In the afternoon, after Gee's funeral, you go to work. You imagine--you know he would have done the same. So you twist your hair back into a knot, grip a tarry cup of coffee, and go to your squad. Fugitive, on the fourth floor.

Near your desk, and all over the break room, there are newspapers thrown around. You don't let the headlines catch your eye; the news is never good. And there are case files upon files to distract you, reports to file and proofread, blank lines waiting for your name. You didn't become a cop to sit at a desk and type, but today it's welcome. You sink into your rigid chair and let the paperwork soak up your mind, like tissues dropped over a spill of ink.

Two of your guys come in, flushed from the heat and the pleasure of pursuit. So you know the answer before you ask, leaning back in your chair, "How'd it go?"

"Sid Allison is in the custody of the state of Maryland," Lou Fahey says, beaming. He pulls down the knot in his sweaty tie and hovers near your desk. For all his forty years and 250 pounds, he's a big blond kid. "Didn't even run when we got there, Sarge. He just wanted us to let him finish his video game."

"Video game?

"Grand Theft Auto," Fahey says. "For the Playstation."

You rub your forehead. "Kid boosts cars for a living."

"Yeah."

The world keeps turning on its warped axis. You shrug and smile for Fahey. "So you handed him off to Auto."

"Should we have kept him?" Fahey's partner asks. They know that now and then you like to talk to the car thieves, dangling the idea of reduced time over them like bait on a hook. Maybe they even know why: the old hope smoking inside you that someday you'll find Jerry Cantwell. Justice for Beau Felton. Today it seems very long ago and far off.

"Nah." Your chair squeaks. "I can always grab him sometime in the next three to seven years, huh?"

"Lots more where he comes from," Fahey says. The two of them walk away chuckling, headed for sandwiches and the leftover coffee. You like the noise of them, footsteps and loud laughter and the energy that buzzes even when they're not speaking. It's nicest here on the four-to-twelve shift, with late sunlight cutting through the dusty windows like a curved blade. You work. You go out on a call and come back empty-handed in the moon- and street-lit dark. Some of the guys leave a little early, with the permission of your silence. The room empties out and fills again with the night shift.

"Can I have my desk now?"

It's twelve minutes after twelve. You sweep the files into a drawer, careful not to disturb the limited order you've created. The night shift's sergeant practically grabs the chair out from under your ass, and you shoot him a glare.

"Sorry," he says.

"Sorry don't make the sun come out," you say.

In the bathroom, you stop up the sink with a paper towel, dip your hands into cool, rusty water. The pipes thud in the walls. You raise your wet fingers to your face. Loose droplets stream from your nose and chin, trickling under your collar.

The elevator takes a long time, as if you woke it from a nap.

Outside, the air is cottony with heat. It should be cooler this late at night, but the temperature hasn't dropped a degree since noon. You imagine steam rising from the back of your neck and between your fingers. You walk down the steps of the station house, around the corner and uphill, slowing with every step, to find your old Toyota parked between streetlights. And the thin figure sitting on the hood.

You squint. He squints back at you, a familiar profile surfacing from shadows. "John," you say, and cross the street to him. He doesn't get up or embrace you and you're glad. There have been too many careful, fragile hugs in the last few days. You look down into John's face. "I thought you were leaving right after the funeral."

"I haven't slipped the surly bonds of Baltimore yet," he says. You wrinkle your nose and wait for him to talk in prose. He shows you a quick smile. "I have a shuttle flight in the morning. I bet myself that you would already be back on the job."

"You won."

"Good thing, too. If I'd lost, I couldn't afford to pay myself."

You tilt your head, crossing your arms in front of your chest. "Aren't you dying, sitting out here?"

"After today? My bone marrow is ice. My blood is antifreeze. My, uh, spleen is..." He shrugs inside his black suit jacket. "Yeah. This is miserable, this heat, it's only May. It didn't used to be like this."

"Used to be worse." You take out your car keys, spin them around your finger. "You coming?"

"Where?"

"The car's air-conditioned."

"Can I drive?" John feints at the keys, and you snatch them back out of his reach. "Okay," he says, and stands up, circling you and the car. He waits at the passenger side. You draw in a lungful of damp air, steadying yourself before you open the door.

Driving just to drive, racing yourself to red lights, finding a teenage rush of joy in the power to move and keep moving. The AC is on full throttle. You are out of the real city now, driving past factories and then past houses. Your headlights sweep a shimmer across the blacktop.

"That wasn't a funeral," Munch says, apropos of nothing. His finger drums on the armrest between your seats.

"It looked like one to me."

There had been a priest, an army of uniformed officers, half the state's attorney's office, ancient Sicilian women with black lace drawn tight over gray hair. There had been so many people that it was hard to get within sight of the glossy coffin in its dark hole. You'd been grateful for that, and now you feel guilty.

"That was Macy's Thanksgiving Parade without the balloons." He keeps tapping to the downbeat of whatever's in his head. "I hate official funerals. I hate official anything. We go through these rituals to eliminate any real emotion. Standing the right way and bowing your head at appropriate moments instead of behaving like human beings."

A sour taste wells in your mouth. "You're the ambassador for mental health, Munchkin."

"Did you cry at the cemetery?" he asks, twisting sideways in his seat.

He's damn lucky you don't slam on the brakes and let the windshield chew him up. Your fingernails dig into the steering wheel. "No." You put all the ice you can muster into the word.

"Because I saw you crying at the Waterfront, and that wasn't manufactured." He looks at you down the length of his nose, and you force your eyes to the road. You are remembering that night when the news of Gee's death came, the time-warping sensation of being surrounded by strangers and old comrades all at once. You remember the weave of Ed Danvers' white shirt, dampened by your tears, roughing your cheek.

John is looking at you in a way that hurts you, like a fresh bruise under fingertips. A swallow rasps in your dry throat. "Stop," you say.

He lets up, but only a little, holding up one long finger. "Case closed."

The white line ticks away into darkness. Trucks lumber along the highway from one factory to another fast-food joint; diesel exhaust a gray plume in the beam of your headlights. You could drive for as long as you had gas in the tank, and this car gets good mileage, and you could pretend that engine noise drowns out anything he has to say.

But the sign for your exit looms in the dark, and you edge to the outside lane. "Tell me what happened to Tim Bayliss," you hear yourself saying. "Tell me how this happened."

Now he's the one to draw away, the back of his head thudding against the seat, his shoulder against the window. "How am I supposed to know?"

"Aw, don't give me that. You were there, weren't you? When that case--"

"Ryland," he says. "Luke Ryland."

"You were there. You saw him work that one. Tell me."

"I didn't know anything." Frustration pushes up under his voice. "You remember him when he was fresh out of the box, Kay. We used to think he'd crack up on the job because of that damn puppy dog face of his. He stopped looking like that after he was shot and Frank left. Maybe it was Frank. I don't know. I rode with him off and on for a year and all I did was talk. I never shut up. I didn't think about anything except my own ass. You think I knew he could kill somebody?" In the rear view mirror, his eyes are black as the kind of ice that causes accidents. He pinches the bridge of his nose. "I barely knew he was there."

You let his speech rattle around the inside of the car for a minute. The exit ramp comes up and you take its S-curve to the first red light. You catch his eyes in the mirror again.

"But you were around when he took his sabbatical."

"And I thought it might actually be good for him," John says. "You believe that?"

You take one hand off the wheel and rub it against the side of your neck, the knotted tendons there. Stress, you think. Exhaustion. Shock. "You left at around the same time."

Sigmund Freud over there gives the impression of a nod without moving his head at all.

"Why?"

"Hmm?"

You make your voice slow, one word at a time. "Why did you go to New York?"

"Why did you stay in Fugitive when they dropped the rotation policy?" he asks, raising an eyebrow.

The light turns green. You step on the gas gently, sliding forward into the no-man's-land of the intersection.

"This is the same place you lived ten years ago," John says, leaning over your shoulder as you jingle the keys into the lock.

"Yeah. That's what happens when you buy a house." You push the heel of your hand into the door, just above the knob, and pull on the key at the same time. The deadbolt creaks against the humidity and slides free. You open the door. He follows too closely behind you.

"I've been in here twice before," he says, his gaze roaming around as you shuck off the loops of your shoulder holster and lock up your gun. He touches the wallpaper. "Twice, and one time was that horrible birthday party your sister threw, and it really shouldn't count because you left halfway through."

"I had a case," you say, biting your lip to stop the rise of a grin.

"You were running away in mortal terror of the cute little hors d'oeuvres."

"I don't eat anything cute." You enter the kitchen, switch on the light. The ceiling fan swirls into a blur. "Now, if there'd-a been oyster shooters, it might've been a much better party."

He gives an exaggerated shudder as he steps past you, toward the refrigerator as if he belongs here. Instead of taking something out, he opens the freezer and presses his hands against the inner wall. "That's better," he says. "I don't know how I lived here without my brain melting."

You blink at him. "I got so many answers to that, I can't pick just one."

His head tips back a little, like a shield coming up against arrows. Maybe he's the one who's too easy to read. You turn away. In a kitchen it's easy to find something to distract yourself. You run hot water over a glass marked with your fingerprints. When you can't stand the heat you turn it cold, fill the glass, drink. The water tastes clean.

"I wish I could tell you about Bayliss," he says, and you're almost unsure that you heard him. You turn back. He shifts his angular shoulders, a smile ghosting across his face. "The last time I talked to him, I thought maybe something was wrong. I thought maybe he solved it by leaving."

"Really."

"No. I didn't think he solved it." John opens his mouth and closes it again. He steps toward you, changes his mind and slouches against the counter. You become aware of the hum of electricity, the clock ticking in the hallway, the whiteness of the blank fridge door. The glass of water condenses, moistens in your grip.

"Sometimes," he says, at last, "you have to stop being who you are to be honest with yourself. If a guy has a code that he lives by, even if it's not a very good code...and everyone does." He has to pause his throat. His hands are visibly shaking. You wouldn't notice these things if you weren't a good detective. "There are going to be times where you can't do anything, and you have to do something. I...think he was at that point for a while, and something about the Luke Ryland case brought him down. He did it because he didn't know how else to live with himself."

It sounds like bullshit, but you don't say so. You can hear that he means it. He wants it to make sense. To shut it like a door against the horror of these last few days, and something more. You move forward into the middle of the room, into the breath of the fan. "He?"

"Or she." The corner of his mouth twitches. "No sexist, I."

This is not what you meant, but the moment for asking the question has flickered out. "Ed will plead him down if he can," you murmur, wondering as you say it if that's true. "If there's a trial--hell, I don't know. I'm long past thinking that the system gives a damn about what anybody deserves. The justice system, huh?"

He lets out a sigh of relief. "It doesn't give a damn. That's what makes it a system," he says, coming off the counter to stand up straight. "But it's our system. At least we're used to it. Why didn't you ever come back from Fugitive?"

You rock your weight forward into the balls of your feet, taking every millimeter of height available to your body, meeting his eyes. "Why did you go to New York?"

"Touché." He waves his hand in a circle. "I wish I could tell you. Part of it was the unit going to pieces. And I got married to a woman I didn't really like."

"Again."

"Sisyphus had his rock," he says, trying to smirk and not quite getting there. "Your turn, Sergeant."

You hesitate, reaching behind your back to loosen your hair from the knot A thousand reasons, a thousand pinpricks of pain: you knew many things were wrong. He'll have to settle for one splinter of the truth. "I couldn't work for Gee anymore."

"Ouch."

"You asked."

"That was a situational ouch," he explains. He reaches up to tip an imaginary hat, and you catch yourself thinking he'd look good in the right kind of hat. A fedora, maybe. "Here's to Lieutenant Al Giardello, a future folk hero of Baltimore."

Your throat tightens as you raise your glass in a half-assed toast. You will miss Gee, after all, though you thought you'd already left him behind. The last time you saw him, he was just a massive shadow in the stairwell of the station, rushing down to follow the ambulance that was taking Bayliss away. You hadn't known who was hit. Without knowing it, you'd drawn your gun. Now you look at John, standing a foot away in your kitchen, and you think you might cry.

Anger stirs in your chest, an old anger with long claws. "You can talk about honor codes and honesty all you want," you say. "But I never heard of a murder that made any sense or helped anybody live. For Bayliss to do this, he had to be dead inside." John flinches, just slightly, a wrinkle crossing his forehead. You step in toward him. "And I don't think you're telling me everything that you know."

The wrinkle deepens, blackens. He lowers his chin. "You believe in secrets, right?"

"Not like this."

"If you'd been there--" He looks over your shoulder, past the kitchen window and down the long road, a look that goes all the way back to the city and sifts through streets and alleys for something, some missing piece. Detective Munch. "If you'd been there last year, or the year before, maybe you could say that, but you don't know. Don't be so sure you wouldn't do the same thing, Kay. Unless you think you're different because you're a woman."

You imagine slapping him; he could use it. You already feel the sting. Instead you turn away, reaching to grip the edge of the counter, your knuckles flaring white. "You got out, Munch. Don't blame me because you didn't get out soon enough."

He exhales loudly. "So Timmy's a murderer, and that's that. Nobody from the old days will say a word to each other, and that's that, too."

The bleat of the squadroom phone sounds inside your ear; the yellow walls of the Box imprint your eyelids. You never go to the sixth floor if you can help it. Not for the first time, you're flooded with wishing that you'd stopped Tim from answering his first call. Adena Watson. You want it? You'll always carry a fragment of the huge guilt Tim dragged around on his shoulders.

"That's that." In spite of everything, your voice cracks.

His shoe creaks on the linoleum, and John is right behind you, like a fever that you know is coming. The muscles tense all the way up your spine. But he doesn't touch you, just stoops so that his face is almost in your hair. Breathing. You think about moving but you don't move. The clock ticks. You can't help but relax, gradually, into his presence and the pace of his heartbeat. You let go of the counter.

He brushes a finger, just one, against your ribs, where you're used to the pressure and weight of your gun. His hand is cold.

"So let us melt, and make no noise," he says, and pulls away. His footsteps ring into the hall, and you hear the front door open stickily and close again. You're alone in your house, an empty house.

You drink from your water glass, conscious suddenly of sweat under your arms and breasts. Halfway through a swallow, you burst out in broken laughter, almost choking. When you go outside, John will be sitting on your car again, in the heat, with a face like a wounded bird. So much for the dramatic exit. You wipe your mouth on your wrist.

In a little while, you'll take him to the airport. You'll say goodbye, and drive home comfortably through the steaming night. If you get to bed before sunrise, you'll sleep well. And you know that in New York he'll get along. He survives, as you survive. Still, he's added another question to the ranks of questions that will plague you forever, like stones in a graveyard, like red on the Board.

Should you have kept him?

You cough, and laugh, and switch off the light.