Once Tim Hight was arrested for killing the man who murdered his daughter, once Lena put the case together and slapped the cuffs on the grieving father’s wrists—a father in ruin doing what any father might do …

“Are you okay?”

She turned and saw Rhodes walking into the bar. She tried to find her voice, and it came out deep and scratched.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said.

He shrugged without an answer, crossing the darkened room for a peek out the window. Lena could hear the press corps still shouting at the patrol units holding them back. After a while, Rhodes joined her at the bar.

“The coroner,” he said. “Barrera asked me to show him the way up when he gets here.”

“Who got the call? Who got lucky?”

Rhodes gave her a look. “Besides you?”

She nodded. “Besides me.”

“Ed Gainer,” he said.

“Well, he’s not gonna like the stairs.”

“You’re right. Eddie won’t like the stairs.”

Rhodes reached for the pack of cigarettes, found a lighter beside a tray of spent candles, and lit up. When he passed it over, Lena shook him off. Neither one of them really smoked. Although tonight more than qualified as a crisis, she was no longer in the mood. Instead, she looked at the scar on Rhodes’s left earlobe. It was in the shape of an X, and she liked looking at it. His brown hair was cropped short again, his body lean and trim from daily jogs around Hollywood Reservoir. He looked good. The gunshot he’d taken to his left shoulder a few years back—a distant memory that only surfaced when it rained.

Rhodes stepped behind the bar and found a plate to use as an ashtray. “I guess Hight held it together for as long as he could,” he said. “I’ve never met him, but during the trial he looked okay. Wearing down maybe, but okay.”

Lena nodded again without answering. No one in the division had met Tim Hight because his daughter’s murder investigation had been handled by local detectives on the Westside. The case didn’t ignite until prosecutors released those family snapshots to the press. By the time the public met Lily Hight, Jacob Gant had already been arrested and moved from his parents’ home in Venice to an isolated cell at Men’s Central Jail.

Rhodes leaned on the bar directly across from her. “After tonight people will think that Tim Hight’s a hero. They’re gonna say that he did what we couldn’t. That he did what he had to do. That he finally got justice for his daughter.”

“He’s not a hero,” she whispered.

“It doesn’t make any difference, Lena. They’ll call him one.”

The words settled in for a while.

“He’s not a hero,” she repeated. “He didn’t shoot Gant, lay down the gun, and wait to face the music. He walked into the room and shot Johnny Bosco first. And he shot him in the back, Stan.