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notebook. He did not leave with what he came for, but he also did not leave disappointed. Evans had a keen ability to read other people, and he was a man who knew the value of patience.
    Cieloczki had taken Kay to a late dinner that night. “Not Eli’s or the Fishmarket tonight,” Gil had proposed. “Someplace quiet where we can talk.” They had settled on Dannaher’s, a Near North restaurant where the decor favored dark walnut booths and the menu was printed in green. There, nursing a Bushmill’s to Kay’s single glass of burgundy, Cieloczki recounted every detail of Evans’s visit.
    “You want the job,” Kay said, studying her husband over the rim of her wineglass and marveling at how, after eighteen years of marriage, he could still surprise her.
    Cieloczki leaned back and lifted his hands, palms up. “I honestly don’t know,” he said, tacitly acknowledging Kay’s reaction. “And Kay, that surprises me. I’ve never been anything but a Chicago fireman—never wanted to be anything else.” His eyebrows knit together in deep concentration. “Before today, I never considered doing anything else.”
    Kay reached across the table and took his hand.
    • • •
    Later that night, after they had fallen asleep in the warmth of each other, Kay had awakened alone in their bed. Outside the room, light spilled from the stairwell that led down to the living room. Soundlessly, she walked to the head of the stairs.
    There, in a circle of light cast by the reading lamp at Gil’s favorite chair, her husband sat. His eyes looked into some unseen distance, and his forehead was furrowed in deep thought.
    He held something between the fingers of his left hand. From her vantage above and behind him, it looked like a story clipped from a newspaper. But the headline type was large and black, the size usually reserved for major tragedies.

Chapter 7
    Many of those who knew about my father automatically assumed that they had uncovered the motive behind my own actions, even if they were convinced I had long since buried it in my own mind.
    They were perhaps right, though my own opinion is that the grave they had excavated was not as shallow as they thought. But certainly, the fate that Gerald Davey had brought down upon himself—and by extension, on my mother and myself—was the genesis for what had turned into my own sort of Children’s Crusade.
    I understood that. But I also understood something else, all too well. There is a self-knowledge that all zealots possess despite our denials: that buried deep inside each of us is not a revulsion but a secret fascination. The sins we profess to hate the most, we crave to commit ourselves.
    • • •
    “But I saw the story in the newspaper,” Father Frank Bomarito repeated. The priest frowned, his face no longer the non-judgmental mask it had been as he listened to the recitation of my sins. “You were acquitted.”
    We were sitting in the rear pews, near the sacristy. It was dark here, lighted only by votive candles that flickered red and blue beneath statues of saints and virgins. At the front of the church near the altar, a single taper burned white over the tabernacle, signaling to the faithful that the Host was present inside.
    “Yes,” I said. “Otherwise, I would be in prison right now.”
    “I haven’t asked if you were guilty,” the priest said carefully.
    “No,” I said. “You haven’t.”
    He waited.
    “I didn’t go in there intending to keep any money,” I said, finally. “I know that for certain. But when I walked out, I had five thousand dollars in my pocket. And I remember thinking that nobody knew. Except for people who didn’t particularly care.”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know, Father. Was I tempted? Yes. Definitely. Is that why I didn’t turn it over to…to the people I was working with? I tell myself no; I tell myself I wanted to come up with better evidence. Maybe mark the bills myself, use them for bait.”
    “But you suspect that