Morning came earlier at Stahl’s condominium than it had in the days before the explosion in Diane’s apartment. She was awake and out of the bedroom by five. She put on the bathrobe he had ordered for her, went to the kitchen, and made coffee. She liked the fact that there were skylights above and windows opening onto a narrow garden with a fountain, which made the stone wall outside look as though it were made of water. She was too much of a cop to be uninterested in how the security was maintained. She had to go all the way to the window to look up and see that there were horizontal bars above the garden to prevent intruders, and she supposed there were bars or barriers on the roof to prevent anyone from reaching the skylights.

She sat down in the kitchen with her coffee and played with her new phone. It was late enough in Florida to call her mother, so she did. Her mother’s number rang a few times, and she decided she must be too early. Her mother’s phone was still turned off. That was the way she left it for the night because it made noises while she was trying to sleep. She sent her mother a text to tell her she’d try again later.

She thought about Dick now, and as always thinking about him seemed to release strong feelings of affection. The response still surprised her, but it also pleased her. She hoped it meant that the direction her life had taken was right. She wasn’t quite ready to formulate a more confident statement for herself. That would be too close to saying the words aloud. Once people said things aloud, what they said tended to become sure and settled.

Not much was sure or settled. The reason she had become a bomb technician was not that she was cocky or had no fear of death. It was the opposite.

She wanted to live to be old and had always worked hard to deserve to be alive. A person who risked his life every day for others and who worked to gain the knowledge and skills to do it well must have a claim to living. She had not been overconfident, but she had been optimistic—until the evening after the car bomb in the Valley. That night, she had lost that feeling.

The new captain, the middle-aged man who had come from nowhere that day to stand in for the fourteen men who’d been murdered—an absurdity in itself—had behaved as though the substitution were natural. He had stepped in and taken charge. He had begun to study the booby-trapped car at once. He looked at the car as a single explosive device and saw the device in three dimensions and all its complexity, approaching it from above, below, all sides. He had picked up alterations and signs she hadn’t seen at first, and provided ways around the traps that she didn’t know.

She had realized within fifteen or twenty minutes that her only chance of making it to the end of watch that night was to do what he asked and to make herself be what he wanted. She had to see with her perfect vision into a dim space and extract the component he wanted out, reach into the hell-made contraption farther because her hands and arms were smaller and thinner, remove the component more gently because her tactile sense was keener and her fingers were less callused. She had concentrated on seeing exactly what he saw and thinking what he thought. Sometimes she watched his eyes to see what they were focusing on.

By the time they had worked their way down to the heart of the contraption—the shaped charge so big it was intended to blow a crater into the pavement and set off the gasoline tanks—she was practically an extension of his mind. It made perfect sense to her that he would strap the charge to his chest and take the long, lonely walk into the concrete riverbed. She was fully aware that carrying the charge was crazy, even suicidal. But taking it below street level was the most effective way to render the bomb harmless, and he was the only one who had enough experience to have a chance of doing it successfully.

At the end of that day, after she was safe and clean and sitting in her apartment alone, she had felt lost. She was relieved and afraid at the same time. She knew that what had saved them—saved her—was that he’d been able to practically read the bomb maker’s mind. She had seen how he did it, followed his steps, but was positive she could not have initiated them. If she came upon a similar device tomorrow, she would probably die.

She’d had an urge to talk to somebody, but nobody who hadn’t been there could understand or have anything useful to tell her. What did she need to know? What was she supposed to expect, to look for, to fear, to do? She realized that what she wanted to know was the future. She knew there was no place to find it, but she also knew the idea wasn’t idle, because there was one person who knew so many other things that he was closer to the future than anyone else. And he had probably learned things dismantling that bomb during the day. She knew he had. Of course she was drawn to him.

She had gotten ready—perfume, pretty underwear, the skirt and blouse she had been saving. She took a great deal of care with her hair and makeup. She thought clearly about why she was choosing to put forward this version of herself, when she could instead put on a clean, pressed uniform. It was because she needed to look as appealing as she could, and she needed to make it clear that her visit wasn’t an official errand that should have been handled at work.

She had admitted to herself just as she arrived outside his building that part of the attraction all along had been sexual. She had brought the bottle of Scotch thinking it was an afterthought, but it had really been premeditated. She had thought of it twice in the hour before she left home in the hope that it would set a nonbusiness tone. But the tone was one in which sex would be more likely. In the end she had insisted on the sex—thrown herself at him because sex was the opposite of death, and death might win in a day or so, and because she needed to be as close to him tonight as she could be.

During the next few feverish days while they fought the bomb maker every day and spent every night in each other’s arms, she felt as though she were living a whole life in an accelerated form. It had been like riding a runaway horse. She was not in charge at all, rather clinging to the horse and trying not to fall.

Boom. That was the instant everything had changed completely. She woke up six weeks later, on the far side of a chasm. All the unself-conscious abandon and lust and hero worship were knocked into a pile back there with those six days.

Her limber, athletic animal self was gone. She wondered if she would ever walk right, whether her hearing would ever fully return. Whenever she moved to test for pain, she always found it. The notion of sexual attraction was as far from her mind as it could be. She thought about the discomfort of breathing with so many broken ribs, of regaining the full extension of her limbs.

She had told Dick she remembered everything that happened between them. She knew that to him it meant she remembered and didn’t regret any of it. What she felt was probably worse. She mourned those times, yet hadn’t found a path back to the way she felt the first week with him.

One of the things that had made the relationship happen was her confidence that it would be temporary, a few days of madness that would end with the death of one or both of them. Two days ago Dick had felt hurt when she called it a fling, so she promised she wouldn’t.

But keeping her promise was hard. She didn’t know what would happen now. She didn’t know what could. As the days went on, she had been wanting time to stop so she could catch up with her lost forty-two days. But every day Dick did more to help her and protect her and support her while she recovered. She felt as though she were running up a debt to him.

She knew she should be leaving him right now and taking a plane to Florida to be with her mother. But the things that made her want to leave were the same things that made her want to stay. He was a better person than she had thought. He cared about her. At the moment she didn’t have anything to offer him in return. She knew much more about him now, and felt closer to him, but it was all so different and so inferior to the way they had started.

Diane checked her watch. It was already after 6:00 a.m. She looked around her at the kitchen. She got up and wiped the counters, ran the dishwasher Dick had forgotten last night. She got the pans out and set the table for breakfast. Every move she made was slow and careful and self-protective. She held herself erect and bent at the knees to pick things up because her spine seemed tender today. When she ran out of things to do, she went to the guest bathroom and showered.

She looked around for clothes, then put on a pair of jeans and a new T-shirt Dick had bought for her from May Hedges. She glanced at herself in the mirror, then looked harder. The least she could do was try to look good when he woke up. She opened the makeup kit May Hedges had brought.

The cell phone Stahl had left on his nightstand was ringing. He picked it up and looked at the screen, but the extension wasn’t familiar. “Stahl.”

“This is Bart Almanzo, Dick. Have you seen the news?”

“No,” he said. “What news?”

“Gloria Hedlund’s car blew up in the Channel Ten parking lot at around one last night.”

“Just a scare?”

“She was in it. She’s dead.”

“And nobody called me when it happened?”

“Your resignation was already in. I don’t think they could.”

“Who’s been to look at the wreck?”

“Your guy Elliot. He’s still at the scene now.”

“Has he said if this was our bomber or somebody else?”

“He told my detectives that it was the same guy.”

“Damn. Elliot is good. He’s seen most of the devices, and he’ll know the guy’s work. But this is a change. The victim should be a member of the Bomb Squad, or at least some kind of cop.”

“I’m on my way over there now. I’ll pick you up on the way.”

“I’m not sure I’d be welcome today.”

“Then I’ll just say you’re with me. It should be sufficient, since you’ll be with me.”

“Give me ten minutes.”

Stahl showered and dressed quickly. When he came out into the living room, he saw Diane was in the kitchen.

“Wow. You’re up early.”

“I thought I’d make us some breakfast,” she said.

“I just got a call from Bart Almanzo.”

“Almanzo? Who’s dead?”

“Gloria Hedlund, the TV reporter.”

“The woman who outed us is dead?”

“Yes. Somebody wired her car. Elliot thinks it’s our guy.”

“Do you think I ought to go?”

The surprised way he looked at her betrayed the fact that it had never entered his mind. “If you want to see it, I’m sure he’ll be glad to take us both. I’m not sure there’s much point in either of us going if Elliot’s at the scene, but he asked.”

“Then I’ll skip it and see Elliot another time.”

“Have you got your phone?”

She turned around so he could see the outline of the phone in the back pocket of her jeans. He leaned close and kissed her. She didn’t turn her body toward him to allow an embrace, but he didn’t notice. He went into the bedroom and came back with a metal box the size of a book with a combination lock built into it. He punched the numbers and it popped open to reveal a Glock 17, two spare magazines, and a box of fifty nine-millimeter rounds.

“I want to give you this before I go. I know your gun and badge didn’t travel to the hospital with you, and you probably won’t get them back until you’re on active duty again. This is what you’re used to, right?”

“You know it is,” she said. “Get out of here now.”

Almanzo had already pulled up outside. Diane watched the security monitor as Stahl trotted out to the street and got into the plain car.

She sat down at the kitchen table and picked up the Glock. She looked it over, released the magazine, and checked the chamber, then loaded the magazine with the first seventeen rounds and set it down again. It had been typical of Dick Stahl to give her this. He realized that she was going to be unarmed and alone, and that the bomb maker knew she wasn’t dead yet.

She knew that if she had told him the things she was feeling right now—the disappointment at being left here, no longer considered a police officer because she had been hurt—he would have been shocked. He would patiently explain why hers was the wrong reaction, explain that she was irrational to imagine an officer who was on medical leave would be included, and explain that a man who cared about her the way he did would never do anything to hurt her feelings intentionally. Several men had told her that in the past, and they’d all found ways to hurt her feelings.

Almanzo drove the police car along the quiet street toward Century Park East. “How’s Sergeant Hines doing?”

“Glad to be out of the hospital,” said Stahl. “She isn’t fully recovered, but she’s eager to get back to work.”

“Do you think she wants to go back to the Bomb Squad?”

“I wish she wouldn’t,” Stahl said. “But she probably will if she gets back her manual dexterity and nerve control. Getting good at EOD takes a long time and a lot of field experience. It’s hard to let go once you’ve done the work. She made it clear she’d be willing to take a look at the Hedlund scene if we wanted.”

“You and Elliot both said it was weird that Hedlund was the victim. Why do you think the bomber picked her?”

“I don’t know. If I were to guess, I’d say our boy has been busy. He hasn’t done anything since the hospital. That must have taken a big charge and a lot of work, risk, and planning. He might be feeling he’s under pressure to keep the tempo up and keep the city off balance while he makes more bombs and prepares for something bigger. He picked a well-known person who has been reporting on him, and on us. So it counts in his mind as a win. That makes it a defeat for us.”

“You think that way even after she made a big point of getting you fired?”

“I wish she hadn’t done that. But if I hadn’t done what I did, she wouldn’t have.”

Almanzo drove in silence for a minute. “Did you and Sergeant Hines stay home all last night?”

“Yeah.” Stahl studied him. “We did.”

“Please don’t look at me like that, Dick,” Almanzo said. “It was a murder. Any question that can be asked has to be.”

“You’re right, of course. We got Diane sprung from the hospital around seven in the evening, and then my assistant, Andy, drove us home in Diane’s car. A cop named Morrissey picked Andy up from my place and drove him home. I had a lady from Bloomingdale’s waiting for us to show Diane some clothes I bought her because there was nothing left of the clothes in her apartment. I still have her business card. Her name is May Hedges. By the time that was over we were both tired. We had a drink and went to sleep. If there’s any doubt we never left, the twenty-four-hour security guys at my building keep a log and retain the recordings from the surveillance system.”

“Okay,” said Almanzo. “Sounds tight to me.”

“I can guess where you were last night,” said Stahl.

“That’s right. I was home asleep until one fifteen, when my guys got called in to look at a murder scene and I learned who the victim was.”

He pulled up to the Channel Ten studio on Melrose. As he turned up the short drive beside the guard gate, they could both see that the parking lot was full of reporters, photographers, and freelancers held back by a pair of police officers inside the yellow tape. Some of them began to move as soon as Almanzo’s car appeared, instinctively aware that a car like that probably held ranking cops. They hurried to get close while the car was held back by the lift gate. When the bar lifted they were already holding cameras within five feet of the car on both sides, getting shots of the two men inside.

When Almanzo stopped outside the tape, they began to yell. “Captain Stahl! Didn’t you resign?”

“Can you tell us what happened?”

“Are you a suspect?”

Almanzo nodded to Stahl and stepped forward to head off the small crowd. “My name is Captain Bart Almanzo, commander of Homicide Special. Captain Stahl has come at my request to assist me in this examination of the scene. This is an ongoing homicide investigation, so neither of us will be answering any questions at this time.”

The group could not have failed to notice that Stahl was walking off while Almanzo was keeping them occupied. Almanzo stopped when Stahl was far inside the yellow tape. Then he ducked under the tape and trotted to catch up.

Elliot was beside the burned wreck. He had the hood up and he was taking photographs of the engine compartment. He looked up. “Captain!” He stepped closer to him to take off a glove and shake his hand.

Stahl said, “I hear you think this is our guy again.”

“I’m pretty sure it is. It doesn’t make sense to me as a strategy, but there it is. We found fragments of a homemade mercury rocker switch on a stand like the one he used at the gas station. So I started to look for his other trademarks, and I found that two backup charges had gone off too. There was one using the circuit for the brake lights, and another backup with a set of lithium batteries using the solenoids that locked the doors as the switch. It was a toss-up which circuit would go first.”

Stahl turned to Almanzo. “That’s him, all right.” He said to Elliot, “Where did the car go up?”

He pointed at a spot behind a reserved parking space. “Over there.”

“It figures. Backups to the backups, and far more explosive than he needed.”

When Almanzo went to talk with his two detectives, Stahl said to Elliot, “I’m sorry I had to resign, but I won’t abandon you guys. I’m trying to come back to work as a consultant, which is probably what I should have been in the first place. If you need me before then for any reason, call me. The same for the other teams.”

“Thanks, Captain.”

“Not captain anymore, and that’s one part that won’t be coming back. It’s just Stahl now.”