Rossi maintained her composure when she entered the bustling Nashville precinct after four weeks on short term disability. Greeted by a standing ovation from the officers in the room, she wished to become invisible and avoid the stilted, sympathetic conversations. “Next time I’m taking two months leave,” she spoke stiffly, reluctant to reveal her reconstructive dental surgery to the crowded room of colleagues who acknowledged her in admiration with a rollicking round of applause.

She found her desk occupied by a store-bought sheet cake with her caricature etched in buttercream icing to highlight an accentuated jawline with jumbo ears and a missing front tooth like some goofball portrait on the cover of MAD Magazine. Despite the rousing reception, she maintained a somber view of the precinct’s memorial wall, updated to include the dress uniform photos of Deputy Yolanda Jayden Jones, Sergeant James Martin Haggarty, and Detective Thomas Mathew Clayson. “This means a lot,” she told the room when the applause diminished. “I literally don’t know what to say. Excuse me…”

She locked herself in the women’s restroom. Overwhelmed from the guilt of surviving the unsurvivable, she broke down in the privacy of secluded space, alone in her own remorse and guilt. “Get your shit together,” she told the image in the mirror above the sink. “You’re alive. They’re not. Any given day, it could have gone the other way. Be grateful for the second chance to right the wrongs in this world. Your colleagues weren’t so lucky.”

She flushed a toilet and ran the sink before returning to the precinct’s public domain. “The deputy chief needs to see you,” she heard the captain on duty inform her when she dropped her purse in her chair.

She rode the elevator to the corner window office upstairs to find Deputy Chief Rollins beside a stack of moving boxes. “You wanted to see me?”

The deputy chief wrapped an etched glass service award in newspaper. “You weren’t due back for two more weeks.”

“I’m cleared for duty.”

“Says who?”

“My doctor. My dentist. And my shrink. I can’t sit at home anymore. I need to work.”

The deputy chief laid the wrapped memento in a box with other items. “Let it go, Rossi. Take all the time you need and do whatever it is you do when you’re not here.”

“Are you ordering me?”

“Not anymore, detective. My time’s expired.”

“You’re retiring?”

“I put in my papers last week.” The deputy chief came around the stack of boxes, a look of admiration on his face when he indued Detective Rossi a cautious hug. “Don’t let this job consume you. Not after what you went through. And I’m sorry for the cake downstairs. Some in this brotherhood have poor taste when it comes to expressing their emotions. We’re all grateful you came back in one piece.”

“More or less.” Rossi covered her mouth with her hand. “I look like a monster.”

“You look like someone who’s stared the devil in the face and survived to tell about it. How’s your leg?”

Rossi touched her slacks above her thigh, where two surgeries left massive scar tissue from a painful wound that still hurt with each step. “Much better. If you hadn’t been there—”

“You’re a survivor. You would have found a way to put Simon down whether I showed up or not.”

“How did you know to breach Simon’s house?”

The deputy chief pushed a stack of boxes against the wall. “I didn’t. Sergeant Haggarty sent an emergency code from his radio before his injuries overtook him.”

“Why didn’t you share this before?”

“You weren’t in the right state of mind.”

“What else are you not telling me? Sir…”

The deputy chief eyeballed Rossi. “You got something to say? Let’s hear it.”

“I saw you in an older photo with Simon Hollis. You had your arm around him like you were childhood pals.”

“Times were different. Don’t believe everything you see.”

“And what did I see?”

“My wife loves country music. She met Simon by association with a friend of a friend. Simon had photos taken with both of us at a charity event downtown. Clearly, he was not the man he pretended to be.”

“Simon Hollis would have killed me and everyone else in that room.”

“But he didn’t. And now he’s in the ground where he belongs. You did your job, detective.”

“Not well enough.” Rossi watched the deputy chief continue packing, unsettled by the thought of his pending retirement and the void his absence would leave behind. “Three cops are dead because of me.”

“Nobody in this department blames you for what happened. We all accept the risks that come with the job.”

“Tell that to their families.”

“I already have. It never gets easier.”

Rossi waited for the deputy chief to unpack a desk drawer and drop the contents in another box, a simple motion to mark the end of a valiant career that had started with a patrol officer earning his degree between shifts while he worked his way up the ranks, doing the job better than anyone else. “Any progress on Captain Wallen?”

The deputy chief shook his head. “Internal affairs put the case on hold, pending the discovery of new leads. They told me you tried to contact them.”

“I talked to the ex-wife of our Volxen CEO, William Brady. She suspected an affair between her husband and Captain Wallen twenty years ago, but she never confronted him about her suspicions. Apparently, Captain Wallen wasn’t the only husband to lead a double life. I think Wallen blackmailed Brady and had him falsify DNA evidence at Volxen Labs to further his law enforcement career. I also believe Simon Hollis killed both men, but I don’t have the evidence to support it. And now all three men are dead.”

The deputy chief stretched a roll of packing tape across a box to seal it shut. “You did your job, detective. The Simon Hollis case is closed.”

“Not for me. There was someone else in the house with Simon. Someone who tried to warn him you were coming.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Simon didn’t pull the trigger on Deputy Jones. I saw it happen, but I never saw the shooter. Simon was with us when Sergeant Haggarty and Detective Clayson were murdered. Unless Simon found a way to be in two places at once, we have another killer on the loose.”

“I read your report. Simon had you in his sights. Nearly killed you.”

“Doesn’t change what I saw and heard that night.”

“The lead detectives already have your statement. They’ll find you if they need you.”

“McMillan? Davis?”

“Anderson is the primary now.”

“Anderson couldn’t find his own ass with four hands and a mirror.”

The deputy chief motioned with a bowling trophy. “The crime scene techs combed Simon’s house and surrounding property. Some real macabre shit went down in there. They found two more bodies buried in a garden. They also found human remains in the backyard. Simon dissolved his victims in some kind of neutralizing agent he flushed through a modified septic system.”

“Let me help with the case. I still have valuable information from Larkin’s notes.”

“Not your assignment.”

“Don’t patronize me, sir.”

“No one’s patronizing you, Detective Rossi. You weren’t even scheduled to return to active duty for two more weeks.”

“Then I’ll work the Chun Lin case.”

The deputy chief taped the lid on a box of file folders. “The case is closed.”

“Since when?”

“Since the primary detective solved her murder. All the evidence implicated Simon Hollis. The brutal assault and battery. The missing teeth.”

“What about motive?”

“Simon Hollis liked to hurt people. He staged the murder to look like Stu Harvey was the perpetrator.”

“Simon had a solid alibi. I read your report. You never found any teeth in his possession or on his property.”

“Let it go.”

Rossi felt her jaw beneath her chin where a dull throbbing pain emanated from her dental implants. “When you rescued Lisa Harvey, she was adamant that her daughter was still alive.”

“She was in shock. So were you when we arrived. You said yourself her child was stillborn.”

“Technically, Lisa Harvey’s baby died from complications at birth. The baby was breached. It also suffered from vasa previa. Blood vessels had grown outside the umbilical cord and ruptured during labor, resulting in massive blood loss.”

“That’s tragic, but unfortunately, it happens.”

“Stewart Harvey lost his seven-year-old son in a drowning accident. I think he snapped when he found out his second child died on delivery. And I believe he murdered Chun Lin.”

“That’s a big stretch, detective. Harvey was the victim, not the perpetrator. Chun Lin’s murder was premeditated, calculated by someone with a definitive motive. She wasn’t killed in a fit of rage by a grieving father.”

“Simon Hollis never confessed to the murder,” Rossi stated flatly.

“He didn’t have to. We had enough evidence to convict him.”

“What if Stewart Harvey staged the crime scene to make it look like Simon killed her?”

“Let it go.”

“You have to admit it’s possible,” Rossi pressed her boss.

“Possible, but highly improbable. Either way, Stewart Harvey never struck me as the murderous type.”

“Talk to the legions of Simon Hollis fans. They’ll tell you the same about him.”