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“Me too, and there it is,” Sampson said. He picked up a folder from his desk. “I’m going to finish here and take Willow for a bike ride after she gets out of school.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “I’ll be home packing for our trip to Notre Dame.”

“Jannie there already?”

“Trained on their track yesterday,” I said. “She says it’s a fast surface and she sounds relaxed and focused.”

“Perfect,” he said. He opened the folder and started reading.

I started to work on various reports concerning the deaths of the John Doe victim, Corey McGovern, Drake Conway, Jeffrey Frost, Dylan Sentinel, Anna Stein, Colin O’Hare, and Egon Brezec. I didn’t get very far.

“I’ll be damned,” Sampson said, breaking my focus. “This changes a whole lot.”

I looked up. “What does?”

My partner was on his feet, grabbing his wallet, phone, and keys. “I’ll explain in the car. We need to go to the Bridge to Nowhere one last time.”

“We’re officially on suspension pending review.”

“And I officially don’t care,” Sampson said. “You coming or not?”

104

IT WAS HOT, PUSHING ninety. And the humidity was so high there by the Anacostia River that the air felt like mist.

When John Sampson and I climbed out of the car, we heard the distant rumble of thunder. The skies were hostile and brooding ahead of an upcoming storm. Once again, we started through the thick brush toward the ghost ramp. There was no breeze in that forlorn place, no relief from the oppressive conditions.

Sweat was pouring off our brows and soaking our collars and the backs of our shirts when we finally stepped out of the vegetation and took in the hulking frame of the Bridge to Nowhere, the massive stanchions, the north and south embankments, the graffiti, and the sections not waiting for demolition but crumbling on their own.

I looked up and spotted Lainey Locket high on her perch in the upper corner of the north embankment, then followed Sampson’s gaze to the south.

“You think Brundage is back up in there?” I asked.

“Released from custody and the hospital yesterday,” Sampson replied.

We walked closer, avoiding the ruts in the old service road, keeping our attention on the shadows until we reached the shade and shelter the ramp provided. Up and down both embankments, people were watching us, all of them probably wondering, worrying, and wanting to be ignored.

We obliged them and paused at the scorched earth where Dylan Sentinel and his Audi had burned and peered up the far embankment toward the lair of the high troll of the south.

In Brundage’s absence, his shelter and belongings had been scavenged.

“How do we find him now?” I asked.

“We’ll figure that out next, sugar,” Sampson said. He turned and led the way up the steep north embankment, past the tents and makeshift shelters and people just lying out, trying not to move in the heat.

New people had taken over Boog’s and Anna’s shelters, but we did not stop to chat with them. We wanted to talk to the high troll of the north.

Lainey Locket was perched in her usual spot, just beneath the tallest part of the Bridge to Nowhere, in the shade of the ramp where that stub of a steel girder jutted out toward the lumberyard, a good sixty feet above the brush and rubble of the decaying ghost ramp.

Wearing a faded blue dress, flip-flops, and a yellow bandanna holding back the riot of her graying mane of hair, Locket stood two steps out on the girder. She watched us with interest when we stopped on a ledge slightly below her and back ten feet.

She held on to a U-shaped piece of rebar overhead with one hand and said, “Detectives. To what do I owe the honor?”

“Just a few lingering things to sort out, Lainey,” Sampson said. “With Brundage gone, do you run the show on both sides of troll town?”

“And what an empire it is,” she replied, amused.

I said, “When was the last time you saw Brundage?”