Chapter 29: Badge

Dez didn't argue.

He unclipped the badge from his belt and put it in the commander's hand.

Then he took the gun out of its holster, dropped the magazine, cleared it and handed both over.

The cameras got all of it.

I opened my mouth.

"Don't," Dez said quietly, without looking at me.

"He saved my life," I said to the commander anyway.

The commander looked at me.

"Ma'am, this is a department matter."

He turned and walked away with Dez's badge in his coat pocket.

Dez stood in the hallway with his hands at his sides.

That night his mother called me.

"He's in his apartment with the lights off," she said.

"Eating seeds and watching the Bulls lose. He hasn't done that since he was nineteen. Do something."

"I'm going to."

"Good. What?"

"I'm going to need a lot of paper," I said.

On Tuesday morning at ten I walked into the district station on the South Side.

I wasn't alone.

Nessa came first, with her caseworker, in a new coat from Mom, carrying a cardboard tube.

Then the woman with the reading glasses from the tip line, with a shopping bag full of folders.

Then the families.

The foundation's DNA bank had matched three of the seven children over the weekend.

A mother from Gary who'd lost her son at a bus stop when he was two.

A father and grandmother from Milwaukee, for the thirteen-year-old.

And the littlest one's mother, who'd driven all night from Indianapolis and came straight from his hospital bed with her coat buttoned wrong.

Brendan held the door for all of them.

He'd driven them all down in a Devlin Freight van.

The front desk sergeant looked at the crowd coming through his door and stood up slowly.

"Can I help you?"

"I need to see the commander," I said. "And I'd like the unit to be there."

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