“Outdoor burning’s illegal,” Bob said.

“I’m getting ready to throw some hot dogs on the grill.”

“You don’t eat hot dogs.”

“Salmon, then.”

At six-two, the veteran detective had nine inches on Abigail in height, and, although he was pushing fifty, he could run ten miles and still move the next day. He’d taught her how to use free weights properly, and he’d taught her crime scene investigation. She’d taught him what it was like to lose someone to violence.

She’d taught him that seven years was the blink of an eye.

A page, filled with bloodred ink, went up in flames.

As I regain consciousness, I feel the ice pack on the lump on the back of my head and almost vomit from the raging pain of my concussion.

“Don’t move,” my husband tells me quietly. “An ambulance is on the way.”

I try to tell him that I’m fine, but I become very still as I notice the anger in his face. The knowledge. The awful sense of betrayal.

He knows who did this to me.

Bob pointed at the five-pound Folgers coffee can that she had set on the plastic chair, behind the stack of spiral notebooks. “What’s that for?”

“The ashes.”

“Come again?”

“I’m performing a cleansing ritual.”

“A firebug I arrested ten years ago said the same thing.”

“This is different,” Abigail said, watching the pages blacken and burn. Once Bob left, she’d finish tearing up the last two notebooks, burn their pages, rid herself of their raw emotion.

Detective Bob O’Reilly of the BPD wouldn’t understand cleansing rituals.