When Corinne poked her head into Saffy’s office, Saffy was massaging her temples, a headache looming. Corinne insisted on her first name—for this reason she evaded much of the troopers’ ribbing and leering, the address too feminine, brash and awkward on their tongues.
“Sit,” Saffy said.
“I’ve been reviewing the defense,” Corinne said, letting out a sigh. “It’s not good, Captain. If the DA can’t get the witnesses to talk again, I don’t think we can either.”
“We’re missing something,” Saffy said.
“Probably,” Corinne told her. “If so, it’s buried deep.”
Out in the bullpen, Saffy could hear the familiar hoot and holler of the boys, rowdy as always. Things had surely been different for Corinne in the NYPD, where Saffy had plucked her from the lower ranks—back in the Bronx, Corinne wasn’t nearly so isolated as a Black woman. Sometimes Saffy wondered if Corinne regretted moving here, accepting Saffy’s mentorship. Saffy had long been grappling with the contradictions of her job: the privileges her badge allowed, the fact that prisons were filled almost entirely with Black and brown people. She had felt the constant sting of ignorant people, the malicious and the well-meaning alike—she knew what it meant, to keep a gun on her hip. With Corinne here, Saffy felt distinctly less alone.
“We could go for intent this time around,” Corinne suggested. “All those calls Marjorie made to the police, the domestic incidents. We could lean harder on that, try to dig up more. But prosecution knows it’s shaky.”
Saffy pictured Greg Lawson’s face. Pale and pudgy, swollen alcoholic. Just another bad man, his head hung morose as he pled with the jury. This job was getting to her. Not the bodies, or the missing children, or the rampant opioids. It was this. Men like Lawson, who believed their very existences afforded them lawlessness. Men who had been handed the world, trashed it, and still demanded more.
“Are you okay?” Corinne asked, standing to leave.
Some nights after work, Saffy and Corinne drove to the diner down the highway for cheesecake and coffee—the same diner where Angela Meyer had gone missing. They speculated new suspects; they belabored old hunches. The case for Izzy, Angela, and Lila was still open, though no one had touched it in years; Saffy had outlined the basics for Corinne, painting Ansel Packer as one promising suspect in a pool of cold leads.
“I need your help with something else,” Saffy said, before Corinne could leave. “Shut the door.”
*
Saffy’s house felt particularly empty that night. She kicked off her shoes, locked her badge and gun in the front hall cabinet. The silence was oppressive—in the half-light of dusk, her living room looked sparse and lifeless, furniture looming in twilight shadow. She flopped onto the couch, pulled her phone from her pocket, and opened her personal email, the room glowing blue as her inbox refreshed.
Nothing.
The woman said it could take a while, Kristen had told her, attempting reassurance. The agency had been Kristen’s idea—she’d first mentioned it as they opened the box of decorative pillows they’d ordered from India. Saffy was renovating, with Kristen’s help, relying on her friend’s impeccable eye for color. A few years ago, when Saffy first started researching Indian culture—religion and art, geography and food, the basics that might have been passed on by her father—she had commissioned a framed painting of Jaipur, done by a Rajasthani artist. She’d hung it on the wall in her bedroom, an instinctual comfort she often studied as she fell asleep.
Saffy knew very little about her father. Only that he’d been a visiting student in the same University of Vermont sociology program as her mother, a young man from Jaipur who’d returned before she was born. Shaurya Singh. A recent cursory search had pulled up hundreds of men—the name, she read, translated roughly to bravery, and she pictured that strength coursing through her own bloodstream.
She refreshed her inbox now, more anxious than she’d ever admit. The agency had warned it could take months, even years, to locate a birth parent. Saffy didn’t know if her mother had shared the news of her pregnancy—if that was why he left—or whether her father was aware she existed at all. She should prepare for bad news. But none had come. She scrolled her inbox first thing every morning, all scattered hope as she scanned for the agency’s logo. It had been over six weeks.
Saffy knew she should make dinner. A frozen pizza. She should change out of her rumpled work clothes, run a comb through her hair. Instead, she texted Corinne, who would be home by now, eating dinner or watching TV or jogging through the fields behind her wife’s family farm.