simulations, and I’ve done all the reading and training and stuff. I just mean… in real life. In the field. Is there anything you think I maybe don’t know?”
“I am sure, Ms. Paige, there are many things you don’t know.”
And then I just keep driving; I just leave that flat piece of truth unadorned, add no further context. I’m being a prig, I am aware of that, I am being a special kind of asshole. Indulging in rigorous literalism, answering questions to the letter, ignoring the spirit in which they were asked is a nasty and childish trick. But I can’t help it—I’m already regretting agreeing to this. I should have held firm with Arlo, told him to pin this particular ribbon on someone else’s chest. I value my time alone. I like driving by myself; I like working by myself. I like knowing that if I’m on the way to a scene of crime, and I feel like taking forty-five seconds to run into House of Pies and pick up a slice of blueberry I can then eat in the car, I can do that without anyone judging me or asking questions.
Too late. We drive on. We’re almost there.
3.
I slouch across the lawn, bent forward, moving slow but with big intent, the heavy man’s hurry, with Ms. Paige trotting along at my heels. I see the body and I move right to it, ignoring the crowds, ignoring the regular police, the capture crews, the gawkers—the shifting crowd that appears in the wake of a death, like insects coming up out of the ground after rain.
I push through the crowd, sighing. Growling, maybe. I’m making some kind of noise and all the regular cops and microphone operators and AV knuckleheads step back, wary. There’s sweat gathering at the back of my collar, sweat beading under my beard. The early-day cool has burned away and it’s hot as a mother out here—I’m roasting in my blacks. I’ve never minded the discomfort of the uniform, to be honest with you, full true; I always feel like the discomfort is part of the job. The discomfort is the job. It marks you out, sets you apart. You get to a scene and you’re already scowling, and everybody knows you’re there on business. Everybody is watching the boundaries.
“Sir?” says Ms. Paige, and I raise one hand—Gimme a second.
This is nothing. This is an empty dumb nothing.
The dead man was a roofer, and he died falling off a roof. Those are the facts, and they’re clear from the get-go, clear and plain. As Arlo would say, it’s true as daylight, true as doors on houses. The mansion is one of these expansive but unassuming old places, with the poured concrete and the Spanish tile, with the wide white patio and the rambling lawn. A modest two stories but turreted with balconies and pilasters and stone-carved cherubs peeking out from the corners of the porch. I shield my eyes and look up to the spot on the red tile roof, where the man scrambled before he fell, and I note the patch of loose and broken tiles. A single piece of fractured gutter juts out like a broken bone.
I turn from the house to the body of the man, and all the angles are adding up. He fell from the high pitch of the roof, scrabbled in vain to catch himself on the downspout, and died when he hit the ground. I get out my Day Book, pin down this first set of flat facts in black ink, pressing hard so the carbons catch it.
“Sir?”
“Let’s just do this, Ms. Paige,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”
The man’s body lies facing the sun, half
