As much as he wanted to know, just know why, he expected it would take forever for it all to come out. If then.

As he saw it, from the pieces he put together from the reports, the gossip, the conversations, Hobart hated everybody. His mother, his teachers, his co workers. He hated blacks and Jews and gays, but mostly just hated. And he liked to kill things.

Whitehall hated his life, wanted to be somebody, and believed everything and everyone worked against him. He’d gotten a summer job—at the mall—and had been fired within two weeks. For showing up high, a former coworker claimed, when he showed up at all.

Paulson hated his luck. He’d concluded he’d done everything right all his life, but still lost his girl, and wasn’t quite as good as his father at anything. He’d decided it was time to be bad.

They’d targeted the mall for impact, and Hobart took the theater because he wanted to destroy the place that expected him to work for a living.

Rumors claimed they’d done three dry runs, timing them, refining them. They’d planned to regroup at Abercrombie & Fitch, barricade themselves inside, taking hostages as bargaining chips, and taking out as many cops as possible.

Whitehall and Paulson nearly made it, but they’d taken an oath. If one of them fell, they all fell.

When Hobart didn’t show, and with the cops closing in, Whitehall and Paulson—according to witnesses—bumped fists, shouted, “Fuck yeah!” and turned their weapons on each other.

Maybe some of it was true. Maybe even most. But Reed expected more and more would come out. They’d do a book, probably a freaking TV movie.

He wished to hell they wouldn’t.

He came back to the moment when people started to stand, and felt a wave of shame that he’d been inside his own head instead of paying attention.

He got to his feet, waiting while the pallbearers carried Angie out. He couldn’t imagine her inside that box, didn’t want to imagine her there. Her family filed out, grouped tight together as if holding each other up.

He saw a couple people he knew now—Angie’s friend Misty, some others who worked at the mall. It shouldn’t have surprised him to see Rosie. He’d sat with her the day before at Justin the busboy’s funeral.

He knew Rosie had spent the last few days at funerals or in hospital rooms.

He hung back, let her go on her way. Probably to another memorial, or to visit one of the injured, maybe to take food to someone who’d suffered a loss or was recovering at home.

That was Rosie.

The opposite of the three who’d killed.

When he stepped out of the church, he walked into a perfect summer afternoon. The sun shined out of a blue, blue sky dotted with soft white clouds. Grass grew summer green. A squirrel darted up a tree.

It didn’t seem real.

He saw reporters across the street, shooting video or taking photographs. He wanted to despise them for it, but wasn’t he clinging to every word they reported, every photo they published?

Still, he angled away from them, started for the car he’d parked nearly two blocks away. When he heard his name called, he hunched his shoulders rather than turn. But a hand dropped lightly on his arm.

“Reed. It’s Officer McVee.”

He gave her a blank look. Her hair fell down her back in a bouncy honey-blond ponytail. She wore a plain white T-shirt and khakis. She looked younger.

“Sorry, I didn’t recognize you. No uniform. Were you at the funeral?”

“No. I waited out here. I called your house. Your mom told me where you were.”

“I gave my statement and all. A couple times.”

“I’m off duty. I’m just, well, trying to do my own personal follow-up with anybody I connected with that night. For myself. Are you going to the cemetery?”

“No, I don’t feel right about it. Her family and all that. I didn’t know Angie all that well. I just … I was trying to get her to go out with me. We were maybe going to that same movie, the last show, and … Jesus.”

He fumbled on sunglasses with shaking hands.

“You want to go over to the park? Sit and look at the water for a while? It always helps me level out.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah, I guess.”

“How about you ride with me, and I’ll bring you back for your car after?”

“Okay, sure.”

When he thought of it later, he wondered why he’d gone with her. He didn’t know her. She’d been a blurred face and a uniform inside the madness and shock.

But she’d been there. She’d been in it, like he had.

When he got in her car, he had a moment to think it was older and crappier than his—if a lot cleaner. Then he remembered.

“You shot Hobart.”

“Yes.”

“Man, they didn’t fire you or anything for it, did they?”

“No. I’m cleared. Back on the job tomorrow. How are your parents dealing?”

“They’re pretty messed up, but they’re handling it.”

“And the people at the restaurant?”

“I think it’s harder. We were there, and we saw … You can’t stop seeing it. But we’re doing okay. Like Rosie—head cook? She’s doing a lot of stuff. The funerals, hospital visits, taking food to people. It helps, I think. I don’t know.”

“What’s helping you, Reed?”

“I don’t know.”

He felt the air on his face, through the open window—breeze off the water. That was real. Cars zipped by, a woman pushed a kid in a stroller down the sidewalk. All real.

Life just kept going. And he was in it. Lucky to be in it.

“I talk to Chaz a lot. My friend at GameStop.”

“I remember. He saved lives. So did you.”

“The kid? Brady? His dad called me. He wants to bring Brady to see me maybe next week. He said his wife’s getting better.”

Essie said nothing for a moment, but, like CiCi, she believed in truth and trust.

“She’s going to make it, but she’s paralyzed. She won’t walk again. He probably didn’t want to lay that on you, but you’d find out.”

“Goddamn it. Goddamn it.”

He put his head back on the seat until he could breathe clear again. “I try to listen to music, or shoot hoops in the backyard, but I can’t stop reading about it, or listening to the news. I can’t stop.”

“You were part of it.”

“My parents want me to see somebody. You know, a shrink or something.”

“It’s a good idea. I have to see one. Department rules, and for a reason.”

He opened his eyes again, frowned at her. “You have to talk to a shrink?”

“Already have. I’m cleared—it was a good shoot—for desk duty. And I’m talking to the department shrink. I’ll be back on full active in a while. I don’t mind working through it. I killed somebody.”

She parked, turned off the engine. “I did it to save lives, including my own and my partner’s. But I killed a seventeen-year-old boy. If I could just shrug that off without a single regret, I shouldn’t be a cop.”

She got out of the car, waited for him.

They walked for a while, past a playground, along a promenade, then sat on a bench where gulls swooped and cried, and the bay rolled blue as the sky.

Boats glided on the bay, and Reed heard kids laughing. A woman with a killer body inside spandex shorts and a tank jogged by. A couple who looked a thousand years old to his eyes strolled, holding hands.

“Is it true, what the papers and TV are saying, that he—that Hobart—was the main guy?”

“I’m going to say it’s likely he was the strongest-willed, pushed for the plan. But the three of them? It seems to me they were like pieces of a sick, sad puzzle that fit together, and at the worst time. A few months sooner, a few months later, Paulson probably wouldn’t have fit.”

Reed knew what the papers and TV said about Paulson, what neighbors and teachers said. How shocked they were, how he’d never been violent. Always bright and helpful.

Fucking Boy Scout.

They were putting Angie in the ground now. They’d put a kid on his first summer job in the ground yesterday. How many others?

“I don’t think you can kill like that, just kill people the way they did, if it’s not in you. I mean, maybe—probably—everybody’s capable of killing, but like you did. To save lives, to protect people. In self-defense or like a soldier, that’s different. But what they did, for that something else has to be inside.”

“You’re not wrong. I think with Paulson’s background, his family, they’d have gotten him help. But he linked with the others at a dark time, and those pieces came together.”

He listened to the soft lap of the water, the call of birds, somebody’s radio. Realized the world seemed more real as he sat there, talking to her.

He felt himself slide more inside it as he sat with her.

“What was it like? When you shot him?”

“I’d never fired my weapon off the range before last Friday night. I was scared shitless,” she told him, “but that mostly came before and after. In the moment? I guess it came down to training and instinct. He shot my partner. I could see people, dead and dying. He shot at me, and I just did what I’d trained to do. Take out the threat. Then I had to do what came next. My partner—down, but not seriously injured. There was the kid in the bathroom. The first nine-one-one caller.”

“That’s, ah … Simone Knox.”