Clemens sat in the kitchen at his laptop, working on his notes, while I was on the couch. He thought I was reading, but I was thinking about Juanda Tillery and her reaction to the fact that we were digging up the past. She didn’t want any part of it. She was scared. You could see it on her face. She acted all mad, but you could see the fear behind it.

Made me think of Tracey and Boo, how they never stuck their neck out. Would never say Daddy had an alibi and was with them on Sonoma Street when the shooting went down. They’d been afraid, too. Even Miss Lola, the way she talked about police being in her home, pressuring Monique, she had the fear.

Juanda, Tracey, Boo, and Miss Lola. Everyone was so scared. The thing is, it was mainly fear of police, and that’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about on the couch while Clemens typed.

Police — you’re supposed to trust them. They make you safe. But it’s like Juanda and the others, they’ve seen too much. Seen police take Romero Taylor and arrest him for something he didn’t do. Seen police pressure kids into lying so they can win a trial and put the wrong person in prison. Most people probably think police have solved a horrible murder by catching Daddy. But people in my neighborhood know different. The street knows, like Juanda said.

So they’re afraid, a fear that turns everything on its head. Instead of trusting police, there’s mistrust. Instead of feeling safe, there’s fear. It’s ironic when you think about it. Irony — when there’s a difference between what you expect and what actually is. I learned about irony in school this year from my English teacher.

But this situation goes beyond being just ironic. Because when there’s a shooting, the police chief goes on TV saying people with information need to come forward. Police can’t do it alone, he says. The neighborhood’s got to do its part. He’s like blaming the neighborhood. It’s unbelievable. Because he’s leaving something really important out. People are only gonna come forward if they trust police. But people like Juanda, Tracey, Boo, and Miss Lola have seen police twist their words, or lie, or bully them. And no one ever seems to point this out when the chief starts complaining. Makes me so mad. You gotta be able to trust police — and you gotta fix that problem — before you get all huffy on TV about cooperation.

I looked across the room at Clemens. I was about to get up and go tell him what I was thinking, get these ideas off my chest. I was going to say it’s the kind of thing a reporter could be pointing out to the chief at one of those press conferences when the chief is mainly dumping on the neighborhood. But before I could, the phone rang.

Clemens picked up. He nodded a few times, then put the phone down.

“It’s Nora,” he said to me. “She’s got something.”

When Clemens and I made it down the marble stairs to Nora’s basement office, we found Nora leaning against the doorjamb, waiting for us. She was dangling a piece of paper at arm’s length. The look on her face, and the way she held the paper away from her, it was like she was holding something rotten. She might as well have been pinching her nose.

She even said, as she waved the paper in our faces, “This stinks.”

Nora turned and walked inside. We followed her. Nora flattened the document on a table. I recognized it at once as a Form 26 report from the Boston Police Department. And in the space at the top of the page to describe the subject of the report, someone had typed in: “Ruby Graham Shooting on August 20, 1988.”

“I found this in the batch of Form 26s you got from your source,” Nora said. “It was not in the original pile Boston Police gave me when I became Romero’s attorney.”

Clemens and I leaned forward. It was short, only a half page long, typewritten, and the police officer who prepared it began, “I respectfully submit that I was in an unmarked cruiser in the Roxbury area when a description was broadcast to be on the lookout for a white Suzuki Samurai seen in the vicinity of a shooting on Humboldt. Said vehicle was described as containing an unknown black male.”

I looked up. “I remember reading about a Suzuki in other reports. Some of the kids at the corner said they saw a Suzuki farther down Humboldt.”

The officer’s report continued. “I observed a Suzuki fitting the description and followed it along Blue Hill Ave toward Devon Street. Without blue lights, I followed the motor vehicle that took a right onto Devon. I turned my blue lights on, pulled out in front, and forced motor vehicle to the left side of street. Officer investigated and was able to identify the driver.”

Clemens began rubbing his forehead. My eyes widened.

“Driver was identified as Lamar ‘Thumper’ Parish.”

Clemens exhaled deeply. “Holy smokes.”

“See what I mean?” Nora said.

The Form 26 had one more sentence. But it wasn’t anything explaining why Thumper Parish was driving around Humboldt in a Suzuki Samurai. Instead, the Form 26 just ended abruptly: “After investigation, driver was able to leave scene.”

“Just like that, ‘able to leave scene,’” Nora said. “Gimme a break.”

But that wasn’t all. The name of the officer signing the report at the bottom of the page hit like a bolt of lightning: “Submitted by Det. Richard Boyle, Badge #9384.”

“Richie Boyle,” I said in disbelief.

“So many questions,” Nora said. “So few answers.”

“Clemens, what’s going on?” I said.

Clemens was shaken. “I don’t know.”

I looked at Clemens, then at Nora. “Richie stops Thumper in a white Suzuki that police are looking for, then lets him go? What’s that about? Why would Richie let Thumper go?”

Nora shrugged. She looked at Clemens. Clemens gritted his teeth.

Clemens squeezed a copy of the Form 26 in one hand as he gripped the steering wheel of his Volvo and drove to Richie Boyle’s house. He was so intent and lost in thought, he didn’t see what I saw — or thought I saw. We’d taken a turn, and, racing past a side street, I spotted a shiny black Mercedes at the intersection. I turned my head quickly to get a better look, but Clemens was driving too fast. Thumper? I felt a chill shoot up my neck, even if I couldn’t tell for sure.

“You see that?” I said.

“What?” Clemens said.

“The Mercedes back there. The black Mercedes.”

“No.”

I wondered if I’d imagined it. Clemens was no help. In the time I’d known him and we’d become friends, I’d never seen him like this. I didn’t know if the anger came from feeling our story was maybe slipping away. Juanda Tillery had shut us down, Tracey Dailey wasn’t fully on board, and we still had no idea where Travis Golson was. Or if it was because of Richie, and Clemens was feeling like he’d been betrayed. I just couldn’t tell. I only knew Clemens was not happy about the way things were going.

Clemens wasn’t the only one. Retired Detective Boyle was not too happy to see it was us pounding on his front door. No bear hug this time for Clemens — way past that. No invitation to come inside, either. But Clemens didn’t wait for one. He brushed past Richie and stepped into the living room. Before I followed, I looked up and down the street. No sign of the black Mercedes.

Inside Richie’s, things looked different. The big picture on the wall was gone. The picture of Richie, Frank Flanagan, and other police receiving a public service award for taking down George “G-man” Whigham and his drug operation. Now there was only a shadowy outline where it had once hung. There were other changes, too. Some cardboard boxes were scattered around, some of which were partly filled.

Even the police radio, which was blaring last time, was turned off.

“Goin’ somewhere?” Clemens said.

“Thinkin’ ’bout it,” Richie said. “Maybe someplace the sun always shines.”

I pointed to the wall. “What happened to G-man?”

Richie frowned. “Huh?”

“Your big award — the one you got for arresting George Whigham?”

He ignored me. Nothing had changed much from our first visit.

Clemens said, “That was a big one, Richie, a career highlight — the G-man bust. Thing is, I don’t think you ever told me the whole drama. Told me plenty of other stories. You loved talking about your war stories. But the G-man bust, never heard much about that one, how you guys figured out where G-man was holed up with what turned out to be an arsenal of guns and a new shipment of drugs.”

Richie wasn’t in a hospitable mood.

“Okay, Clemens. You and your junior reporter here, whaddya want?”

Clemens gently placed the Form 26 on the table.

“Where’d you get that?” Richie said.

“Richie, c’mon. I got sources.”

Richie shot Clemens a look.

Clemens said, “You never told us you knew Thumper Parish.”

“What’s to tell?”

I had a hard time keeping still. “Really?”

Richie kept his calm. “My job was to know the street players, talk ’em up, try to establish some kind of rapport. Thumper’s a player. Big deal.”

“Thumper’s not just any player,” I said.

Richie glared at me.

Clemens said, “Says here you stopped Thumper in a Suzuki.”

Richie acted like he was reading the document. “Yeah.”

“Says you let him go ‘after investigation.’”

“Yeah.”

“Richie, what’s that mean?”

Richie tilted his head, rubbed his chin.

“Richie?”

“It means I conferred with Flanagan.”

“Conferred?”

“Yeah, conferred. You know, talked!” Richie looked agitated. “Christ, Clemens, we were responding to a shooting — god-awful shooting of a little girl. It was chaos. All hands on deck. Flanagan was coordinating. So, yeah, I called in — I conferred.”

“How come none of that’s in your Form 26?”

Richie shook his head. “Clemens, it’s just a summary, not War and Peace.”

Clemens would have none of it.

“Why did you let Thumper go, Richie?”

Richie stared at Clemens. “No comment.”

“Was it Flanagan? He tell you to let him go?”

“I’m not gonna answer that.”

“Well, you just did,” Clemens said. He looked at Richie. “You stop Lamar Parish, let him go? Your Form 26 gets buried? You never tell us any of this?”

Clemens’s voice was filled more with disappointment than anger.

He continued. “You know, Richie, right off you made it clear you didn’t like me and Trell digging around on this thing. Then you-know-who starts popping up, makin’ it clear he doesn’t like it either. Something’s going on, Richie.”

“Whaddya talkin’ about?”

Clemens told him about Thumper Parish bursting into Tracey Dailey’s place looking for me, and, before that, Thumper doing a drive-by in his shiny black Mercedes past my house when we were leaving for the prison to see Daddy. He told him about two of Thumper’s guys going after Daddy in the prison cafeteria.

I jumped in. “I think I saw the Mercedes on the way over here.”

Richie began pacing in circles. A pained look came over his face. The veins in his neck pulsed, and he began rubbing his hands. It was like he wanted to tell us something, but all he said was, “You two gotta go.”

Clemens bowed his head. I picked the Form 26 off the table, and we headed for the door. Clemens stopped suddenly and blurted out, “Travis Golson.”

“That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while,” Richie said. Maybe Richie was caught off guard, or maybe he wanted to somehow make nice.

“Know where he might be, Richie?” Clemens said. “Can you tell us that?”

Richie shrugged. “Naw. Last time I saw him, I think, was in Roxbury District Court. He’d caught a bunch of cases, faced some serious stuff. Not pretty.”

“Ohh” is all Clemens said.

When Clemens basically went mute, I knew his mind was already spinning off in a new direction. I knew that because my mind took off, too. I’d learned a lot in the past month and was starting to think I had a knack for this. Court files include a ton of personal information. I’d learned that from reading Daddy’s records. So, when Richie said Travis Golson had cases in Roxbury court, I knew our next move.

“We head to Roxbury District, find Travis’s files, maybe get a lead?” I said.

“Maybe an address, maybe a relative’s name,” Clemens said as we drove away from Richie Boyle’s house. “Something we can use to break this sucker open.”

The clerk’s office inside Roxbury District Court was cramped and busy. There were no windows and the air was stale. People were bunched at the counter, asking the clerks on duty questions about court cases or paying fines for minor crimes and traffic violations. We squeezed into the lobby and had been standing there for only a few minutes when one of the clerks took notice.

“Oh, my. Look who’s here.”

Behind the counter, a woman stood up at one of the desks along a side wall. She was tall, with straight black hair cut short, and black skin so shiny it seemed to reflect the overhead fluorescent lights. “Clemens Bittner,” she said as she reached the counter. “I thought maybe you’d moved away, or retired. It’s been years.”

“Yeah, took a bit of a hiatus, I guess. How you doin’, Toni?”

The two chatted a bit. Clemens asked about Toni’s family, and she told him about her son, now away at college in Providence, and a daughter, who had finished school and was a social worker for the state. Toni turned to me. “He’s such a doll. Most reporters come in here, always in such a rush, wanting this record or that. Clemens, he’s good people. Takes the time, treats you like a human being.”

Clemens introduced me, without going into Daddy’s situation, and then said, “Toni, we’re hoping to pull some cases, old ones. From the late 1980s.”

Toni stepped to a computer screen at the counter. “Name?”

“Golson,” I said. “Travis Golson.”

She looked at me and smiled. “You the apprentice?” she said.

“Kinda,” I said.

“Date of birth?” Toni said.

I looked at Clemens. He said, “We don’t have one. In 1988 Travis Golson was sixteen or seventeen. My guess is he was born in the early 1970s.”

“Okay, let’s see what we find with just the name.” Toni worked the keyboard and then waited. I could see her eyes reading information popping up on the screen. “Yep,” she said. “This looks like your Travis Golson. Busy boy, he was. He’s got a handful of cases in the system, and none are active. They’re all closed.”

“You mind pulling the files, Toni?”

“They’re back in the vault,” Toni said. She nodded toward two coworkers who were dealing with the crush at the counter and said, “Gimme a minute so I can help out front here, and then I’ll go back and get them.”

Clemens and I stood off to the side as the three clerks got busy shortening the line that had formed at the counter. Then Toni gave Clemens a nod and disappeared. Five minutes later, she returned carrying a small stack of files.

“Here you go — Travis Golson,” she said.

With the crowd thinned, we had room to use the small table against the wall. I realized my heart was racing, knowing we’d be getting clues to Travis Golson’s whereabouts. We’d finally be able to locate him. I counted six files in all, meaning Travis had once had six separate criminal cases pending against him. The actual charges were typed onto each file’s tab. I read them aloud: possession of marijuana with intent to sell, burglary, larceny (stolen car), trespassing, possession of cocaine, disorderly conduct (fighting). Travis had been in pretty big trouble.

I took the top file, Clemens took the next, and we began flipping through the pages, looking for the arrest forms and other paperwork that contained personal information, like home address, parents’ names, and all that great stuff.

Except it wasn’t there. We tried the next two files, and then the last two. Not one contained the key information we had expected to find. On every form where the person’s address and parents were supposed to be filled in, the box was either left empty or filled in with UNK, which stands for unknown.

We tried flipping through the files a second time.

“Unknown, unknown, unknown,” I said.

“The same,” Clemens said. “Nothing.”

“This Travis kid homeless, or what?”

“Maybe,” Clemens said. “No address and no parents to speak of.”

“Which equals no leads. Just another dead end.”

Then Clemens said, “Wait a minute.”

He opened one file, then another. Something had caught his eye. He stacked them together. “I’m going to go through each, read you a date. You write it down.” Clemens flipped open the first file and found the form called a docket sheet, which is a time line for a criminal case as it makes its way through the court system. He ran his finger down the docket sheet, then said, “Okay. July 16, 1989.”

I wrote the date down on a pad.

“July 16, 1989,” he said, reading the docket in the second file. He read the third: “July 16, 1989.” It was the same for the rest: July 16, 1989.

“What’s that mean?” I said.

“It means that Travis Golson appeared in court that day, and that all six criminal charges pending against him were bundled together.”

“Bundled?”

“Yes, combined together,” Clemens said. “You see, it’s not like he committed six crimes on the same day. Like the stolen car. Travis was charged in 1986 with stealing a red Chevy Camaro. The cocaine possession? The docket for that case says Travis was arrested in June 1987 with a bag of crack cocaine. In all, the crimes occurred on six different occasions between 1986 and 1988.”

“Okay, I get that,” I said. “So, six criminal charges were pending against him, and on July 16, 1989, Travis went to court to face all of them at once.”

“Exactly,” he said. “But look what happens in court that day.”

I read the docket sheets. Each docket said, “Continued to Nov. 16, 1989.”

“What’s that mean?”

Clemens said, “It means the cases were postponed until November 16. It means that in July, nothing really happened. Nothing was resolved for Travis one way or another — guilty, not guilty, whatever. Instead, the cases were continued until this new date in the middle of November. In the meantime, the six charges were still hanging over Travis Golson’s head. He could be found guilty of one crime or all six of them, and as a punishment, he could be sent away to prison.”

Clemens was on the edge of his seat. He hovered over the files.

“What else we know was happening in 1989?” he asked.

Something I’ll never forget. “Daddy’s murder trial. The trial started in October, and Daddy was convicted on November 11, 1989.”

“Okay — and it was a trial where, as we already know, a teenager named Travis Golson was a star witness.”

Clemens slid one of the docket sheets in front of me. “Now look at the date where Travis’s cases were postponed to.”

I ran my finger down the docket sheet until I found November 16.

“What’s it say?” Clemens said.

I looked at the two words filled in for that date. “Forget it,” I said. “No way.”

Clemens actually chuckled. “C’mon.”

I squinted. The words were nolle and prosequi. “Nawllie prawskey?”

“Close,” Clemens said. “It’s Latin, a legal term meaning ‘do not prosecute.’”

Clemens flipped through each of the six docket sheets to show me that on November 16, each charge against Travis Golson was nolle prosequi — all six.

“It means they decided not to prosecute the charges,” he said. “They dropped them. Travis left court free and clear.”

“Wow. Travis’s lucky day.”

“You think?”

I let what Clemens had walked me through sink in. Bingo.

“I get it,” I said.

“You do?”

“I do.”

I recited the sequence of events: Travis was in court in July, and all six of his cases got postponed until November. Travis testified, and Daddy was convicted on November 11. Travis’s cases came up again five days later, on November 16 — and they were dropped.

“Quid pro quo, it’s called,” Clemens said.

“No more Latin, please.”

“Something for something,” Clemens said. “It’s like this: Travis testifies against Romero, and the six cases go away. You help me, and I’ll help you. Something for something. But if Travis didn’t testify like they wanted, the six cases would be waiting for him like a firing squad.”

Clemens had more. “Look closer, the name penciled in the entry for November 16.”

It read, “nolle prosequi per order of Frank Flanagan, District Attorney.”

“Flanagan was the one asking the judge to drop the cases,” Clemens said.

“Something for something,” I repeated. “You help me; I’ll help you.”

We’d come to court looking for one thing — a lead to locate Travis Golson — and found another — a sweet deal for Travis in return for the testimony that was so damaging to Daddy. More than ever, we needed to find Travis Golson in the hope he’d tell us more.