"You did. And it's possible that the jury won't hang. We'll wait and see."

"But I'm free to go."

"Not exactly," he said. "There's still the matter of a couple of truck hijackings out in the desert, Insula."

Insula.

I made sure my face stayed carefully neutral. It was possible he could just be fishing. The least I could do was make him put all his cards on the table.

"You've seen my tattoo," I said mildly. "It's Latin for 'island.' That's how I feel sometimes. Solitary."

"Actually, it was Joel who saw your tattoo," he said. "The second time you came over to talk to him in the park, it was a hot day, and you were wearing a thin tank shirt. He read the tattoo through it. A little later, even though you'd never mentioned your friend in that neighborhood by name, Joel dropped a casual reference to 'your friend Serena' into the conversation, and you didn't even blink. That's when he knew." Ford smiled a little. "Did you know that up until that moment we thought you were some kind of urban legend? 'Insula, the white sucia.' We'd seen pictures of Warchild, knew she was some kind of fine-looking. For her to have a blond female lieutenant, that was about two steps away from being some cholo's letter to Penthouse Forum."

I didn't feel like laughing.

"Joel came in real excited, told me what he'd found. After you gave him your cell number, we were brainstorming ways to best use that, and then the APB on you came in from San Francisco. Joel brought it to me and said, 'You're not going to believe this, but you remember how I told you that Insula told me her name was Hailey? That's her, Hailey Cain. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true.''

"It's funny, but one of the early things that worked in your favor, as far as convincing me you didn't kill Eastman and Stepakoff, was the truck hijackings. We knew right away it was you and Warchild. Two females who spoke a mix of English, Spanish, and Latin? That narrowed the suspect list considerably."

I hoped the irritation I felt at myself didn't show on my face; the code Serena and I had used hadn't been such a smart idea after all.

"So the timeline didn't work out. The idea that you were cleaning up a murder scene in San Francisco at five or six P.M. and jacking a truck outside Los Angeles at midnight ... it just didn't scan. Then your fingerprints came across the wire from the military database, and Joel said, 'This isn't right, either. She's only got nine fingers.'

"Now, that was interesting, because it seemed to be a detail no one else knew, not even people in San Francisco. That was when I got curious enough to call you.'

And the rest was history.

Ford said, "You shouldn't make too much of the fact that I helped you with the San Francisco murders, Hailey. I'm a cop. The evidence against you didn't add up, so it just made sense to look into things further. But I also have a lot of sympathy for a pair of pharmaceutical-company truck drivers who were made to lie down in a ditch with a gun at their backs."

I didn't respond to that. A defense of my behavior was also an admission.

"In the legal system, drug- and gang-related crimes are among the least sympathized with. Judges and prosecutors are anxious to look tough on them. If I can convince just one prosecutor that you were in on the truck robberies, do you realize how many charges he can make out of that? Hijacking, armed robbery, a.s.sault, kidnapping, possession with intent to distribute, possession of an unregistered firearm ... That's a long time in prison you're looking at."

"And you'll make it stick how? Gonna get the truck drivers in here for a voice lineup, make me say some Latin words for them?"

"Tell me, where'd you get your law degree?" he said, amused. Then, "Where were you around nine p.m. on Tuesday?"

It took me a moment to adjust to the shift in direction, but I thought back. "I'd only just gotten to Brian's place, in Woodland Hills. You remember, I called you not long after."

"Maybe an hour after," he said. "Are you sure you weren't, at any point, at a rented storage unit off Olympic?"

He knew about the place where Serena stored boxes of pharmaceuticals, her cache of weapons, and her money. "No," I said. "Why?"

"Your good friend Warchild Delgadillo has established quite a successful sideline in marijuana-infused oils. It's apparently been quite a moneymaker for her and a select group of her girls." He raised a pale eyebrow. "How long did you think a lucrative operation like that was going to go unnoticed by higher-ups in the gang underworld?"

"That's your rhetorical way of telling me it didn't?"

"It's a sucker's game, trying to keep a sideline like that unnoticed," he said. "Either you have to stay so small it's not worth the effort, or you come to someone's attention and pay the penalty for not cutting the right people in."

I didn't like where this was going.

"On Tuesday night Warchild went to her garage unit and caught someone breaking in. Maybe she thought he was some random street thief. He wasn't. He was a foot soldier for one of the sureno bosses around here, who sent him to impound everything she had. I guess between back payments and punitive damages, the bosses decided Warchild was in the hundred-percent tax bracket. They wanted everything."

He left unsaid something I was sure he also understood: that Serena, in particular, had to be taught a lesson because she was female.

"What happened?" I said.

"She and this gunny shot at each other."

"Was she hit?"

"No. He was. Warchild fled the scene, but we caught her a few miles away. She's in custody."

Good, I thought. Well, it wasn't good, but at least I knew she was safe.

But then Ford said, "She's facing a homicide charge. The guy she shot died in intensive care."

G.o.d, Serena. Last year, when we were in the thick of our troubles with Skouras, I'd asked her if she'd ever killed anyone, back when she was running with the guys of Trece. She'd evaded the question in a teasing way, and I'd hoped she was being coy. Now I didn't have to hope. Couldn't hope. That line had been crossed.

"It's good she's in custody," Ford said. "La Eme put out a fifty-thousand-dollar hit on her, in retaliation for the foot soldier's life."

"They can't do that," I objected. "She's familia. She's made her bones."

"Of course they can. Who's she going to appeal to, the sureno HR department?" He let that settle. Then he said, "This isn't really about Serena Delgadillo, though. She's not the person I have sitting in front of me. You are."

Before I could adjust to the shift in focus, Ford got to his feet and walked to the interrogation-room mirror. He pressed his face against the gla.s.s to see through.

"Who's in there?"

"No one. I didn't think there was, but sometimes cops get bored, just hang out in there for no good reason, watch the show. I wanted to be sure."

Interesting. Magnus Ford was about to say something that he didn't want his colleagues to hear.

He turned away from the mirror and said, "I'm retiring soon."

"Congratulations?" I offered blankly.

He came back to stand over the table, pulling his billfold out of his jacket. He opened it and laid a business card on the table between us. I picked it up and read it. THE FORD GROUP, it read, in a spare, clean font.

He said, "I'm going into a private line of work. Personal security, surveillance, property recovery, negotiation, ransoms. A kind of private police work that wouldn't have to abide by jurisdictional lines."

"Wow. That must be a generous pension you're getting, to be able to do all that."

There was an answering flash of wry humor in his eyes. "I have financial resources beyond this job. Which I'll be using to hire and to adequately compensate the right people. People with special talents."

He stopped there, went around to the other side of the table, and sat down again. "This is the deal, Hailey: You agree to come work for me and you'll walk out of here. What I know about your crimes as 'Insula,' that retires with me. I won't take it to a prosecutor, and you won't get charged. In addition, I'll make the homicide rap against Warchild go away."

"You can do that?"

"I'm not your average patrolman. I've made some friends in my time in government work."

Not police work, but government work. That was interesting. I filed it away for the future.

He went on, "In addition, I'll get Delgadillo a plane ticket out of state. She won't be safe here, even if she went up to Northern California. There are sureno guys who'd follow her there, for a fifty-thousand-dollar payday."

That was true. I said, "I'm not necessarily saying yes, but why me? I don't have any special talents."

He merely tilted his head.

"Oh, G.o.d," I said. "You know about the brain tumor. That's not a talent. And it won't stay asymptomatic forever. That makes me a relatively short-term investment. I don't see how I could be all that valuable to you."

Ford reached into his coat pocket and took out a Hershey bar, unwrapped it. "Sweet tooth," he said, as if apologizing. "You want some?"

I shook my head.

He broke off a rectangle of chocolate and put it in his mouth, sucked gently for a moment, and swallowed. "In a way you make a good point," he said. "Your lack of fear could be a liability as much as an a.s.set, if it makes you behave in unnecessarily reckless ways. As for your other a.s.sets, you're a good fighter and shooter, but a lot of people have military training. And then you're trilingual, but one of those languages is useless to me. French or German would be far more useful than Latin."

My high-school guidance counselor had argued much the same thing, pushing me to enroll in French courses rather than leave campus and sit in on Latin cla.s.ses at the community college. If only she were here. Vindication at last.

"You have potential," Ford continued, "but that potential remains raw, and it'll take time and work to develop. You are, as you said, an investment."

He'd been thinking about this.

"How long would I be in the service of the"-I glanced at the business card again-"the Ford Group?"

"Well," he said, "given the generous offer I'm making you here, your freedom and Warchild's, plus the resources I'm going to put into your training, to fill in the gaps left by West Point and the streets ... I'd say it's fair to call your term of service 'indefinite.' Put another way, as long as you can realistically commit."

"Realistically commit?" I repeated. "You're talking about the tumor again. Are you saying I'm coming to work with you for the rest of my life?"

"It was you who called yourself a short-term investment. That wasn't me."

"Can I just stop here and congratulate you on your tact? You're really putting on a clinic in sensitivity."

He sighed and lifted a shoulder. "Be that as it may, I'm going to need an answer from you. The prosecutor's office closes in"-he checked the readout on his cell phone-"forty minutes."

I said nothing.

He added, "I should also have mentioned, in addition to the legal considerations you'd get from me for joining up, of course you'd be paid. You might be pleasantly surprised."

He really was offering a lot. But it couldn't exactly be called a choice, and I was pretty tired of being manipulated and boxed into corners.

He was watching me, waiting for me to get uncomfortable and fill the silence. He was very, very still: I'd rarely met anyone who made so few little, incidental movements.

Finally I cleared my throat.

"If I come work for you," I said, "there's one other thing I need, as part of my recruitment package."

His eyebrows rose again, skeptically. "The package I've already offered isn't generous enough for you?"

"This is important. It's something I can't leave unfinished."

"I'll consider it, then. Tell me."

"There's a girl in Serena's neighborhood named Luisa Ramos. She goes by Trippy, though she might have a new moniker now. She used to be a sucia, but now she runs with Tenth Street. She's a figure who's probably beneath your notice, at least for now."

He nodded but said nothing.

"I need your guys in gang intelligence to focus their attention on her and get her off the streets. They won't have to manufacture any charges. If they watch her, she'll give them reason. I think she's a blossoming psychopath."

It wasn't just her attack on me I was thinking of. When she'd had me pinned, Trippy had said, When Warchild's gone, I'm going to run the sucias. Not someday if, but when. It sounded like she'd known that Serena was going away.

The missing detail in Ford's story, about the gunfight at the storage unit, was this: There were many ways the sureno bosses could have found out about Serena's oil-of-chronic trade, but how did the foot soldier know exactly which storage facility, and which unit, was hers? Serena was cagey, and the only person who knew the location of her biggest stash was her lieutenant. That was me, and I hadn't told anyone.

But before me it was Trippy. I felt fairly certain she'd betrayed Serena to La Eme.

Ford tapped the ends of his fingertips together. "You're leaving that world behind you, though. You'll be safe from this girl. So getting her arrested and imprisoned, is that just retaliation for past wrongs?"

I shook my head. "There are other people she could still hurt."

"I see," he said. "And if I do that, you'll come work for me?"

"Yes." Such a small word.

"Done," he said, then he stood up and unlocked me from the D-ring.

I stood up, too, stretching my limbs after such a long time of sitting. "What happens now?"

Ford reached into his coat again and set a pager on the table. "That's yours, as my employee. Don't give the number to anyone else. It's just for me to contact you. It won't be this week, or next week, but when I'm ready, I'll page you." He put his handcuff key back in his pocket. "I'm putting a lot of trust in you, here, that you won't be on the first Greyhound out of town once the charges against Warchild are dropped. So I'd like you to stay in Los Angeles. I'm not saying that I'll be checking up on you, but you might find it wise to remember that I know where you live. In fact, I thought I might give you a ride home, unless there's someone else you'd like to call."

"No," I said. "There isn't."

"All right," he said. "If you're ready, I'll take you to say good-bye to your friend."

EPILOGUE.

1.

Once I was proved innocent, I became the subject of a small media-feeding frenzy. My other life as "Insula" never came out, since only Ford and Joel Kelleher knew that particular detail, and neither of them spoke to the media. Given that, there was nothing to take the l.u.s.ter off my story, which became uncomplicatedly heroic. The Dateline and 20/20 types acted accordingly, immediately revising their take on me to stress my West Point accomplishments (whereas before they stressed my stigmatizing failure to graduate). They drew attention to the "mystery" of my "lost" years, the way I "dropped off the grid" after leaving West Point, then "came virtually out of nowhere" to "run Brittany Mercier literally to the ground on national television." And then, they said dramatically, I walked out of a sheriff's substation a free woman "and, once again, simply disappeared."

Not true, of course. I hadn't gone very far at all, just back to Crenshaw. I cleaned my apartment in antic.i.p.ation of leaving it for good, scrubbing the corners of the kitchen linoleum, chasing dust kitties from under the couch. I ran for miles to stay in shape and did push-ups and sit-ups in my living room, but I stayed away from the Slaughterhouse.