Chapter 2

(Thursday, February 25, 1999)

I live above a dojo on Forty-Third, which is the kind of detail that people either understand immediately or never understand at all. The building is a stucco box from the thirties that somebody split into commercial on the ground floor and residential on the second sometime in the seventies, and the residential half is a one-bedroom with hardwood floors that creak in three specific places I have memorized and hardwood that does not creak in specific places I have also memorized, because when you live alone and you work homicide, you maintain a map of what your floor sounds like when only you are on it.

Thursday night I came home from Elena's, parked the Crown Vic in the spot behind the building that is mine by the unwritten law of having parked there every night for four years. I hung my jacket on the coat tree by the door, then the holster. Sat on the edge of my bed with my boots still on and did nothing for a while. Below me Sensei Sato was running the advanced class. I could feel it through the floor: the specific vibration pattern of eight to twelve people doing repetitive striking drills on mats, which has a rhythm distinct from sparring, distinct from forms, distinct from the shuffle and thump of the beginner class that runs at six. The advanced class runs at eight. It was eight-fifteen. I should have been down there.

Instead I was sitting on my bed thinking about the way a woman's hand had felt, which was not a productive line of investigation, and about the way Elena Herrera had trusted her, which was.

I pulled my boots off. Put the case file on the kitchen counter, which is four steps from the bed because the kitchen and the bedroom share an agreement about space that a generous person would call open floorplan and an honest person would call a studio with pretensions. I have a bedroom. The bedroom is separated from the kitchen by a half-wall that someone installed and then either ran out of money or conviction before they made it a full wall, and I've put a bookshelf against it on the kitchen side, which means my cookbooks are technically in my bedroom and my case notes are technically in my kitchen and the jurisdictional confusion suits me fine.

The apartment is small and I keep it clean and there is nothing in it I don't use. I moved four times in eight years and learned what I actually carry and what you leave in the box you never open and then move the box to the next place and don't open it there either. Eventually you throw out the box. What's left is what matters to you, and what matters to me is: books, most of them nonfiction, most of the nonfiction about either martial arts or criminal investigation because I am a woman of narrow and overlapping interests. A heavy bag mounted in the corner of the bedroom where someone else would put a dresser. My dresser is in the closet because the heavy bag was a higher priority. Two good knives in the kitchen, a cast iron pan that I have maintained with the consistency I wish the department brought to evidence chain of custody, and a coffee maker that cost more than my first car, which is not a high bar but the coffee maker is worth it.

I made coffee. It was eight-thirty at night and I made coffee because I was going to work the Foss angle for another two hours and because coffee after eight PM is a choice I've made so many times that it has ceased to be a choice and become a personality trait. I stood at the counter and drank it black and read through what I had.

Foss's priors told a story if you knew how to read them. The two domestics were both called in by neighbors, not by the partner, which means either the partner had been trained not to call or the partner was unable to call or the partner had made the specific calculation that calling would make things worse, and every one of those options ends at the same place. The assault charge was a bar fight that got pleaded down because the victim didn't want to testify, which I read as either the victim was afraid or the victim was paid or both. Foss had a pattern. The pattern was violence managed through the legal system's willingness to look at each incident as a separate event instead of reading the sequence, which is like reading a rap sheet one line at a time and deciding each entry happened to a different guy.

The noise complaints were interesting because they were disproportionate. Herrera's apartment wasn't loud. Elena said David played music sometimes but kept it down, and the building manager confirmed no other tenants had complained. Two formal complaints to management about a neighbor who wasn't loud enough to bother anyone else suggested Foss was building a grievance the way some people build them: deliberately, with documentation, creating a paper trail that could later be used to justify whatever he'd already decided to do.

Or he was just a guy who didn't like noise. That's why you build the case before you build the theory.

I worked until ten-thirty, then I turned off the overhead, and the apartment dropped into the specific quality of dark that you get in the Sunset when the fog is in: the streetlight on Forty-Third diffused into a general orange glow that came through my bedroom window and made everything look like a photograph someone had left in the sun. Below me the dojo was quiet. Sato closes at ten. The building settled around me the way old buildings do, which is slowly and with commentary, every joint in the frame expressing an opinion about temperature and moisture and the specific grievance of having been standing in San Francisco fog for seventy years.

I lay in bed and did not sleep and thought about Carl Foss and then stopped thinking about Carl Foss and thought about the way Aleena had hugged Elena Herrera.

The hug had been wrong the way numbers on a financial statement are wrong when the statement is almost perfect. The problem with almost perfect is that real things are never almost perfect. Real things have texture and mess and the organic quality of having been assembled by humans who make mistakes, and when something is almost perfect, the almost is where the information lives. The duration was right. The pressure was right. She took Elena's weight without shifting her center of gravity, and the release was controlled enough that Elena never hit a moment where the support wasn't there. Everything about it was right, which is its own kind of tell.

It meant either she had extensive training in physical contact with grieving people, or she had so much practice that the technique had dissolved into instinct. Either way, it didn't match a corporate executive's résumé.

I added it to the file. The file that wasn't on paper.

The window was cold to the touch, which means the fog was sitting right on the glass. Somewhere on the block a car alarm went off and stopped. I could feel the outline of my body on the mattress, the specific ache in my right hip from where I'd taken a throw badly six weeks ago and hadn't let it fully heal because I kept training on it, which Sensei Sato had opinions about that I respected and did not follow.

I went to sleep. It took a while. That's all I'm saying about that.

Friday I brought Foss in.

I'd spent the morning building the probable cause with my partner, Marcus Webb, who is the kind of detective who makes you better by being competent in ways that are different from how you're competent. Webb does timelines. He can take a week of LUDs and bank statements and witness interviews and produce a reconstruction of someone's movements that reads like a train schedule. He pulls landline records the way other people pull weeds: methodically, patiently, following each one to the root. When I told him I liked Foss for the Herrera murder he said, "Show me," and I showed him, and he looked at it and said, "The pattern's real but the timeline's soft. Let's firm it up before we go."

We firmed it up. It took three hours. We pulled Foss's landline records from Pac Bell, which Webb had requested Wednesday and which had come through the squad room fax that morning because Webb knows the right clerk at the phone company and maintains that relationship the way you maintain a source: consistent, low-pressure contact that pays out when you need it to. The records were on thermal paper that curled at the edges and smeared if you ran your thumb across the ink, which is how the phone company communicates with law enforcement: grudgingly and in a format designed to deteriorate.

The records painted a picture. Foss was a phone guy. He called the same bookie in Las Vegas every game night, usually between six and seven, and then again after the final spread came in. He called his mother on Sundays. He called a number in Daly City three or four times a week that we hadn't identified yet. On the night Herrera died, his landline showed a call to the bookie at six-forty-five, thirteen minutes, probably placing bets on the Warriors game. Then nothing. Ninety minutes of dead air on a line that normally lit up all evening, followed by a call to the Daly City number at eight-twenty-eight that lasted four minutes.

Ninety minutes of nothing from a habitual caller was anomalous. It was not evidence. But it was a soft spot in his night that he'd have to fill with words when I asked him, and words under pressure are where cases open up.

We also ran down the canvass reports from the uniforms who'd worked the block Wednesday. Six apartments in the building, four occupied, two answered the door. Nobody saw the stranger the roommate had described. The buildings on either side of Herrera's produced nothing useful: an elderly woman who went to bed at seven, a couple who'd been out that evening, a guy who said he might have heard shouting but couldn't say when and couldn't say from where, which is the kind of statement that goes in the file and sits there being unhelpful. No one on the block had a security camera. The few businesses on Balboa with exterior cameras were too far from the building entrance to catch foot traffic at the street door.

The roommate had come in Wednesday morning and spent two hours with the sketch artist. The composite was generic: white male, medium build, no distinguishing features the roommate could pull up. The face had been fading when I'd talked to him in the car Tuesday night, and what the artist got was a drawing you could match to forty thousand guys in the city. We'd run it through the binders anyway, the physical mugshot books that live in filing cabinets at 850 Bryant, organized by height, build, race, and prior offense, and the roommate would sit down with the six-packs we pulled and look at rows of faces and try to find the one he'd held the door for. I expected nothing from it. I'd been right so far.

We picked Foss up at eleven-fifteen. He was home, which I'd expected. He'd been out of work for four months, which I'd known from the background check, and the apartment confirmed it in the way apartments do: dishes in the sink past the point of a bad day and into the territory of a bad month, blinds drawn at eleven AM, the sour smell of a space that doesn't get enough air because the person in it has stopped noticing. I clocked the details on the walk-through and filed most of them under sad and one of them under interesting: a hole in the drywall at shoulder height in the hallway between the living room and the bedroom, patched badly with spackle that didn't match the paint and was recent enough that I could smell it.

Foss came to the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt and managed his face the way I'd expected: careful, calculated, projecting cooperation while his eyes tracked the geometry of the interaction. Where were the other officers. Where were my hands. How much did I already know. He was doing the math, and I could see him doing it, and he could see me seeing him do it, and that shared knowledge sat between us like a third person in the room.

"Mr. Foss, I'm Detective Cunningham. This is Detective Webb. We're investigating the death of your neighbor David Herrera, and we'd like to ask you some questions. Would you be willing to come to the station?"

He would. He was cooperative and calm and his body language was controlled in the specific way that raises my cortisol, which is the control of someone who has rehearsed this. Not rehearsed what to say. Rehearsed how to be. He'd been through the system twice and he'd learned from it, the way smart men with violence in them learn from the system: how to manage the interface.

The interview room at 850 Bryant is a box designed to feel smaller than it is, and I have spent enough hours in it that it feels like a second office, which is the point. Home field. Foss sat in the chair that faces the door and the one-way glass and the single camera in the upper corner, and I sat across from him, and Webb sat to my right with the LUDs in the folder he doesn't open until the moment it will do the most damage.

Webb reached over and hit the button on the wall unit. Somewhere behind the one-way glass the VCR engaged with a heavy magnetic clunk you could feel through the table. I stated the date, the time, the case number, and the names of everyone in the room, because the tape doesn't know who's talking unless you tell it, and the tape is the only thing in this room that doesn't forget, doesn't interpret, and doesn't have an opinion about what it heard.

Before anything else, I read him his rights. I did it from the card, the way I always do, because the card is not a crutch, it's a firewall: if this case ever sees a courtroom, the defense attorney is going to ask me whether I read the Miranda warning verbatim, and I'm going to say yes, from the printed card, and that question is going to die on the floor where it belongs. Foss listened the way a man listens to something he's heard before: with the patience of someone waiting for the part that matters.

"Do you understand these rights as I've explained them?"

"Yeah."

"And you're willing to talk to us?"

"I got nothing to hide."

Which is something people say in two situations: when it's true, and when they want you to think it is. The words are identical. The tells are in the everything else.

I started with background. Where he'd been living, how long, how he knew the building. This is the warm-up that isn't a warm-up. It establishes a baseline: how he talks when the questions are easy, what his rhythm is, where he puts his hands, how long his answers run. I need the map of his normal before I can read his abnormal.

Foss was concise and cooperative. Short answers, direct eye contact that held a beat longer than comfortable, the posture of a man who wanted me to know he wasn't nervous. People who aren't nervous don't project not being nervous. They just sit there. Foss was performing composure, and the performance told me more than the composure would have.

"Tell me about your relationship with David Herrera."

"Neighbor. Saw him in the hall. Said hi. That's it."

"The noise complaints."

A pause. Fractional. The kind of pause that happens when someone is selecting from prepared options. "His apartment shared a wall with mine. He played music late. I asked management to handle it."

"Two formal complaints over four months."

"It was loud."

"No other tenants complained."

"Other tenants aren't on the shared wall."

That was good. Foss was good at this. He'd prepared an answer that was plausible and specific and didn't overexplain. Most people overexplain when they're lying, the way most people add unnecessary detail to fake alibis because they think more detail equals more convincing. Foss had learned that less is more. He'd learned it in rooms like this one, across tables from detectives who were working him the way I was working him, and the education had stuck.

I let the silence sit. Silence in an interview room is a tool: it creates a vacuum that most people rush to fill, and what they fill it with is almost always more informative than what they said on purpose. Foss didn't fill it. He waited. He knew the technique. He'd been on the receiving end enough times to recognize the shape of it, and he sat in the silence like a man sitting in a room, and I respected the discipline while filing it as evidence that he had more experience with interrogation than his two-prior record officially accounted for.

I took him through the night. Where he'd been. What he'd been doing. The ninety-minute gap.

"I was home. Watching the game."

"Which game?"

He named it. The right game for the right night, which he could have checked, which most people do check when they know they're going to be asked. "Warriors-Clippers. Home game."

"Your phone records show you called a number in Las Vegas at six-forty-five. Thirteen-minute call."

Something shifted behind his eyes. Not surprise; he knew we could pull records. But the specificity landed. The thirteen minutes. It told him we weren't guessing, we were reading.

"Yeah. Friend of mine."

"After that call, your landline goes quiet. Then nothing. Ninety minutes of dead air on a line that normally lit up all evening, followed by a call to the Daly City number at eight-twenty-eight that lasted four minutes."

Webb had the folder open now, the LUDs spread on the table where Foss could see them, rows of numbers and timestamps in Pac Bell's standard printout format. Webb didn't push the pages toward him. He just let them be visible, the way you let a weapon be visible: not pointed at anyone, but present.

"I was watching the game. Didn't need the phone."

"You called your bookie at six-forty-five. Thirteen-minute call. Season's been back, what, three weeks? You've called him before every Warriors game since the lockout ended."

Another fractional pause. "I fell asleep on the couch."

"And the Daly City call at eight-twenty-eight?"

"Woke up. Called a friend."

I watched his hands. Foss kept them flat on the table, which is another learned behavior: people who've been told that fidgeting looks suspicious learn to keep still, and the stillness is its own kind of fidget, a controlled output that requires constant management. His hands were flat and his fingers were straight and the tendons along the backs of his hands were slightly prominent, which meant he was pressing down. Holding the stillness. Working at it.

I shifted.

"Carl, I want to talk about something else for a minute. I want to talk about the hole in your hallway wall."

His hands didn't move. His eyes did. A lateral flick, fast, the kind of involuntary eye movement that happens when someone accesses a different category of memory than the one they've been drawing from. He'd been in Herrera-case mode: prepared, rehearsed, running on the script he'd built. The wall question came from outside the script, and for a quarter-second I could see the machinery behind his face shifting to accommodate it.

"I'm renovating."

"Renovating how?"

"Fixing things up. Spackle, paint. The apartment needs work."

"The spackle is recent. Last few days."

"I had time."

"The hole is at shoulder height. Your shoulder height."

Silence. I let it work this time. Both of us knew the answer. The silence sat in the air between us like something physical, and I let it stay there.

Foss's jaw tightened. The tendons in his hands shifted. He did not fill the silence. He did not explain. And in the not-explaining, in the specific quality of the not-explaining, which was the quality of a man who knows exactly what made the hole and has decided that silence is safer than any available lie, I could read the shape of what I was looking at.

I was looking at a man who punched his wall. Recently. Hard enough to go through drywall. In the hallway between his living room and his bedroom, which is the hallway a person walks down when they're moving from one space to another with momentum they can't contain, and the wall is the thing that stops the momentum before it reaches wherever they were going. Or whoever.

Foss was not going to tell me what he'd been doing when he punched his wall. He was not going to tell me who was in the apartment. He was not going to tell me anything about his personal life that he had not already decided, in advance, to offer. He was locked in, and the lock was good, and breaking it was going to require leverage I did not have in this room on this day.

I went back to Herrera. I worked the timeline for another forty minutes. I approached the ninety-minute gap from three different angles, and each time Foss gave me the same answer in slightly different words, which is the hallmark of a prepared alibi: the substance stays fixed and the language rotates, because the person has memorized the content but not the specific phrasing, so they reconstruct it fresh each time from the same stored set of facts. A true memory drifts. New details surface. The emphasis shifts as the person re-experiences rather than recites. Foss's answers didn't drift. They held.

But they held in a way I hadn't expected. They held too well. A man covering a murder doesn't usually prepare a story that's this clean and this boring. "Watching the game, fell asleep on the couch" is the alibi of someone who was actually sitting on his couch doing nothing interesting, or the alibi of someone sophisticated enough to choose the most mundane possible story and commit to it. Foss's priors said he was the former. His behavior in the room said he might be the latter. I couldn't resolve the discrepancy with what I had.

Webb tried a different approach. Technical, methodical, walking Foss through the building layout, the shared wall, the sound transmission, could he hear what happened in Herrera's apartment, did he hear anything that night. Foss answered every question with the same calibrated brevity and I watched his body the whole time, and what I was watching for was the thing I didn't see.

I didn't see guilt. Not for Herrera.

Foss was performing. Foss was managing. Foss was running calculations and controlling his hands and maintaining the disciplined silence of a man who had learned, through repeated contact with the legal system, how to survive a room like this one. But he was protecting himself from being a violent man in an interrogation room, which is a real problem for him and I get why he'd build a whole performance around it. What he wasn't doing was protecting himself from being the man who killed David Herrera. Those are different architectures. I've seen both. This was the first one.

This is the part of my job that does not go in reports. The part where your pattern recognition, built from thousands of hours across hundreds of interviews, produces an assessment that you cannot cite, cannot quantify, and cannot ignore. Foss's body was telling me he was guilty of things. His body was not telling me he was guilty of this thing. And I have been wrong before, and I will be wrong again, but the base rate on this particular signal is high enough that I had to take it seriously.

I let him go at two-fifteen. Webb and I sat in the room after he left and looked at each other across the table.

"He's dirty," Webb said.

"Not for this."

Webb thought about it. He has the specific patience of a man who builds timelines, which is the patience of someone who understands that the sequence matters more than the speed. He looked at his folder. He looked at the one-way glass where nobody was watching. He looked at me.

"The wall," he said.

"Yeah."

"That's not Herrera."

"No."

"Someone's getting hit in that apartment."

"Yeah."

We sat with that for a minute. Then Webb said, "He's not home right now."

I looked at him. Webb looked back. Webb doesn't say things like that unless he's already worked through the chain of reasoning and arrived at the place he wants me to arrive at, and he wants me to arrive there on my own because that's how partnership works: you don't hand someone a conclusion, you open the door and let them walk through it.

Foss was here at 850 Bryant. If there was someone in that apartment, a partner, a girlfriend, whoever lived on the other side of that hole in the wall, they were there right now without him. And a person who lives with a man who punches walls might behave differently when the man who punches walls is not home. Might answer the door. Might answer questions. Might, if the right face showed up with the right approach, accept help she couldn't accept while he was standing behind her.

"The noise complaints give us a reason to knock," I said. "Following up on the Herrera investigation. Canvassing residents we haven't interviewed yet."

"Like his apartment."

"Like anyone in his apartment who we haven't talked to."

Webb was already reaching for the phone. He called Richmond Station and requested a unit for a welfare check at Foss's address, tied to the Herrera canvass: detectives had observed signs of possible domestic disturbance during a walk-through related to an active homicide investigation and were requesting uniformed officers make contact with any additional occupants. It was clean. It was documented. And it would put a badge at that door within the hour, while Foss was still finding his way home from Bryant Street.

The system had let Foss walk twice before. It had pleaded him down and filed him away and given him back to whoever he went home to, and the weight of that history sat in my chest the same way it always does, which is like something I swallowed that I can't digest and can't bring up. But this time the system had a fresh reason to knock and a window where the door might actually open, and Webb had seen it, and I had seen it, and we were using the mechanism the way the mechanism is supposed to be used when it works, which is not often enough but is more than never.

"The Daly City number," I said. "We should run that."

"Already flagged it." Webb closed the folder. "I'll have it by Monday."

I went back to my desk. I pulled up Herrera's employment history and started working backward from Taelen Systems. Herrera had been there eleven months. Before that, a string of positions in his twenties: marketing assistant, office coordinator, operations support at a logistics company called Pacific Ridge Properties. Two years at Pacific Ridge. Nothing remarkable in the file. The kind of résumé that accumulates when you're a decent person figuring out what you want to do and taking whatever's available while you figure.

I looked at Pacific Ridge and it looked like nothing. Dissolved eighteen months ago. I put in a records request and went home.

Friday night the dojo was running a seminar, which I would normally attend and which I skipped. My hip had opinions. That was enough of a reason.

I stopped at the place on Irving that does the dumplings and got an order of pork and chive and an order of the spicy wontons in chili oil and ate them standing at the counter while the woman who runs the register watched a drama on a portable television behind the counter, one of those little Sony sets with a screen the size of a playing card, and ignored me with the practiced indifference of someone who has served me twice a week for three years and has correctly determined that I don't want conversation with my dumplings. The wontons were perfect. The chili oil had that specific numbing quality that starts at the back of your tongue and works forward, and I stood there and ate and let the heat do what heat does, which is fill up the part of your brain that would otherwise be processing the afternoon. For about six minutes my whole world was pork and chili oil and the tinny audio of a show in a language I don't speak, and that was enough.

I walked home through the fog. The Sunset in February runs about two blocks of visibility on a good night, and this wasn't a good night. The fog was heavy enough that the streetlights didn't cast so much as leak, and I could hear the ocean from three blocks inland, which only happens when the air is so dense and wet that sound travels through it the way it travels through a wall. You feel it in your lungs before you feel it on your skin. I have walked these blocks a thousand times. My body knows the sidewalk cracks, the driveways where the concrete rises, the spot on Forty-First where the neighbor's hedge has grown into the walkway and you either duck or you get a branch in the ear. I ducked. My body did it without me.

The building was quiet. The seminar had ended. I could smell the mats: that specific combination of vinyl and sweat and the cleaning solution Sato uses, which is eucalyptus-based and which I know is eucalyptus-based because I asked him once at a point in my life when I was finding excuses to talk to him about anything because I was lonely and he was kind and asking about cleaning products was easier than saying either of those things out loud. He told me about the eucalyptus and then he told me about the proper care of training mats and then he told me I was overrotating on my hip throws and should come to the Saturday session, and the kindness was so clean and the redirect so perfect that I think about it sometimes when I'm conducting interviews, because that's what he did. He heard what I was actually saying and answered it inside a conversation about floor mats, and I didn't have to admit anything, and he didn't make me. I've used that move on witnesses. It works.

I went upstairs. The apartment was dark except for the streetlight coming through the bedroom window and the green LED on the coffee maker. I did not turn on the overhead. I put my bag on the kitchen counter next to the Herrera file. I took off my jacket, my holster, my boots, in the specific order I take them off every night, which is just the sequence that works when you're tired and the motions have been trained into your hands through repetition.

The heavy bag was right there. Five feet from my bed. I looked at it the way you look at someone you know is right and don't want to hear from. My hip said no. My hands said yes. I put on my wraps and hit the bag for twelve minutes, and the twelve minutes were not about the bag, they were about the sound of my fists hitting something solid and the vibration traveling up through my wrists and my forearms and into my shoulders, and each impact was a reset, a small controlled detonation that blew out whatever had accumulated during the day: Foss's flat hands, the hole in the wall, Elena's weight against the back of the armchair, the might-be-nothing that was now, at least, a uniform knocking on a door.

The last three minutes I worked combinations. Jab-cross-hook, jab-cross-hook-cross, the patterns my body knows so well that my mind can leave them and go somewhere else while my fists keep moving, and where my mind went was Aleena, which was not where I'd told it to go, and my hands kept moving while the rest of me failed to redirect, and that was the twelve minutes.

I showered. The bathroom is the only room in the apartment with a door that fully closes, which I consider a design achievement given the general architectural philosophy of the place, and I stood under water hot enough to turn my shoulders red and let the steam fill the space, and for a while the world was small and warm and mine and nothing in it required me to act or decide or evaluate.

I got into bed. The sheets were cold for about thirty seconds and then they were the temperature of my body, which was the temperature of a woman who had hit a bag for twelve minutes and showered and was now lying in the dark listening to the building settle and not thinking about anything in particular.

For about forty seconds that was even true.

Then my hand was on my stomach and the weight of it was wrong, or not wrong but noticed, the way you notice something when your body has decided to compare it to something else without asking your permission. Her handshake. The warmth of it. My fingers holding a beat past the release. I let that sit for about six seconds and then I rolled over and faced the wall.

I am a professional. I have some dignity. I am not going to lie in bed in the dark cataloguing the handshake of a woman I met for ninety seconds during a family follow-up.

The building settled. The city was quiet enough that I could hear the ocean, which only happens when my ears have run out of closer things to process.

I went to sleep.

I woke up at six-twelve with the light coming gray through the window and the case rearranging itself behind my eyes the way cases do when my brain has been working them overnight.

Foss was clear. The stranger in the hallway was next, and next was going to be hard, because the sketch was useless and the canvass had produced nothing and the roommate's memory was already fading into the generic features of a face he'd held a door for and never expected to need to remember. We could run the composite through the binders, and we would, but I'd sat through enough six-pack sessions to know that a generic white male of medium build does not survive the lineup process. The roommate would look at rows of faces and each one would be almost right and none of them would be right, and we'd be back where we started: a stranger who walked out of a building and into the fog and left nothing behind but a held door and a dead man.

And Aleena was connected to the victim's employer in ways I hadn't mapped yet, and she'd been providing support to the family at a level that didn't match her title, and I needed to sit down with her formally and ask questions that had nothing to do with Elena Herrera's grief.

It was Saturday. None of that was going anywhere until Monday.

I got up. I made coffee. I stood at the counter and drank it in my underwear and an old SFPD academy T-shirt that has been washed enough times that the lettering is a suggestion rather than a statement, and I looked at the Herrera file, and the Herrera file looked back, and neither of us had anything new to say to each other.

Below me the dojo was silent at six-thirty on a Saturday morning and the building was mine, and the weekend was ahead of me, and I was going to spend it not working because there was nothing I could work, and I was going to be fine with that.

I drank my coffee. Visibility was still two blocks. Nothing was going anywhere.