“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ve already been in.”

“No, don’t do that,” said Shigawa’s partner, coming to join us. His name tag identified him as Schiller.

“Somebody’s got to,” I said.

“In a couple of hours it’ll be daywatch,” Schiller said. “The county can send some divers out. They’re trained for this.” Schiller was clearly a newly minted EMT, and I’d seen the expression on his face before, a hard fixed look that young rookie cops affect when they don’t want the world to see that the job hasn’t made them jaded and world-weary yet.

I shook my head. “No. This can’t wait.”

“Why can’t it?” Schiller asked, his face empty with incomprehension.

I did not want to put my body back in that opaque, dirty water, did not want to get it in my ears and eyes again. But I had to. In my mind was the image of a child’s body under that brackish water, scudding along the bottom of the canal, perhaps sucked against some natural barrier or manmade screen, hair floating, maybe rolling over and over like a log for hours. I couldn’t imagine leaving him or her there, like a piece of trash, while we went off for dry clothes and breakfast. I tried to find the words to express that to Schiller and couldn’t. But I didn’t have to.

“If you don’t understand why, she can’t explain it to you,” Shigawa said.

There was a beat of silence as Schiller looked away from me, to his partner, registering the minor betrayal. “You don’t have to take an attitude about it, Nate,” he said, and walked away.

I swung a leg over the railing again.

“I’ll be right up here,” Shigawa said.

“I know,” I said. “See you soon.”

In the end, we had the whole 911 experience, a fire engine and an MPD cruiser joining the ambulance at the scene. The MPD officers were Roz, a sergeant in her fifties with short sandy hair, a former K-9 handler rumored to have no less than eight dogs at home. She was acting as the field training officer for a rookie, Lockhart, who looked like a teenage girl in a police officer’s uniform.