The church was full of police.
Thorsen counted them from the back, because counting was easier than looking at the box. Two hundred, near enough. Dress blues, white gloves, black bands across the badges. The motor officers had lined their bikes along the kerb outside in a row so straight it looked surveyed. A retired Detective III did not get that. A retired Detective III got a flag, a bugler if one was free, and a paragraph in the union newsletter.
Somebody had decided Ray Okafor should be buried well.
He stood against the rear wall beside a rack of votive candles, with the duffel between his feet. The suit jacket pulled when he breathed. A few heads turned and turned back. He recognised perhaps one face in ten, and most of those had got older and heavier and moved up. The ones who recognised him looked at the bag first.
Denise sat in the front pew with a gap on either side of her that nobody had been brave enough to fill.
The priest was young and had clearly never met Ray. He said the things you say. Then he stepped back, and a man in a uniform with three stars on the collar walked up to the lectern without notes.
Walter Brandt had been a commander the last time Thorsen saw him. He had the same haircut and the same way of standing, weight even on both feet, hands resting lightly on the wood as if the lectern belonged to him and he was only letting the church borrow it. He waited until the room was completely quiet. Then he waited a little longer.
“Ray Okafor,” he said, “cleared two hundred and fourteen homicides. I looked it up this morning. I wanted to get it right, because Ray would have corrected me.”
A low laugh went along the pews. It was true. Ray would have.
Brandt talked for nine minutes. Thorsen timed it on the clock over the side door. He talked about a detective who typed his own reports with two fingers and never once got a date wrong. He talked about a man who drove to Fresno on his day off to tell a mother in person. He told a story about Ray and a stuck elevator in the old Parker Center that Thorsen had heard forty times and that was, for once, told accurately. He spoke about the weight the job leaves on a man after the job is over, and how the department had to get better at carrying it with him, and he let his voice go rough at exactly the place where it should.
It was a good eulogy. That was the trouble with it. It was the work of a man who had done his reading.
Thorsen noticed he did not say the word partner once.
Afterwards they filed out into a white, flat noon. The honour guard folded the flag in thirteen movements and a captain knelt and put it in Denise’s lap, and she looked at it as if someone had handed her a parcel for a neighbour.
Thorsen stayed on the steps. He was working out how to reach her through all that blue wool when an arm came round his neck from behind and nearly took him off his feet.
“Danny. Jesus Christ. Danny.”
Art Delgado had shrunk. He had been a wide man, a lieutenant who filled a doorway, and now the dress uniform hung on him like a coat on a chair. But the grip was the same, and so was the smell of cigars he was not supposed to be smoking. He held Thorsen off at arm’s length and looked him up and down, and his eyes were wet.
“Look at you. You look like you slept in a field.”
“A bus.”
“Six years. Not a postcard.” He shook him, gently, by both shoulders. “He talked about you, you know that? All the damn time. ‘Danny would’ve seen it.’ ‘Danny wouldn’t have let that go.’ Drove me up the wall.”
“Seen what?”
“Anything. Everything. The crossword.” Delgado let go and wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “Where are you staying?”
“I’m not.”
“The hell you’re not. I’ve got a spare room and a bottle I’ve been saving for a reason. Don’t argue with me, I outrank you.”
“You’re retired, Art.”
“So I outrank you permanently.”
Thorsen almost smiled. It was the first time his face had tried it in a while.
Then the crowd on the steps shifted the way a crowd does around rank, and Brandt was standing there with a driver two paces behind him.
“Daniel Thorsen.” He put out his hand. “I heard you’d gone off the map.”
“The map’s bigger than people think.”
“I’m sure it is.” The grip was dry and firm and went on about one second past the point where a handshake usually ends. Brandt was not a small man, but he had to look up, and he did it without appearing to. “I’m glad you came. Truly. He’d have wanted you here. Are you in town long?”
“I was planning on tonight.”
“Was.”
“Buses run every day.”
Brandt nodded slowly, as though that were a piece of information worth keeping. “Well. If you need anything while you’re here. Anything at all.” He released the hand, touched Delgado once on the arm, and moved on down the steps. The driver had the car door open before he reached it.
“He’s going to be chief,” Delgado said quietly. “Council votes Tuesday.”
“I saw the posters.”
“There aren’t any posters.”
“No,” Thorsen said. “I just figured.”
Across the forecourt, in the shade of the side aisle door, a woman in a dark trouser suit was watching him. Mid-thirties, hair pulled back hard, a lanyard tucked inside her jacket so the badge would not show. She was not crying and she was not talking to anyone. She was doing what he had been doing an hour ago in a dead man’s yard. When he looked straight at her she did not look away. She took her time, the way you do when it is your job, and then she turned and went back inside.
Denise found him. He should have known she would.
The crowd had thinned to clumps. She came across the forecourt alone, the flag under one arm like a folded newspaper, and stopped in front of him. She was a small woman. She had been a surgical nurse for thirty-one years and she still stood like one, straight-backed, as if something sterile were laid out on a tray just in front of her.
He had a sentence ready. He had been building it since Kingman.
“You went to the house,” she said.
It was not a question. He put the sentence away.
“This morning.”
“Before you came here.”
“Yes.”
She looked at him for a while. There was nothing in her face he could read, and he had been able to read Denise Okafor across a kitchen table since he was thirty-four years old. Someone had left a stack of hymn sheets on the low wall beside them, fanned out and sliding. Without looking down she gathered them, tapped the edges on the stone until they were true, and set them back square to the corner.
“There was a man there,” Thorsen said. “He told me he was watching the place for you.”
“People have been very kind.”
“Denise.”
“People have been very kind, Danny.” She said it evenly, and held his eye while she said it, and he let it go.
She opened her handbag and took out a single key on a brass ring. A Ford key, worn smooth, with a strip of masking tape round the head and a capital R on the tape in black marker.
“The van’s in the lot behind the hall. The blue one. He wanted you to have it.”
“I don’t need a van.”
“I didn’t say you needed it. I said he wanted you to have it.” She took his hand, turned it palm up as if she were about to check it for cuts, and put the key in it and closed his fingers. Hers were cold. “There’ll be food at the house from two. You’ll come.”
“I’ll come.”
“Good.”
She walked back towards the cars. She did not look round. A sergeant he half remembered opened a door for her, and she got in with the flag on her knees.
Thorsen stood on the church steps with a dead man’s key in his fist. He had come to the city with one bag and a ticket out. Now he had a van, an invitation, and an assistant chief who wanted to know how long he was staying.
He opened his hand. The masking tape was new. The edges had not even begun to lift.