The department smells like cigarette butts. It’s busy for an early afternoon; it takes me a befuddling few seconds to find an open hook on the coat rack. Usually more of these men would be out on patrol. Instead, everyone’s either in the middle of a phone call or waiting for one. The interrogation room’s closed and occupied; Doyle’s office is shuttered off from the world. Only Santos notices our entrance, and he acknowledges it with a mere wave and a grunt on his way to the break room.

“We’re working on a rash of new drug leads,” Dave says, putting a hand on my shoulder and speaking to me in confidence. “Marko’s little incident was the talk of the local news last night, and all that press got our tip lines going. You know how it is.”

“There’s nothing better than an idiot doing something stupid and violent to drum up our business.” My desk is covered in various colors of paper. To an outsider, it might look like I’ve been gone for a month. “And yet Doyle still had you working the Varros suicide?”

Dave stops in his tracks at the name, looking at me with a twitch in his eye until he’s sure I’m not going to start talking secrets here. “Yeah,” he manages to say. “Told me to make it a priority until it was closed.”

“What a surprise.” I begin to form stacks from the paper in front of me, crafting a hierarchy of importance on the fly. It doesn’t take much to imagine Doyle getting a call from one of his superiors about the case, right after that superior received a call from Flytech’s military mouthpiece, Captain Frost.

“You know Doyle,” Dave says, a little too loudly. “Always the completionist.”

“The drug thing’s your dead horse,” I say, matching his volume. We’re acting like we’re under surveillance, but no one’s so much as glanced in our direction since we walked in. “He should let you beat it.”

Dave laughs, but only for a moment. Something on his desk catches his attention; his eyes droop as he reads. “Hospital report on Janeane. The girl in the drug thing.”

“I know. How is she?” I remember the last time I saw her, with the blood streak on the wall behind her. I remember the mask on her face that I thought I saw, too. I’ve almost convinced myself that sleep deprivation explains that better than anything else.

“Stable.” He folds the report and puts it in his coat.

I wait a moment, until I’m sure he won’t elaborate. “That’s a hell of a lot better than dead,” I say.

He glances at me as I cough into my hand. “Yeah,” he says.

“Burleigh!”

I crane my neck. Lieutenant Doyle is standing just inside his office, holding the door open. He’s trying to grow that ugly, patchy beard again. I’ve told Dave before, though he’s never laughed, that Doyle thinks it’s the best defense against all those chins.

“Yes, sir?”

“Could I see you in my office, detective?”

I turn to Dave. “Run those books some time today. I’m going to get out of here once I’m finished talking to the lieutenant.”

Dave nods. “Alright, then. Say hi to Katie for me, yeah?”

It takes me a moment to craft the response. “You do the same for Rachel,” I say. “Tell her I might even buy the tux, if you keep asking nicely.” I hope that ends the tangent. I’m already walking away from the desk; he can’t ask me about Sarah. Not now.

I’m half a step into Doyle’s office when Dave calls back to me, flipping a hand in my direction. “You’re buying the damn tux,” he says. “If you show up in that coat, I’m asking the priest to kick your ass out.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but that’s just the means to the end. It’s the facilitation of a cover up.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Flytech wouldn’t be interested in just helping a pedophile cover up his crimes.” Dave shakes his head; he’s smiling, but he’s not amused. “Those ‘means’ you’re talking about? That’s their crime. Shit, they might as well have lobotomized Frank.” The smile disappears, and Dave looks out the window, towards the highway and the cloudless sky. “I want to know how they did it, I want to know why they did it, and I want to know what they’re planning next.”

“Next?” The hunger must be slowing me down; Dave’s moving through all the steps, climbing the ladder without checking to see if I’m lagging behind. “You’re looking at it like it’s a conspiracy?”

“Aren’t you?” Dave laughs. He’s on an adrenaline rush; I’ve seen it before, back when he tried to explain to me how Los Pintos was controlled by a phantom drug kingpin and his minions. Dave loves his conspiracies. “Come on, how tired are you, Jake?”  ”You said it yourself when you spoke to that shrink. They have a military contract and they have their claws in the police department. They’ve cut off suspicion at the source. She told you this was the experimental phase. Well, if this is the early testing, what the fuck is the final product?”

I shake my head and let myself smile. It would have been smart to bring Dave on this, even if he hadn’t found the journal. His mind’s right to tackle this. “You’re probably right, Dave, but I don’t think it changes what we do next. We still need to prove that Frank’s the real Dollhouse Killer.”

Dave nods. He’s relaxed again, resigning himself to taking a thoughtful bite of his salad.”Sure. It’s the only concrete lead we have on their process.”

“Right.” I listen for a moment to the sound of some children on the other side of the restaurant. They’re complaining about the toy in their meals, trying to steal each others’ bounty. My tray is now a cratered war zone of unwrapped paper and grease stains; I’d rather belch than cough at the moment, which is, relatively speaking, a wonderful feeling. “I’m going to talk to Stacy Pierce.”

“Frank’s last victim? Why?”

“She’s the last person we know for a fact to have had contact with Frank before Flytech got to him.”  “The police couldn’t have even touched Frank, or else he would have been somewhere in the San Alto case file.”

Dave shakes his head. “She’s a kid, Jake.” He takes a sip from his bottle of iced tea. “I’d imagine she was in shock during the entire abduction. She won’t know anything.”

He’s right, of course. I shrug. “It’s still the best lead we have.”

Dave nods and wipes his mouth with the only napkin that I didn’t steal from his tray. “Well, follow it tomorrow. You’ve been through enough hell so far. We can add ‘conversation with pedophilic-killer victim’ to the checklist after you’ve rested up.”

“Let’s get back to the department first. I should make a cameo appearance, for the lieutenant’s sake, before I head home.” I stand up, pulling on the coat I’ve draped over the seat behind me. “You should look into the books on Flytech. We’ll want corporate hierarchy and history, other connections, whatever else you can find. I haven’t had the time to do that legwork since this whole thing started.”

“Glad to know you’re relegating me to the desk, Jake.” Dave’s grinning like a coke fiend in the middle of a fix. He’s at the heart of something huge and he knows it; if this goes somewhere, he’ll be done chasing after ghosts in meth labs. “I’ll officially close the case on the Varros suicide. They’ll know what we have when we’re ready to show it to them.”

“Perfect,” I say. For the first time in days, I feel prepared for what’s next. “Now let’s get moving.”

Frank shouldn’t have been worried about one thing, at least: the kid janitor at the burger joint gives everyone that dirty look. He gave one to me, at least, though he could just as well have been casting judgment for the pile of sandwiches and French fries on my overburdened plastic tray.

There was never an Anna Varros, and Frank had no children. None of his own. That much I knew, even before Dave told me he’d checked.

There are too many people here: families with screeching children and oversized parents and everyone yelling at everyone else to get out of the way or to listen up. On any other day I’d prefer eating in the middle of a sewage pipe, but right now I’m too hungry to give a shit about the circus. Still, I take a seat as far from the chaos as I can manage, at a two-seat booth pressed against the window, and I eat the way dogs eat.

I’ve half-finished the first burger by the time Dave sits across from me and opens the plastic top on his salad. We’ve already been speaking for an hour; I’ve been doing most of the talking. He knows almost everything that I know, but I don’t know what he thinks about any of it yet.

“Jesus, Jake,” he says. I don’t bother to look up to see if he’s amused or disgusted. “When was the last time you ate?”

“I don’t know,” I say between bites. “Hard to say.”

He doesn’t say anything, which I take as a cue to finish the hamburger. The beef is thin and dry and there’s too much mayonnaise slathered against the flimsy lettuce. It’s the most delicious hamburger I’ve ever eaten.

“So,” Dave says, “what was your plan going to be, before I called?”

“I was going to call you, actually.” I stop to wipe my mouth with one of Dave’s napkins. I didn’t take the time to grab any of my own. “And the plan is that I’m going to prove that Frank killed those girls. Those bastards at Flytech let a guilty man go free. Not only that, but they let another man confess to the guilty man’s crimes. That’s more than enough for me.”

Dave stares at me. I don’t think he cares much about my food intake anymore. “That’s what you care about?”

“What do you mean?”

He sets his fork down and folds his fingers together. His elbows are pinned against the edge of the table. “They didn’t let Frank ‘go free,’ Jake. They tore into him first. They screwed him up.”

I shrug. “They stuck him in an interrogation device. I was in there, too, remember? They got the information he wasn’t willing to give, and then they just let him go.” I start to unwrap the greasy packaging on another burger. “Or he escaped, I don’t know.”

“He didn’t get out free, God damn it.” He’s loud enough that I hold up my hand. We look together at the crowds around us, but no one’s looking back at us. It’s hard to alarm the cattle as they’re feeding.

I watch Dave. His eyes are pinpoints and his left hand is balled into a trembling fist. He’s more intent on this than I was, probably because he has more of the energy required for outrage.

Dave continues, though he cranes his neck closer to the center of the table. “You read the journal, Jake. They fucked his mind. Frank knew he was Julian Varros. He had a whole family back story that he believed wholesale. Then he didn’t know who the fuck he was, and then he shot his brains into a broom closet. Flytech did that to him.”