Koko’s cynicism and anger were palpable. But his son had been killed in Iraq, and I had come to believe that his daily assault on the sensibilities of others was his own strange way of asking for help.

The grass was green and the sun was shining outside my window, but when Koko spread his buttocks on a chair in front of my desk, the sun might just as well have gone into eclipse. He took a huge drag off his cigarette, his brow furrowing as though his inhalation of cancer-causing chemicals were a moment of metaphysical importance.

“Would you not smoke in here?” I said.

He took a coffee cup off my desk and ground out his cigarette in it. “You want the post on the Darbonne girl or you want to tell me you don’t have bad habits?” he asked.

“I’m happy you came by.”

“Right. The lab call you yet?”

“Nope.”

“We swabbed both her hands. She was the shooter. It’s down as a suicide.”

“You’re sure?”

“You don’t have confidence in the atomic absorption test?”

“Let’s get something straight on this one, Koko. I appreciate the work you do. But I want the abrasive rhetoric out of my face.”

I could hear the hum of the air conditioner in the silence. “There is no false positive here. She had powder residue on both hands. She inverted the pistol and fired it straight into her forehead. It’s a suicide, plain and simple.”

“Her father said she didn’t drink or use. She was planning to start college. Why does a kid like that want to blow herself away? How did she end up in her own yard with a revolver her father never saw before?”