“Why do you want people to call you by your first name?” Overton lay beside him in the motel room bed.

Mike looked up at the ceiling, hands nested behind his head. “Just a habit.”

“Okay, Mike.” She put out her hand. “Call me Lena.”

He laughed and shook it.

She propped up on her elbow, her face close. “That’s not what I heard.”

“Oh no? And what did you hear?”

“I heard it was an interview tactic. That you’re good in the box – you get called in for assists all the time, got quite the confession record.”

He didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. “I don’t know. I never really thought about it.”

“Uh-huh… Okay, so your dad worked in the Seven-Seven back in the eighties. Uniformed? That had to be a hell of a time to be working New York.”

“He worked anti-crime, plainclothes division. There was a big corruption scandal when I was a kid.”

“We read about it in college,” she said. “Cops working with drug dealers. What was the big organization going on?”

Mike sat up a little, fixing the pillows. “La Compania. Guy named Chelo ran the outfit like the military. His guys had all kinds of hardware – street-sweepers, you name it. He put out contracts on cops. I mean he would literally chase the cops, cook off a few shots in broad daylight. That’s how it was. And he had pros coming up from the Dominican Republic just to take people out.”

Mike thought for a minute about the Harriet Fogarty crime scene, the only trace evidence a couple of bloody shoe prints. Then he got back to the story and said, “My dad was killed. Could’ve been Chelo, but…”

Lena’s eyes got big and she spoke through a hand covering her mouth. “How old were you?”

“This was in ’84, so – nineteen. I wanted to go down there the next day, sign up, get to working the Seven-Seven, and not stop until I found his killer.”

“But you didn’t go…”

“Mom pleaded with me. She’d had a hard enough time letting me go down there when I was growing up. And these contract killers they just… you know. After the job, they’re gone. So. I was ready, though. I was ready to take on Chelo myself.” He laughed a little, but it didn’t feel funny.

After a moment Lena asked, “Where’s your mother now?”

“North Carolina. With my sister, Kim. Couldn’t take the winters anymore, either. A warm-weather type, like your son Avery. I mean, this summer, though – it might as well be Florida.”

“She never remarried?”

“I think she was afraid to. There were a couple guys – literally, two men she saw for a while after dad – but that was it. What about you?”

Her skin reddened a shade and she looked away. “No. No more marriage for me.”

“Where’s, ah…?”

“Danny? Oh, he’s around. Sometimes.”

“So the boys were with him last night, or…?”

“No. The neighbor came over and stayed.”

She seemed to want to drop the subject of her ex-husband so Mike switched gears. “What about your parents? How are they doing?”

“Still together, doing well. They live in Upper Jay. Dad’s a retired history teacher, mom worked at the bank for years, as a teller.”

“That’s good.”

They both settled back for a minute, looking up at the ceiling. “It doesn’t feel like we grew up in the same town,” she said.

“Well I mean, I was gone most summers and I’m what – ten years older than you?”

“Keep guessing.”

“Fifteen?”

She smiled, said, “So you got into this because of your dad.”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“I remember thinking, you know, picturing Officer Friendly, sort of walking around the community, smiling, and helping people. When I was growing up… I don’t know. My parents kept me pretty sheltered, I guess. I mean, I got into it a little bit when I was older, I partied a little bit, you know, out in the woods, kids drinking beer. Like Norman Ridge. You ever go out to Norman Ridge, drinking?”

“Sure.”

“But then, I think it was my first year, we had this huge drug bust. I didn’t go into the department straight out of college, I traveled a little, went to California – but that very first year, I’m as green as a blade of grass, and there’s this big, multi-agency sweep.”

“Cut your teeth?”

“Cut a million teeth on that one. My first year and part of the biggest roundup in county history. At least for the time. And it was fine… you know… but there were some things that just… Ugh. It was a wake-up call, know what I mean?”

“I do.”

They fell into silence for a full minute, both of them thinking about the past, Mike thinking about his long-departed wife. Then Lena said, “We should get going.”

The first hints of dawn were coming in pinkish light through the half-drawn blinds.

Lena grabbed a shower first, leaving him to sit on the edge of the bed, looking at the wreck of their clothes. This was crazy. His first time in a long time, and it was a Lake Haven detective and they were in the middle of a huge case.

But she was so damned cute. And smart. And funny. And she seemed to like him. What did it matter? Sex was no big deal.

But it felt like a big deal.

Mike pushed off the bed and looked at himself in the mirror attached to the bureau. At fifty-three, his stomach was still relatively flat. He’d started going gray in his mid-thirties but it had stayed concentrated to his chest hair, some streaks above his ears. At this point he’d outlived his father.

He hadn’t talked about his dad to anyone in a long time. It continued to stir something – he wasn’t quite sure what yet.

Maybe that his father had a reputation for being a good box man, too, and always used his first name, made it informal, drew out confessions. But Mike hadn’t gotten a confession out of Steven Pritchard.

He walked to the bathroom and rapped on the door with a knuckle.

“Yeah?”

“Permission to enter?”

“Granted.”

Steam filled the room, turning the shower door opaque. He could see Lena’s shape. She’d kept her hair up, just doing a rinse. He could stand one, too.

“Permission to enter further.”

She sighed. “Don’t get my hair wet.”

He slid the door away and stepped into the tub. Enough room in there for them to fit comfortably.

“What do you want to do next?” Lena asked, soaping up.

He dragged his eyes away from her sudsy pubic hair, wet breasts, and looked at her face. “It’s been twenty-four hours and we haven’t heard one word about Marlene Blackburn. You feel like gambling?”

“Me? Gambling? Oh, I’m down for a game of blackjack any old day of the— no. I do not feel like gambling. We’ve got the meeting with Joe Pritchard and Terry Fogarty today to go over the estate stuff.”

“I’m about to reach the terminal end of my patience.”

She blinked some water away. “You have a terminal end? You seem pretty patient to me.”

“I couldn’t wait a week to get you in bed.”

“I got you in bed, Mike. And we talked about this – the casino might as well be tribal territory.”

“Maybe I just feel like gambling, and I bump into her, casually ask her if Steve Pritchard has been shacking up with her.” He took the soap from her and scrubbed.

She pushed past him, stepped out, and wrapped herself into a towel. “No, we’ve got the meeting set for today. We need to get prepared.”

Mike ducked his face under the showerhead, then shut off the faucet and stepped out. “Maybe we split up, just for a couple hours?”

“How are we gonna do that? We took one car.”

“I could grab one of those motorcycles left behind…”

“Haha.”

“What are you doing? Are you brushing your teeth with your finger?”

She spat into the sink. Turned on the tap, splashed some water into the basin to wash away the spittle. “Look, this is your thing I’m talking about – your old scores theory. I’m with you on it, so we also need to talk to Cheever, right now, so we can take a warrant and get into Lavoie’s stuff, look at the Child Protective Services cases she shared with Harriet when they both worked in Lake Haven. I’ve got a change of clothes in my car. You?”

“You drive around with a change of clothes in your car?”

She winked at him. “You never know.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Well, then we’ll stop by your place. I think Cheever will go for it, I really do. But then that means it’s going to be a lot of ground to cover, a lot of cases to look through; we need to do it together. So after the meeting with Joe Pritchard, we spend some time on these cases. If we still haven’t heard from Perkins by tomorrow, you can head to the casino. Pritchard is in county lock-up and not going anywhere.” She headed back into the motel room and started fishing her clothes off the floor.

“He might.”

Lena stood upright, gave him a look.

“Pritchard lawyered up,” Mike said. “I just saw the email on my phone. Signed an attorney–client contract last night. The lawyer has requested a bail hearing, citing that the previous bail was exorbitant.”

“Well at least we know he doesn’t have any money.”

“Or he’s cheap.”

“So if he gets out,” she said, “we’ll tag him. A day or two, at least. He won’t go anywhere, anyway, I don’t think.”

“No?”

“No,” she said. “Maybe it was Harriet, maybe not – but he’s here for something. In the area.”

He thought about it a minute. He also thought about unspooling her from the towel, but they’d gotten sidetracked long enough. “Alright,” he said.

She came close to him and he thought she might kiss him, but she touched his arm with a demure smile then went back to gathering her clothes.

They dressed in silence – Mike figured both of them were wondering the same thing: if it had been the right idea to get in bed with a colleague, what they knew about each other, and the volumes they didn’t.

“How long has it been for you?” he asked, buckling his pants.

“What?”

“This.”

Her eyebrows went up as she buttoned her blouse. “You’re asking me how long it was since I had sex?”

“Yeah. Is that so crazy?” He held up his hands. “I’m not looking for exact figures or anything.” He nodded at the bed. “But we just pulled an all-nighter; I don’t think either of us got our breath back for more than a good twenty minutes at any point. I’m telling you, I’m not as young as I used to be. I’m sore in places where I didn’t know I had muscles.”

A smile broke over her face, but she rolled her eyes and kept dressing. “It’s been a while.”

“Yeah. Me too.” He frowned at her. “Why are you putting those clothes back on?”

“I’m not walking out to the car in a towel, Mike – what would the neighbors think?”

---

Joe Pritchard resembled his brother but was taller and clean-shaven, though just as fierce in the eyes. Mike had glimpsed him at the memorial, but from afar. He and Overton welcomed Joe, Terry, and Victor into Mike’s office.

Once everyone was comfortably seated, Mike jumped into it. “We’ve had the documents faxed over from the estate lawyer. We’d like to discuss the property in Gloversville. But first let’s talk about what’s happened. As you know, Steven Pritchard was picked up this past weekend for fighting with a man outside a bar in Lake Haven. Petrov didn’t press charges, but Steve has been charged with disorderly conduct and assault in the third degree. After the arraignment, he sought counsel and is now contesting bail. There’s a hearing scheduled for this coming Monday. Bail was set high, in part for remarks Steve made to me the night of his arrest. He’d said, of Harriet, that ‘she had it coming.’”

Mike gazed at their faces, watching the various reactions. Terry seemed to turn inward while Victor blushed with anger. Joe Pritchard grunted and said, “Sounds like Steve.”

“It sounds like him?”

“Steve has problems,” Joe said. “He called me, asked me to bail him out. I told him to get a good lawyer.”

“I’ll come right to the point, Joe: Do you think your brother would have done something like this to your sister?”

Joe’s answer was immediate, filled with conviction. “No. Absolutely not.”

Terry blew out a held breath and got up from the chair, walked toward the wall, then turned around. “How can you say that? Rita was afraid of Steve, Joe. She told me about his potential for violence…”

Mike waited to see how Joe reacted. The elder Pritchard stayed calm. “Steve is all bark and no bite, Terry, always been that way.” Then he looked Mike in the eye. “This guy, Petrov; he hit him?”

“You asking if Dmitri Petrov struck Steve?”

“No – did Steve hit him. Did he actually hit him? Or was he just yelling, running his mouth?”

“He didn’t physically strike Mr. Petrov, no. But he kicked the door open while detained in the back of a police car. An officer had to use force to restrain him.”

“Yeah, mace. Steve said.” Joe shook his head. “Well, you said this Petrov guy didn’t press charges… Doesn’t sound like there were any to press. Anyway, look – I know about my brother. He’s his own worst enemy. His mouth has always gotten him into trouble. But he never touched Rita, and never would. He said what you say he did, okay, he even admitted as much to me, but that’s because Steve is an asshole, and that’s when he’s sober.” Joe looked at Lena. “I’m sorry about the language.”

Lena’s brow drew together in a scowl. “Why are you apologizing to me?”

Joe opened his mouth, closed it. Opened it again. “Sorry to everybody.”

“Yeah,” Victor said sarcastically. “You’re sorry, Uncle Joe.”

“Victor,” snapped Terry. “Please.”

“Let’s get into the estate,” Mike said, eyeing Victor. Then he took a quick glance at his notes, refreshing the critical information. “The property is on Route 8, in Gloversville; 103 acres, a once-working dairy farm. In the Last Will and Testament of Arthur and Cecilia Pritchard, the house and property was bequeathed to you, Joe, and to Rita, each of you with one-half.” Mike looked up. “I’m not passing judgment on family business, but I’m wondering if this is what’s behind Steve’s comment about your sister deserving death.”

Joe’s expression hardened. “Well, what you’re… I don’t want to help anyone build a case that my brother murdered our sister, for God’s sake. He told me he was somewhere else. Right? With a woman on the res.” Joe looked between the investigators. “Did you check on that?”

“We’re in the process.”

“Well, what’s taking so long? If he was with someone else, and they’ll give a deposition or whatever, then he’s off the hook, right? This thing with the bail – the judge has got to knock that down; it’s excessive. And a year in jail for kicking a car door?”

Terry broke in. “Was he upset with you, Joe? Did he think you had it coming, too?”

Joe tilted his head to look at Terry behind him. “He was, Terry. For your information, I spent months on the phone with Steve. He’d call, sometimes drunk, sometimes just royally ticked off. Once, he was even crying. He told me he tried to talk to Rita a couple times, but she shut him down.”

“Oh, for God’s… She drew a boundary, Joe.”

“Steve wanted to lease the property from us,” Joe said to Mike and Lena. “He was trying to get Rita and me to come to terms on that. This whole thing played out over a few years, Rita and I spoke on it a few times. I was willing, and I thought maybe she was, but you gotta deal with, you know, a lot of paperwork, so the whole thing – it never really got off the ground. And Steve, okay, he gets these ideas but doesn’t follow through. He’ll think he’s gonna return the place to a working dairy farm, but then he’ll lose interest. Couple months later, suddenly it’s the most important thing in the world again.”

“Can I ask,” Lena said, “why your parents would’ve kept him from such an inheritance?”

“Look,” said Joe. “Much of an estate passes by law to beneficiaries, despite what the will says. Like retirement proceeds, life insurance, joint bank accounts, payable-on-death bank accounts, stocks registered with a transfer-on-death form – these all go to a specified beneficiary.”

“I’m aware,” Lena said, a bit coolly.

“Well, Steve’s a beneficiary in these regards. Okay? So, you know. It’s not like he was cut out of everything. Just the farm.”

Lena said, “If you’re implying that Steve should have been content – he filed twice in probate court just this past year. And he doesn’t seem to be able to come up with any money for his bail.”

Joe looked bewildered. “Naw, you sure? Probate? Steve knows once a will is drawn up, it’s final…”

“But that doesn’t mean uncontestable,” Lena said. “Do you know about your parents changing the original will?”

Joe blinked. “Changing it? I mean, I dunno, maybe they updated and added a few things, I guess…”

“There are actually several codicils attached to the will,” Lena said. “Apparently your brother Steve was originally set to inherit a third of the Gloversville farm, but then that inheritance was revoked. That change was dated, signed, and witnessed just a few months before your mother passed. So, she changed it after your father died two years prior.”

A thick silence developed. Terry sat back down in his seat, looking like he had something to say.

“Terry?” Mike asked.

Harriet’s husband sighed, long and heavy, glanced quickly at Joe, then looked at Mike and Lena. “Rita mentioned talking to Cecilia before Cecilia died. They talked about Steve, about his behavior. To be honest – okay, I told her I didn’t think that he should get any part of the Gloversville property.”

Joe opened his mouth but Terry put up a finger and hurried on. “Stocks, insurance, all these other benefits – okay. But that property was in Rita’s family for over 100 years. Splitting it three ways – I thought it would only cause infighting. Like Joe just said, Steve would get some harebrained idea – he’d already talked to her about razing the old barn, the house, rebuilding… I mean, he had some crazy plans, Joe. And you and I both know he would’ve gotten halfway into it, figured out how much work was involved, or gotten distracted by something else and…” Terry raised his shoulders and let them drop. “Cecilia was worried about it, and she talked to us. And me and Rita, we helped her make the right decision. And yeah, she was honest with Steve that she did. He called her a cunt, and that was the last they spoke.”

Mike was surprised to see tears in Joe’s eyes.

Terry said, softly, “Steve might be inconsistent about everything else, but he could hold a grudge.”

Joe seemed to shrink. He wiped away the moisture in his eyes. “Fuck.”

Finally, Lena said, “So, Joe. Do you still think – is it out of the realm of possibility that Steve, maybe just in a moment of – I don’t know. That he could have done this?”

Joe slowly lowered his head until his chin rested against his dress shirt. “I don’t know.” His voice was almost inaudible. “Goddammit. Maybe.”

---

Mike and Lena had skipped lunch, rushing to catch Judge Cheever. In the car, they had talked a bit about Joe Pritchard – who had plans to fly back to Salt Lake City that afternoon – and the tension between him and Terry and Victor Fogarty. With Cheever’s consent, they moved on to the DSS armed with a court order to open old cases from Child Protective Services.

Shalene Jaquish was the assistant director, her position above both Harriet Fogarty and the remaining supervisor, Jessica Rankin. Jaquish was a fast-talking, busy woman, the kind that oozed efficiency. Even as she sat at her desk and reviewed the order from Cheever, she was getting things done. The phone rang, she answered it and spoke, solved a problem, sent an email.

She pushed the paperwork at Mike and Lena. “Come with me,” she said, and led them through a door, down a flight of stairs, where she snapped on a light in a massive underground records room.

“So,” she said, still moving, hips swinging along, “you can’t take anything out of this room. Copy machine is there in the corner. But I would guess if you’re going through all cases involving both Harriet and Corina Lavoie, you’re not going to want to Xerox everything or you’d be here a week.”

One of the overhead fluorescents was flickering; in one corner, the ceiling was festooned with cobwebs. “What’s that smell?” Lena asked Mike in a soft voice.

“We think there’s a dead mouse down here somewhere,” Jaquish said, overhearing. She finally stopped, squaring her shoulders with the end of a cabinet. “Here we go. 2000 to 2005. That what you’re looking for?”

Mike boggled at the sheer volume of information surrounding them: the whole thing resembled a kind of prehistoric data farm. Instead of servers in rows, there were storage units jammed tightly together.

“The units move on tracks, you control with these,” Jaquish said, and grabbed a large three-point knob and spun it. The first unit in the group rolled away, creating a corridor. Mike stepped in and had a look. Each unit had six shelves, bisected to form two sections, each about four feet wide, crowded with manila folders. There were a few colored folders – some reds and blues, interspersed.

“How is the information arranged?” Lena asked.

“Alphabetical, by client. If there’s many charts for the same client, then in year order for that client, then year order for the next client, and so on.”

“They’re not arranged by caseworker?” Mike’s heart sank a little.

Jaquish shook her head. “This is the area for Child Protective Services, these two sets of shelves cover 2000 to 2005.”

Mike looked around at all the other storage and did a quick mental calculation: Five-year sections, dating back to the establishment of DSS in ’77, meant roughly ten to fifteen of these cabinet blocks. “So what’s all the rest of this stuff?”

Jaquish put her hands on her hips and rotated around. “Disability, Adult Protective Services, Child Support, Medicaid, HEAP, Temporary Assistance, SNAP, Day Care, Accounting.” She finished her spin, pointed to a corner. “That’s the server over there. You might see Trevor Garris coming down here; he’s still working out all the kinks of our new EHR and all the networking. Hope that’s not a problem?”

“No, that’s fine,” Mike said. “Whatever.”

She looked at him, eyes sharp as a sparrow’s. “You’re lucky this isn’t Mental Health – they’re not required to hold onto anything past ten years. But with Child Protective Services in particular, children aren’t necessarily grown up ten years on. So…”

“What about transferring all this to digital?”

“We’re actually still in the process of that – have been for years – scanning and storing in digital. But we haven’t destroyed the old stuff yet.”

“How far back are you scanning?”

“Ten years.”

Mike suppressed a sigh. No luck jockeying a mouse and doing a little clicking instead of wandering around in the catacombs. To hell with this ‘old scores’ theory…

Jaquish flashed a quick smile then hurried back to her busy world. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Mike was surprised – the records room was treated like Fort Knox; he’d expected supervision the whole time. But she was already through the door and pounding back up the stairs. Then he looked around, saw the camera mounted in the corner.

---

“Well,” Lena said. She slid open the top drawer. “We’re only looking at three years, right? The overlapping years that Harriet and Lavoie both worked here.” She pulled out a file, flipped through. “Usually, the first thing is the referral sheet, that’s for the initial call. And then back here… okay, this is the discharge summary. And, see this? There’s the caseworker, right there.”

“But the referrals,” Mike asked, “they’re not all coming from the state register?” He kept eyeing the different-colored files, hoping for an easy way out of this and not seeing it.

“If it’s a civilian that calls the hotline, okay. But anyone with a public licensure to help children is a mandated reporter, and I don’t know if they have to go through the register.” Lena put the file back and jotted a note on a legal pad beside her. She seemed resolved to see it through, but Mike was still antsy.

He pulled out a red folder. “What about these?”

Lena looked over. “Yeah,” she said. “We’re going to need a bit more help. Hang on; I got someone to call.” She stepped away, pulling out her cell phone.

Mike heard her talking, then sifted through the photos in the red folder. They made him sick; pictures of a child’s arm and neck covered in huge bruises. He wanted to be chasing down Pritchard’s alibi, not seeing images of abused kids. But Lena was right – this was his idea. Pritchard looked good for it, but if they couldn’t connect him to Lavoie, it didn’t feel right, because one missing and one murdered caseworker in less than a year felt like more than coincidence. The idea was that it was someone like Gavin Fuller, but a decade or so back, whose resentment of Child Protective Services had cooked until it boiled over.

“Okay, Mary, thanks so much.” Lena stepped back into the aisle between cabinets. “So that was my friend who works for DSS in Oneida County. Certain cases might be classified in a different-color folder. Permanently separated families, for example.”

“Or serious abuse cases,” Mike said, holding up one of the pictures.

Her mouth formed a tight line. “Yes.”

He nodded at the red folders. “Then let’s start with these?”

“Okay. But let’s look for the discharge summary first, so we can separate out the ones with Harriet’s name, Corina Lavoie’s name.”

They pulled two smaller tables together and went to work, each amassing a stack of colored folders. The flickering fluorescent continued to bother Mike, and he could smell the bad smell now, too. He got up.

“What are you doing?” Lena glanced at the clock.

“Looking for that mouse.”

She didn’t say anything else, just tucked back into the work.

He didn’t care about the mouse, he needed a moment.

After he wandered back to the table, he’d formed the complete thought. “So, the people that call in the complaint, you know, about a child in danger, they can be anyone. Like we said, mandated reporter, or just someone off the street. And their name goes into the file.”

“Usually. They can withhold it. They’re certainly going to want it withheld from the alleged perp, but the name is recorded by the hotline staff.”

He crossed his arms, looked down at the spread of files on the table. “But I bet the perpetrator often figures out who reported anyway. Or has suspicions.”

She leaned back, looking thoughtful. “I see where you’re going – someone angry with whoever reported the suspected abuse or neglect; they’re pissed off someone rang the bell on them.”

“Just thinking, if I was upset someone came in and took my kid, I’d be just as likely to be upset by the person who made the call initiating the investigation as I would be anyone else. Maybe we factor that in. Maybe our guy found out who called it in, harassed them, something, and there’s a report.”

“Okay, but by that token, we might as well be looking at everyone involved – cops, lawyers, judges, other social workers. I think we need to keep this narrowed to caseworkers. If we don’t come up with anything, then we widen out.”

“I can go with that.”

“We’ll be looking at police reports if anything piques our interest, and we can cross-reference to hotline data…” She touched her lip a moment, lost in thought. “But, I have another question, something we never addressed.”

“Shoot.”

“If this is something that happened ten to fifteen years ago, when both Harriet and Lavoie were working here together – why does the perp wait all this time to go after them?”

“Because he’s in jail.” Mike took a seat beside her. “That’s the whole thing. Someone gets investigated for child abuse, neglect – something – and goes to jail. Meanwhile their kid goes into placement, gets adopted, who knows. When the parent is released, years later, he goes after the caseworkers.”

“Well we’re back to the same problem. This hypothetical parent might just as likely blame the complainant – or why not the cops? Or the judge who sentenced them? And anyway, in most of these cases, the parent doesn’t go to jail. They get parenting classes, counseling, drug rehab…”

“But what we have is one dead caseworker and one missing caseworker. We don’t have any dead judges or cops. The complainant could be anonymous – cops, forget it – judges probably hard to get to, too. The caseworkers are the most vulnerable.”

“You mean mostly women,” she said.

“Yeah. That might be part of it. This guy’s a coward. Probably has some history of violence toward women…” Mike thought about Jameson Rentz for a moment, then he put it out of his mind. Same problem – Rentz didn’t connect to Lavoie.

Lena turned back to the files, her expression grave. “Alright, here’s a brush-up for us both: Once a call is placed to the hotline, then they forward it to the local CPS, where it gets assigned the caseworker. Okay? Assignments are handed out based on current caseload, or on rotation – who’s on call at the time a new case comes in. There might be an initial person who responds at first to the emergency, if there is one, but then another could be assigned after that for various reasons. So, this is why the records aren’t kept by caseworker.”

“Understood.”

“Once a person is assigned to a part of the work, their name, any credentials, and the date, should be on every piece of paperwork. Getting back to an emergency case, though – if the report is an emergency and happens at night on a weekend, let’s say, the state register puts them through to the police, and the police dispatcher notifies the caseworker on call. So, like I said, we can cross-reference with police records.”

“The good news is,” Mike said, surveying the pile of files, “we can focus on the three-year overlap.”

But Lena was shaking her head. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about that. As a supervisor, Harriet can still be directly involved. We need to look at everything from 2003 to 2008. So that means getting into the next five-year cabinet section. And this is all presuming that our perp is reacting off something that specifically had to do with both of them, and that, even if it did involve both of them, Harriet’s name is even going to show up. Sometimes her role is just to offer guidance, and she’s not going to be on any paperwork.”

Mike let his eyelids droop and stared at her.

“Get to work,” Lena said.