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We pushed through a tangle of vines and brush to find Detectives Hayes and Winthrop with their weapons aimed at the homeless former detective, who’d been shot through the right arm and was bleeding badly. I went to Brundage, took off my jacket, and pressed it against the wound while Sampson called for an ambulance.

“You had to shoot him?” I asked the detectives.

“He shot first,” Hayes said.

“I did not shoot at you, bonehead,” Brundage said through gritted teeth. “I shot at O’Hare after he shot at me!”

Winthrop shook her head. “We never saw O’Hare.”

“Really?” Sampson demanded. “I sure as hell saw one very big dude go over that cemetery fence before Brundage did.”

“Never saw him,” Hayes insisted. “Must have been a football player or something.”

“It was O’Hare!” Brundage said again. “He came through the Bridge to Nowhere two hours ago and I’ve been following him ever since. I know who I was after.”

“Security cameras will tell us the truth,” Sampson said.

“You saying we’re lying?” Winthrop said. “Is that it?”

“Not lying,” I said as sirens came at us from a dozen directions. “Just mistaken. Possibly. We’ll know soon enough. Why didn’t you wait for us, Sean?”

Brundage grimaced and then sighed. “I wanted that citizen’s arrest, Cross. I wanted something that could help me get my old life back.”

Tommy Hayes laughed caustically. “When hell freezes over, that’s when you’ll get your old life back, Brundage. Assault with a deadly weapon will get you multiple years behind bars in the meantime. You can wait for the big cooldown in prison.”

Sampson turned to Hayes. “Anybody ever tell you you’re kind of an asshole?”

“Quite often, actually,” Hayes said. “But ask me if I care.”

I said, “You’ll care if the security cams show O’Hare was right here and you let him go because you had a vendetta against Brundage.”

“Not going to happen,” Winthrop said.

“Not a chance,” Hayes said.

But if I were a betting man, I’d have put quite a lot on there being a very good chance indeed.

Sampson and I saw Brundage into an ambulance with a uniformed officer escorting him, then went to the campus police office and had them pull up the video from the security cameras starting from the time Winthrop and Hayes called for the active-shooter alert. Winthrop and Hayes were right behind us.

A camera on the performing arts building caught a full-face view of Colin O’Hare running into the alley toward the Jesuit cemetery less than a minute before Sean Brundage appeared in pursuit.

“Wait until Internal Affairs gets hold of this,” Sampson said to Winthrop and Hayes, who stood there sober and chagrined.

“Says a lot about your judgment, Detectives,” I said as they stared at the image of O’Hare. “None of it good. First you blew off a serious investigation into the first victim, then you botched this job. And now we’re back to square one with the real Firebug.”

92

I WAS BITTERLY DISAPPOINTED that Colin O’Hare had eluded us and still worried about the missing kids, but when I got home, I set my concerns aside and gave my grandmother and father the good news that I was closer to locating Charlie.

“I found his old baseball coach’s jacket in a place he stays in from time to time,” I said.

I did not mention that the first Firebug victim had died behind that same place or that my brother’s jacket had been lying on the floor six feet from a dead real estate developer.

“He sure could hit a baseball,” my dad said. “I remember Charlie was the best of you boys at that.”

“Really tore the cover off the ball,” I agreed. “And he had range. Excellent shortstop.”

Dad got wistful. “I would have loved to see that. And you playing basketball. And every other moment I missed.”