Will opened his eyes to see Lucy crouching over him, her face all concern.
     “Are you going to be okay, Will?”
     He stood slowly, scanned the room to get his bearing. “I guess I blacked out or something. I’m fine, I think. Where are the girls?” He expressed a sigh of relief. Bug, Tweak and Marta were coming down the aisle toward him with a uniformed police officer behind them. Tweak looked pale, but triumphant. “She whacked him,” Bug said, pointing her thumb at Tweak. A smile played around Tweak’s lips.
     “Where’s the injury?” Three emergency medical technicians rounded the corner behind Will, all business with their bags of equipment and a gurney rolling along beside them.
     From the opposite end of the aisle, Morris motioned them toward him, “Down here.”
     For a brief moment before the med techs obscured his view, Will could see the legs of someone sticking out into the aisle. “God, did I shoot him? I didn’t think I shot him.” He started forward, but Lucy put her hand on his arm.
     “No, you didn’t shoot anyone. Tweak thumped this one on the head.”
     “Where’s the other guy? The one called Giorgi?” Will asked.
     “Looks like he took off,” Morris said as he approached. “We’re looking for him. Inside the building and out.”
     “And Teddy Milcheford? Where’s he?”
     Morris sighed. He looked wearily from one of them to the other. “Lucy, damn it. You and your friends are a real pain in the butt.”
     Will stared at him in disbelief. Once again, he felt Lucy’s cautionary hand on his arm and he decided not to address Morris’s comment, instead he said, “The man, Giorgi. I think he could have killed Emmy.”
     Morris stroked his chin thoughtfully. “I’m going to need to question all of you about the events here tonight. You brought me here out of the peace and quiet of my home and you owe me that much. Not that I go by what’s owed. Procedure. Can’t get around procedure.” He turned to the uniform, who had stood to one side almost invisibly since herding the girls up the aisle. “Nielsen, get DeChris up here and find out if there are a couple of rooms in this place where we can question the witnesses.”
     Tweak stared down the aisle toward the locker where the medical techs were examining Hammer. Will followed her gaze and watched the techs place Hammer on the gurney, adjust it to full height and roll toward them. As they passed Will, his eyes met briefly with Hammer’s. The skinny man looked even smaller on the stretcher. His face was expressionless, only his eyes moved.
     “He’s not hurt too bad, is he?” Tweak asked.
     “I’m not qualified to say so, but I think he’ll be all right,” Morris said.
     Sergeant DeChris arrived with Officer Nielsen. “There’s an office on the fifth floor and a storeroom on the fourth with some chairs in it.”
     “Let’s go.”
     As they rode a cavernous freight elevator up to the fourth floor, the retreating siren of the ambulance carrying Hammer to the hospital served as elevator music. Morris stepped out. “Nielsen, you come with me and take notes. Lucy, let’s start with you. The rest of you go on up to the next floor with DeChris.”

     The elevator opened directly into Teddy Milcheford’s warehouse aerie. Several thick ribbed glass fixtures hung from the exposed beams twenty feet above them. All the lights were on, washing the room in bright incandescent circles. Dirt piled in the corners of the room, like miniature snow drifts. Mouse turds stippled the dust. Old cobwebs slung from beam to beam and dangled in strands that wavered in the breeze of an open window. And the windows were streaked with years of dirt and pigeon droppings. Beneath their feet the gray paint covering the floor was chipped and scraped, revealing soft fir tongue-and-groove.
     Teddy’s office was the entire fifth floor of the warehouse, but his furniture rested on two 10×20 Persian rugs that floated like islands in the middle of the room. The desk was an oversized mahogany executive piece. Behind it was a maroon leather chair with brass buttons holding upholstery to frame. A matching long low leather couch was arranged perpendicular to the desk. Beyond these, a door in the far corner of the room was open enough to reveal a closet-sized bathroom, toilet only. A sink hung from the wall outside the bathroom.
     There was nothing on the desk. No pictures anywhere; the room completely unadorned. In this room the warm June evening took on a distinct chill.
     DeChris claimed the chair behind the desk, the girls and Will sat on the couch.
     Will could feel DeChris studying him. The sergeant had been missing from the doorways of Will’s life since Colin was formally charged with Emmy’s murder. But when DeChris spoke it was with the same taunting inflection. “How’s it feel to have me watching over you again?”
     Will didn’t answer. How can Morris stand to work with this guy day after day?
     “The detective is going to want to question you all separately. Meantime you all should limit your conversation to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the tooth fairy. I’ll be here to guide you, if you should go astray into unauthorized territory.”
     The four of them remained silent, letting DeChris’s words hang on the air. DeChris shrugged and began opening drawers in Teddy’s desk with his knuckles. Apparently, to avoid fingerprints, Will thought as he watched.
     Something in the middle drawer of the desk caused DeChris to stop, “Oh Jesus,” he said and closed the drawer. He fidgeted in the chair and drummed his fingers on the top of the desk.
     The elevator cranked into motion going down, stopped at the floor below, and came back up with Nielsen on board. He said, “Detective wants to see the one who hit that guy with the crowbar.”
     Tweak got up slowly, looked at Bug. Bug gave her a push. “Go on. It’ll be all right. We didn’t do anything wrong.”
     Then it was just Marta, Bug and Will with DeChris, who no longer appeared interested in them. Will closed his eyes, thinking he could sleep, but the events of the night kept playing out in his head.
     Bug was summoned downstairs, then Marta. Will waited. He had long ago lost track of the time. It had to be after midnight. He began to drift.
     At first, Will didn’t think he heard DeChris speak. He thought he had fallen asleep.
     “There’s a picture in this drawer.” It was really just a whisper. “I’ve seen her with her mom and dad lots of times. Since she was a little girl.”
     Will didn’t move, didn’t answer, didn’t open his eyes.
     “What am I going to do with this? What has that bastard done?”
     The elevator came for Will.

     The makeshift interrogation room was outfitted with a card table, some wood folding chairs and several pallets of imported goods destined for Teddy’s store downtown. Two of the chairs were at the table and a third was nearby. Morris invited Will to sit across from him at the table, while Nielsen took the remaining chair, flipped open a notepad and clicked his pen.
     Morris was grim. “Damn it, Adelhardt,” he complained. “You’ve put me in a lousy position.”
     “Forgive me,” Will said, “but I haven’t put you in any position. If you can’t arrest Councilman Milcheford because he’s such an outstanding member of the community, don’t blame me for your dilemma. I’m not the one who molested his daughter.”
     “Take it easy, Professor,” Morris said. “You can appreciate my position. The man is my boss. I wouldn’t even be here if Lucy hadn’t called me instead of 911. This isn’t my kind of crime. I’ll probably catch hell for it in the morning.”
     “The man committed incest. Madeline Milcheford ran away from her own father. You don’t think the people of this city actually want him on their city council, do you? You don’t think you have a choice about arresting him do you? And what about Emmy? Giorgi is Teddy’s goon and Giorgi killed her.” Will felt his chest tighten; the dust in the warehouse, the anguish in his heart combined to cut off his breath.
     Morris crossed his arms and leaned back. “What you are doing is speculating. I need evidence. I don’t know that Colin Doherty didn’t kill Emmy D’Angelo. Nothing that happened tonight points conclusively away from him. But what I need right now is for you to tell me what happened here tonight. From the beginning.”
     Will described the evening from arriving at Lucy’s to the moment the police came. Morris stopped him occasionally to ask him a clarifying question, but mostly he let Will ramble on.
     “Let’s get back to Madeline Milcheford. It would help if we knew where to find her. We need to talk to her. Marta hinted that she might be willing to tell us, but she needs some assurances. What is Marta’s role in all of this?”
     “I can’t say,” Will retorted. He wasn’t going to be the one to tell Detective Morris that Marta was involved with Maddy’s situation.
     “Can’t or won’t?”
     “Listen, I didn’t know anything about any of this until tonight. All I can tell you is that no one is likely to tell you anything about Maddy unless you can assure them that she is safe and I don’t think you can do that until Teddy Milcheford is locked up.”
     “Excuse me,” Sergeant DeChris entered the room and stood waiting for Morris to acknowledge him.
     “Yes, Sergeant?”
     “May I have a word with you, Detective?”
     “Why aren’t you with the witnesses?”
     “You’ve got the last one here. They’re all downstairs with the other officers. I wouldn’t interrupt you if it weren’t important. I found something, Detective.” DeChris looked directly at Will.
     The picture, Will thought. Whatever it was that DeChris saw in that drawer must be incriminating.
     DeChris and Morris left the room. After a moment, Will heard their voices, indistinguishable sounds. Then Morris opened the door. “We’re finished here. You can go home, Adlehardt.”
     They were all waiting for him. Perched on the loading docks. Waiting for Will, waiting for the signal that they were free to go. As Will joined them, a cab pulled up to the curb. Bug and Tweak stood and made a show of preparing to leave. “Guess we’ll go now,” Bug said.
     Marta nudged Lucy as the girls began to walk away.
     Her hint was not lost on her mother. “Why don’t all three of you come home with me?” Lucy asked. “I’ll make pancakes.”
     Will could see that the bribe was hardly necessary. Bug and Tweak were not eager to be on the street with Giorgi still on the loose, and Marta looked as though she would appreciate a little mothering herself.
     “How about you, Will? Want to come along? You can have the couch,” Lucy offered.
     Will shook his head. It wasn’t just that the adrenaline had drained him and he was too tired to be good company. It was that looking at the four of them, he felt like an addendum, an afterthought. He was lonely and tired and didn’t want to be anybody’s company. He remembered to wave only after the cab was already in the next block. It was too dark to tell if they saw him, or if they waved back.