SEVEN TWENTY, bright and early. Sal Argurito’s just getting the inventory office open. He seems annoyed that I’m standing there waiting. Like the federal employees at the post office who always loiter in the back, leaving customer-service windows vacant and avoiding the glares of customers piled up in line, he’s ignoring me.

“Morning, Sal,” I say. He doesn’t answer. Or answers differently—by glancing at the clock, which hasn’t yet hit half past seven.

I’ve known Sal since I was a pup in the department. He had his twenty put in even back then. Nobody knows why he’s stuck around to do this back-office work when he could be sitting on his porch sipping iced tea with his wife. The only thing we can figure is that he doesn’t want to sit on the porch all day sipping iced tea with his wife.

“How ’bout this weather we’re havin’?” I say.

Nothing. He puts some forms up on the shelf and busies himself with something, God knows what, out of my sight.

“I need the personal effects for Dwayne Sears,” I say. “The Moreland homicide.”

He passes by me, stooped and grumpy, with nary a glance in my direction.

“C’mon Sal, I’m on the clock here. I’ll buy you some new body wax.”

“Hold your damn horses,” he mutters.

“I can’t remember which scent you prefer. Lavender or Apricot Morning?”

He doesn’t think I’m funny. “Moreland?” he calls out.

“Yeah, the multiple homicide. K-Town.”

A few minutes later, he returns with a large box. “The one got your name in the papers, you mean.”

“Spelled my name right,” I say.

“Like that’s hard. Try having my name.”

“I tried being Italian once, Sal. I felt an overwhelming desire to eat spaghetti and lose a war.”

“Sign the receipt, you filthy Mick. If you’re sober enough to use a pen.”

I sign out the box and take it to an interview room. The box is half full, but all I want is Shiv’s cell phone. It’s an iPhone like mine, so I assume my charger will work. A tag next to the phone shows the password, which some enterprising officer must have had the foresight to get from somebody, probably LaTisha’s mother. The password is 8474, which after a brief game of word scramble tells me spells “Tish.”

The phone is dead, but with my charger, it only takes a few minutes before the white Apple icon pops onto the screen. I run through the call history to search for the calls Shiv most recently made. He wouldn’t be dumb enough to do drug deals on this phone. He had a burner for that, if he used one at all, but his normal phone is the best bet for what I need.

Most of the recent calls have IDs assigned to them—Mo, Eddie, KJ, Sheila—but the ninth and tenth ones stand out, calls made two days before the shooting. They are longer numbers, both beginning with 01140256, followed by different six-digit numbers.

International calls.

I carry the phone and charger to my desk, where I plug the charger back in and jump online on my desktop. Takes me two minutes on a search engine to confirm that 011 is the US exit code for international calls, and 40 is the country code for Romania.

Evie was using Shiv’s cell to call home.