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please,” Sasso said, and almost smiled despite himself. He’d always had a soft spot for Behr, even back when Behr was a complete newbie and they’d first been paired up. They’d spent countless nights cruising the streets of what used to be referred to as the “Spaghetti Bowl”—the place where a bunch of interstates and main thoroughfares twisted together. They mopped up blood and hauled in DWIs, barroom brawlers, and wannabe gangsters. And while they rode, Sasso kept up that steady patter of “rules to live by.” Like
“The faster you finish the fight, the less shot you will get,”
and
“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
    “What do you want with it anyway?” Sasso asked, putting the drive on the bar top. “Shouldn’t you stick to the neck brace and rusty zipper cases?”
    “Probably.”
    “Department wouldn’t give you the files directly?”
    Behr shook his head.
    “So you figured ‘use your old T.O.’?”
    “Yeah,” Behr said, “I know you keep good ties.”
    “Yes,
I
do. Because people—regular people—keep up friendships, relationships, warm human contact.”
    “Uh-huh,” Behr said.
    “Like I tried to do with you, long after you gave it up.”
    “I didn’t give it up,” Behr said. “It just … went.”
    Back after his first son had just died, Behr seemed to systematically burn down everything around him. He hoped that time was past.
    “I wouldn’t wish what happened to you on my worst enemy. But it’s been a while now, Frank. I gave you all the space you asked for, and then some. And you had plenty of chances to come find me, buy me a drink, and make things right. Instead you did what you did, you let a quarter of a lifetime go by, and now you show up for this.” Sasso put a finger on the flash drive and slid it across the bar.
    “Thank you,” Behr said, taking it. “And I get it, Gene. I’ll come buy you that drink one day.”
    Sasso nodded, and Behr, not knowing what else to say, left.

18
    Nothing like the smell of formaldehyde in the morning
, Frank Behr thought to himself as he entered the brown brick building that housed the coroner’s office, though the place didn’t smell
only
like formaldehyde. Truth was it smelled like overcooked ground beef.
    “How are you? Frank Behr to see Jean Gannon,” Behr said to the middle-aged woman sitting at the reception desk. He hadn’t been in touch with his friend Jean, a forensic pathologist for the city, in a while and it’d be good to catch up in person before he asked for her help. Behr had a small sack of chocolate truffles and a few airplane-size bottles of Grand Marnier in one coat pocket, the bag holding the hairbrush in the other. It was his custom to bring Jean gifts when she was doing him off-the-books favors. The fact that he had clearance on this one didn’t stop him from keeping up the tradition.
    “Jean’s not here,” the receptionist told him.
    “Not here as in out getting a coffee, or not at work today?” Behr wondered, glancing at the trophy case across the lobby that held macabre souvenirs of past deaths—a piece of plastic a child had choked on, a length of rebar that had impaled a construction worker, a paper-like hood of dried facial skin, including the nose, of a burn victim. Morgue workers had a specialized sense of humor.
    “Not here at all anymore,” she answered. “Jean took early retirement a few months ago and left the office.”
    “What?” Behr uttered. He wasn’t surprised often, but this got him. Jean had loved her work. The sense of time moving by was ablow to him. Then there was the fact he no longer had a connection in the coroner’s office.
    “I know,” the receptionist said, then rolled her chair to a bulletin board and took down a business card. “Here,” she said, passing it to him. “This is where she’s working now.”
    The card read: Scanlon Brothers, Mortuary and Funeral Home.
    “Here,” Behr said, placing the chocolates and