“We get it, Cindy,” I said. “Take a breath. Let someone else speak!”

“Sorry.” Cindy laughed. “ Sydney,” she said, raising a hand, calling our waitress over, “hit me again, please.”

“Rich and I spent our lunch hour sifting through missing persons and running Bagman’s prints.”

“Your lunch hour. Wow,” Cindy said facetiously.

“Hey, look at it this way,” I said. “We bumped your Bagman to the top of a very thick pile of active cases.”

Cindy gave me a look that said “sorry,” but she didn’t mean it. What a brat. I laughed at her. What else could I do?

“Did you find anything?” she asked.

Conklin told her, “No match to his prints. On the other hand, there are a couple of hundred average-size, brown-eyed white men who’ve gone missing in California over the last decade. I called you at two thirty so you could make your deadline. When you dump your voice mail -”

“Thanks, anyway, Rich. I was interviewing. I turned off my cell.”

More beer came, and as dinner arrived, Cindy served up the highlights of her other interviews at From the Heart. It took a little while, but soon enough I realized that Cindy was pretty much playing to Conklin. So I sawed on my sirloin and watched the two of them interact.

My feelings for my partner had taken a sharp and unexpected turn about a year and a half ago when we were working a case that had brought us to L.A. We had a late dinner, drank some wine, and missed our flight back to San Francisco.

It was late, so I expensed two rooms at the airport Marriott. I was in a bathrobe when Conklin knocked on the door. About two minutes later, we were grappling together on a California King.

I’d hauled up the emergency brake before it was too late, and it felt awful, absolutely wrenching – as wrong as if the sun had gone down in the east.