An anthology of stories edited by Michael Connelly, 2008

A long time ago, when my first book was published, the first review it received classified the novel as a “police procedural.” This classification was news to me. I thought I had simply written a book, a crime novel, if it absolutely needed to be classified. Okay, a mystery, even. Sure, it was about cops and robbers and how the good guys work to catch the bad guys, but I never realized that I had ventured into what was called a “subgenre.” I soon learned that crime fiction is a world of genres and subgenres and even sub-subgenres.

Nearly twenty years later, I sit here writing the introduction to a book that celebrates one of those subgenres. Welcome to the world of the cop story. Welcome to stories that explore the burden of the badge.

One note on these stories, however. While this tome and its individual stories will fall under the classification of police procedural, they are anything but explorations of procedure. They are explorations of life. They are explorations of character.

In my observations of the blue religion as both a journalist and a writer of fiction, I have found that most people who carry badges believe they are part of a misunderstood breed. And I believe they have a point. How are we to weigh the burden of the badge if we do not carry the badge? In these stories, we do it by exploring the many facets of character of those who carry the badge. As you will find, procedure is only window dressing for our true focus. We learn what it is like to corner a murderer, to unmask a hidden killer. We walk the line between justice and revenge. We see what it costs to do the job both right and wrong. We find resolution and redemption.

There is an adage attributed to Joseph Wambaugh, the great writer of police stories, that informs our effort here. It is as simple as it is true. It holds that the best story about the badge is not about how a cop works on a case. It is about how the case works on the cop. In the subtlety of that distinction is the axiom that gave the writers who are gathered here all they needed.

I know a detective who works cold cases in Los Angeles. He works out of a windowless office, with his desk pushed up against his partner’s. He has a glass top on his desk. With such a basic setup in almost any other office in the world, one would almost invariably find photos of loved ones – children, wives, families – under the glass top. Smiling faces, reminders of what is good in life. Inspiration to do the job well.

But not this detective. He slips the photos of dead people under his glass. Photos of murder victims whose killers he still hunts. They are reminders of what is bad in life. Reminders of the job unfinished and inspiration to keep going and to do the job well.

To me, that gets to the heart of character, not procedure. And that is what this book is all about.

So we moved up here to Spirit Lake in Idaho, where a lot of Jim’s friends had come to live. After forty years in Laguna Beach, it was a shock to walk outside and see only a few houses here and there, some fog hovering over the pond out front, and the endless trees. The quiet too, that was another surprise. There’s always the hiss of wind in the pines, but it’s nothing like all the cars and sirens on PCH. I miss the Ruby’s and the Nordstrom Rack up the freeway. Miss my friends and my children. We talk all the time by phone and e-mail, but it’s not the same as living close by. We have a guest room.

We’ve had mostly a good life. Our firstborn son died thirteen years ago, and that was the worst thing that’s ever happened to us. His name was James Junior, but he went by JJ. He was a cop, like his father, and was killed in the line of duty. After that, Jim drank himself almost to death, then one day just stopped. He never raised a finger or even his voice at me or the kids. Kept on with the Laguna Beach PD. I had Karen and Ricky to take care of, and I took meds for a year and had counseling. The one thing I learned from grief is that you feel better if you do things for other people instead of dwelling on yourself.

We’re living Jim’s dream of hardly any people but plenty of trees and fish.

There’s some skinheads living one lake over, and one of them, Dale, came over the day we moved in last summer and asked if we had work. Big kid, nineteen, tattoos all over his arms and calves, red hair buzzed short, and eyes the color of old ice. Jim said there was no work, but they got to talking woodstoves and if the old Vermont Castings in the living room would need a new vent come fall. Dale took a look and said that unless you want to smoke yourself out, it would. Two days later, Dale helped Jim put one in, and Jim paid him well.

A couple of days later, I went to dig out my little jewelry bag from the moving box where I’d kind of hidden it, but it was gone. I’d labeled each box with the room it went to, but the movers just put the boxes down wherever – anyway, it was marked “bedroom,” but they put it right there in the living room, where Dale could get at it when I went into town for sandwiches and Jim went outside for a smoke or to pee in the trees, which is something he did a lot of that first month or two. Jim told me I should have carried the jewelry on my person, and he was right. On my person. You know how cops talk. Said he’d go find Dale over in Hayden Lake the next day – skinhead central – what a way to meet the locals.

But the next morning, this skinny young boy shows up on our front porch, dark bangs almost over his eyes, no shirt, jeans hanging low on his waist and his boxers puffing out. Gigantic sneakers with the laces loose. Twelve or thirteen years old.

“This yours?” he asked.

Jim took the jewelry bag – pretty little blue thing with Chinese embroidery on it and black drawstrings – and angled it to the bright morning sun.

“Hers,” he said. “Hon? What’s missing?”

I loosened the strings and cupped the bag in my hand and pressed the rings and earrings and bracelets up against one another and the satin. It was mostly costume and semiprecious stones, but I saw the ruby earrings and choker Jim had gotten me one Christmas in Laguna and the string of pearls.

“The expensive things are here,” I said.

“You Dale’s brother?” asked Jim.

“Yep.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jason.”

“Come on in.”

“No reason for that.”

“How are you going to explain this to Dale?”

“Explain what?”

And he loped down off the porch steps, landed with a crunch, and picked up his bike.

“Take care of yourself.”

“That’s what I do.”

“We’ve got two cords’ worth of wood and a decent splitter,” said Jim.

Jason sized up Jim the way young teenagers do, by looking not quite at him for not very long. Like everything about Jim could be covered in a glance.

“Okay. Saturday.”

Later I asked Jim why he offered work to Jason when he’d held it back from Dale.

“I don’t know. Maybe because Jason didn’t ask.”

The street was dark and narrow, a smear of frost along the roof of the occasional parked car. Two of a possible six overhead lights had been smashed several weeks before. Recycling bins – blue, green, and gray – shared the pavement with abandoned supermarket trolleys and the detritus from a score of fast-food takeaways. Number thirty-four was toward the terrace end, the short street emptying onto a scrub of wasteland ridged with stiffened mud, puddles of brackish water covered by a thin film of ice.

January.

Tom Whitemore knocked with his gloved fist on the door of thirty-four. Paint that was flaking away, a bell that had long since ceased to work.

He was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt and sweater, a scuffed leather jacket – the first clothes he had grabbed when the call had come through less than half an hour before.

January 27, 3:17 a.m.

Taking one step back, he raised his right leg and kicked against the door close by the lock; a second kick, wood splintered and the door sprang back.

Inside was your basic two-up, two-down house, a kitchen extension leading into the small yard at the back, bathroom above that. A strip of worn carpet in the narrow hallway, bare boards on the stairs. Bare wires that hung down, no bulb attached, from the ceiling overhead. He had been here before.

“Darren? Darren, you here?”

No answer when he called the name.

A smell that could be from a backed-up foul-water pipe or a blocked drain.

The front room was empty, odd curtains at the window, a TV set in one corner, two chairs and a sagging two-seater settee. Dust. A bundle of clothes. In the back room there were a small table and two more chairs, one with a broken back; a pile of old newspapers; the remnants of an unfinished oven-ready meal; a child’s shoe.

“Darren?”

The first stair creaked a little beneath his weight.

In the front bedroom, a double mattress rested directly on the floor; several blankets, a quilt without a cover, no sheets. Half the drawers in the corner chest had been pulled open and left that way, miscellaneous items of clothing hanging down.

Before opening the door to the rear bedroom, Whitemore held his breath.

A pair of bunk beds leaned against one wall, a pumped-up Lilo mattress close by. Two tea chests, one spilling over with children’s clothes, the other with toys. A plastic bowl in which cereal had hardened and congealed. A baby’s bottle, rancid with yellowing milk. A used nappy, half in, half out of a pink plastic sack. A tube of sweets. A paper hat. Red and yellow building bricks. Soft toys. A plastic car. A teddy bear with a waistcoat and a bright bow tie, still new enough to have been a recent Christmas gift.

And blood.

Blood in fine tapering lines across the floor, faint splashes on the wall. Tom Whitemore pressed one hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.

The photograph of the girl hadn’t changed since the first time Broward Sheriff’s Office detective Ben Stoltz had looked at it three years before. She looked pretty much like she had when he walked up to her in the center of yellow crime-scene tape in a vacant lot off Sunrise Boulevard. Something about her nose and eyebrows reminded him of his own daughter, and that was really all it took. One of the things that had saved his sanity was the rise in the murder rate in Broward County, which had kept him too busy to really consider how he had failed her ever since a jogger had first discovered her body on that cool March evening. Now that things had slowed down, he had time again. Shit.

A musical ringtone shook him out of his daze as he looked at the photograph. He missed the practical and obnoxious rings that phones used to make. Sitting at the same desk he had occupied since entering the detective bureau, using the same Paper Mate pen he had used his first day in plain clothes, he wondered why the phones had undergone such an evolution. Some had a gentle, breezy electronic chime; others sounded like a tiny fire alarm. His phone had whatever was programmed into the damn thing when some pencil-necked geek had plopped it down four years before. If it weren’t for the weary secretary who, tired of taking his messages, had set up his voice mail, he’d be the only one in Homicide without the precious service.

Now, staring at the files of his open cases, Stoltz wished someone would call and get him off his dead ass and doing something. He feared these slight lulls in the murder rate. The times when he might have to sit in the office and look over his mistakes. That’s what he considered his open cases. Why not? If he was unable to solve them, then it was his mistake. He had failed. Aside from his deep desire to retire in Homicide, he knew what his duty was. It was to catch the assholes who killed other people. Sometimes it was more personal or more rewarding. Sometimes he just felt like the referee in some giant game in which one group shoots up another. Of the four files in front of him, three were drug related. He wanted them closed but never felt satisfied with the result. Somewhere, maybe a few years down the road, some dumbass would get picked up on a trafficking charge and give up the triggerman on a drug homicide. Or, as had happened to him several times, a gun would be recovered and traced back to the killing. Once, they had lifted some DNA off the grip of a Beretta that had led to a conviction. These were back burners.

The fourth file. Jane Doe number sixty-eight was a girl that had died around the age of twenty. Jenny’s age. Except this girl wasn’t a junior at the University of Central Florida. She was some lonely girl whom someone had stabbed and left in a vacant lot off Sunrise Boulevard. Still in unincorporated Broward County, about two blocks from the city limits of Sunrise. At first, his boss asked, almost pleaded, for him to say it was in the city’s jurisdiction. But geography didn’t lie, and neither did he. It was their case. No witnesses, no leads, no motive, and no true name for the victim. His sergeant looked like he was about to have a seizure. Then the sergeant had a stroke of genius. Suicide. Stoltz had to bring up the uncomfortable question of how someone stabbed themselves four times to commit suicide and then didn’t leave a weapon near the body. His sergeant was ready. Animals had carried it off. After all, it was a vacant lot. But as the lead investigator, Stoltz refused to go with the “well-armed raccoon” theory and had carried the case for the past three years. Three years, two sergeants, nineteen cases, and one marriage ago. Felt like a lifetime.

He sensed more than saw the figure of Chuck, his partner on most cases, as he dropped into the chair next to his desk.

“Ben, what’s the good word?” asked the only detective who was senior to him in the Homicide Unit.

Ben Stoltz just looked out over his cluttered desk and sighed.

“Yeah, I know. Droughts like this bring up a lot of old shit. I’m recanvassing the neighborhood where we found Cassie Brown’s body.” The heavyset detective looked across at the other cops at their desks. “You never see this many guys in here at once. Rumor is that they may shift some of us to other areas.”

Stoltz looked up and paid attention for the first time. “Like where?”

“Dunno. Fraud is hot right now, and there’s always sex crimes.”

“We got nothing to worry about. We’re senior.”

“Ben, you and I got no juice. These young guys, they’re climbers. They talk to the colonel and the sheriff. They get ‘face time,’ and all we do is get cases and clear ’em. We’ll be the first to go. They’ll tell us some bullshit like it’ll do us good to see something other than corpses.”

Stoltz looked around, seeing, for the first time, his competition. He had always just done his job and been left alone. Would that work in today’s environment? He looked at the other detective. “You’re in DROP. I didn’t come on the Sheriff’s Office until I was thirty-one. I got four years, just to go into the DROP for five more.” In reality, Stoltz didn’t view the DROP retirement incentive as a chance to make more money but as an opportunity to stay a while longer. The Deferred Retirement Option Plan allowed a cop to collect retirement in a savings account and still work for a five-year period. The intent was to move old-timers out of the job.

Chuck loosened his tie. “Man, that would suck to finish up in another unit.”

Stoltz didn’t acknowledge the comment. He was distracted by his sergeant, who, at thirty-four, was nearly twenty years younger than he. The balding young man who never smiled said, “Ben, we got an officer-involved shooting.”

“Where?”

“Our favorite beach town, where else?”

“The cop okay?”

“Of course. That bunch are shooters, not targets.”

“Any weapon?”

“Not from the stiff. Looks like he took the cop’s ASP and the cop fired twice. You two get over there. Crime Scene is on the way.” He ran a bony hand through thinning blond hair. “Ben, you’re the lead. I’ll be along shortly.”

“Got it, Sarge.”

The young sergeant added, “Carla Lazaro is the assistant on it.”

Stoltz gave an involuntary shudder. “She’s not in the Homicide Unit.”

“Public Integrity. They get police shootings. Watch your ass so she doesn’t swallow you whole.”

“I’m still the lead investigator. She’s just an assistant state attorney.”

“But she has a big mouth and bigger ego. If she called the captain and wanted you removed, she’d probably pull it off. Just watch it. She’ll use a case like this for political advantage.”

“I don’t follow politics.”

“But she does.”

Stoltz nodded, not worried about whomever the state attorney had assigned to the case. He just found and repeated facts.

His partner said, “The drought breaks, good thing you’re the duty detective. This’ll give you some juice to stay here if things go bad.” He paused and added, “Too bad the Queen of the Damned is assigned.”

“She won’t bother us.”

“You hope.” He stood and headed toward his desk. “Like I said, at least you caught a case. That’ll look good during review time.”

Stoltz hated to admit it, but he had already thought of that. He had his “go kit,” with a tape recorder, camera, and note pads, all zipped up and ready within a minute. This was the kind of stuff that had kept him sober and sane as the last year had unfolded. Mary’s leaving him, Jenny’s college expenses, and Craig’s Christmas revelation had shaken him out of the life he had found so comfortable. Thank God he still had Homicide.

The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.

– William Faulkner

Parking the unmarked squad car in a space reserved for the president of North End Community College, Detective Berwanger said to his partner, “I always wanted to do this.” Detective Foley resisted pointing out that it was an empty gesture: they knew the president was on vacation in Hawaii.

It was a cool early-fall evening, half an hour before night classes were scheduled to begin, and the campus was relatively quiet. Entering the administration building, the two plainclothesmen reported to the evening director’s office, where a pretty Latina student assistant sat behind the counter. She looked up from what appeared to be a math textbook and smiled. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”

Berwanger showed his identification. “Yes, ma’am. I’m Detective Berwanger, city police. This is my partner, Detective Foley.”

Her eyes widened. “I’ve heard of you.”

“Yes, ma’am. Lots of people have. I wonder if you could help us find someone.”

“A suspect, Detective?”

The two cops exchanged poker-faced glances. “For now, ma’am, let’s just say somebody we need to find. It’s just routine. Nothing to be alarmed about.”

“Of course I’d like to help you,” the student said. “Can you describe this person?”

“Yes, ma’am. He’s a male Caucasian, about six-four, weighs maybe two eighty. Looks like an interior lineman that’s let himself go a bit, but still not someone you’d want to mess with. He commonly has what I can only call a menacing demeanor. Usually shabbily dressed, maybe in an old sweatshirt and jeans. If he’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt, you’ll notice some elaborate tattoos on his biceps. Marine Corps haircut, stubbly unshaven look, just about always has an unfriendly scowl on his face.”

The young woman shivered. “Sounds scary.”

“Yes, ma’am. Have you seen him?”

“He’s standing right behind you.”

Berwanger turned to see Foley shaking hands with Moe Gustavson, who had briefly shed his scowl for a wide smile.

“How do you put up with this guy?” Gustavson demanded of Foley. “Detective Berwanger, you’re going to get in trouble one of these days, harassing female students.”

Looking hurt, Berwanger asked, “Was I harassing you, ma’am?”

“No, Detective,” she said. “Are you under arrest, Mr. Gustavson? Should I postpone your class?”

Gustavson threw up his hands in mock exasperation. “Very funny. And here I was, trying to protect your honor. Can’t I get any respect in this place at all? Fellas, this young woman is Lourdes Ramirez, one of my most promising students. She’ll make a writer if she can learn to write dialogue and set a scene in less than ten pages. If her desk relief shows up, you’ll see her in the front row in half an hour.”

“I’m glad I came, then,” said Foley.

“Quit harassing female students, Foley,” his partner grumbled. “So you want to be a mystery writer, Ms. Ramirez?”

“I hope to, yes.”

“Just like your teacher here, huh?”

She grinned impishly. “Well, maybe not just like him, no.”

“She’s a little too violent and profane for my taste,” Gustavson explained. “And I think she writes her, uh, romantic scenes the way she does just to make me blush.” Under a feminine pseudonym, Gustavson wrote cozy mysteries, with a caterer and her cat in featured roles.

Berwanger and Foley had been visiting Gustavson’s mystery- writing class for several years. It was one of their favorite stops on a demanding schedule of appearances before community groups.

As they walked with Gustavson down the corridor to the classroom, Berwanger asked, “Anybody repeating the course?” Creative-writing classes could be taken more than once for credit.

“A few familiar faces, sure. So you’ll have to come up with some fresh material.”

“That’s no problem,” Foley said.

“We’re still working cops, you know,” Berwanger said. They were in such demand as speakers, it was a struggle to resist a fulltime public-relations assignment.

The class was well attended as always, with more than twenty of the thirtysome desks occupied. The students represented a variety of ages, from teens to sixties, and an even wider range of talents, but they were united in their enthusiasm. Most were dressed student-shabby, a look that fit in perfectly with their instructor’s casual appearance. Others, who obviously had come straight from work, had on office wear.

Lourdes Ramirez sat in the front row, with male attendants on her left and right who paid closer attention to her than to the two cops, at least until Berwanger and Foley got into their more dramatic war stories. The anecdotes about domestic murders, drug killings, neighborly disputes, armed robberies, and gang wars were well polished and constantly replenished, and their tidbits about ballistics, jurisdictional issues, and crime-scene procedures kept the students’ pens and laptops busy. As usual, Berwanger did most of the talking, with Foley demonstrating the equipment – sidearms, handcuffs, weapon-weight flashlight – and throwing in the occasional one-liner from the sidelines. After about forty-five minutes, Berwanger asked the class for questions.

A hand in the second row shot up immediately. “Have you guys ever gone after a serial killer?”

Berwanger glanced at his partner with a humorous smirk and said, “These mystery writers love their serial killers, don’t they, Foley? Can’t they come up with something more original?”

“That wasn’t the question, though,” Foley pointed out.

“Right, it wasn’t. Well, you have to understand that serial killers get attention way out of proportion to their numbers. I mean, from the TV news and the paperback racks, you’d think there was one on every corner. Most Homicide detectives like ourselves go through a whole career without ever getting a crack at a serial killer. And I, for one, am thankful.”

Berwanger scanned the room as if looking for another question, but his partner said, “There was one, though.”

Berwanger said, “What? A serial killer?”

“Aren’t you forgetting about…?”

“Oh, you mean…?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“They don’t want to hear about that,” Berwanger said, but a murmur from the class contradicted him. Scowling at his audience, he said, “And even if you do want to hear about it, I’m not sure I want to tell you about it. Why should we encourage the creation of more serial killers, real or fictional, right, Foley?”

“Come on, Detective,” said a good-natured voice from an older student in the back row. They recognized him as a police buff who often hung around the station, asking research questions. “You have to tell us now.”

“I’m afraid he’s right, Berwanger,” Foley said. “We’re obligated.”

Berwanger sighed in resignation. “Well, I guess it was kind of interesting at that. And unique in its way. But it means you have to go to work, Foley.” He told the class, “My partner fancies himself an actor. He’s not really all that good, and I’m not all that much better” – Foley made a face – “so you’ll have to use your imagination while we do a little scene for you. You want some time to get into character, Foley?”

Foley twitched his shoulders, made a few faces, and looked at Berwanger with an intent stare. “Ready if you are,” he said.

“My partner, the Method actor,” Berwanger said. “Now you’ll have to use your imagination here. Close your eyes if it’ll help. It’s early morning on the bank of a big man-made lake in a city park. Cool morning, very pleasant, just after sunup. This lake is home to all kinds of aquatic birds. See them? Ducks, geese, coots, pigeons, seagulls. Occasionally, you might even see pelicans passing through, especially if the lake’s just been stocked with fish. There’s an island with some high trees in the middle of the lake, and there are usually a few cormorants perched on the branches, spreading their wings to dry them. Sometimes, when the cormorants go fishing, the pelicans will watch them, looking for guidance. That pair with a red ring around their necks are Egyptian geese, and that blue-beaked guy is an American wigeon. In this little scene we’re about to reenact for you, I’m a guy we’ll call George. Foley isn’t here yet, but when he turns up, he’ll be a guy named Fred. They don’t know each other. George likes to come here mornings and feed the birds.” Berwanger reached his right hand into an imaginary bag and made a tossing motion. “Notice how they all congregate at the edge of the lake, competing for the bread crumbs George throws to them. George thinks he’s alone, but then Fred turns up.”

Foley walked across the front of the classroom and stood next to Berwanger.

He woke to the sound of sirens filling his ears. He called to his partner, Darby, who was not there, and then to his wife, who must have left for work as usual in the darkness of the early morning. Brenda worked at the bakery just down the street, three blocks from the house they had lived in for thirty years. Or had they been here longer? He fumbled out of the sheets, listening to the sirens, wishing Brenda was here to help shake him awake. He’d always been a heavy sleeper. Maybe that came from so many long hours driving to crime scenes and making out reports, sifting through all the evidence, interviewing witnesses and grilling suspects, looking for a clue to whatever case he and Darby had been assigned to.

The clock on the nightstand said it was three in the morning, and there was a chill in the air from the September winds that had been blowing through the city for days. He wondered why Brenda hadn’t turned on the heat before she left. Probably trying to save pennies again. They’d been saving for a vacation, three, no four, years now. So far they hadn’t saved much. Not enough to get away to – where was it she wanted to go again? She had wanted to relax a little. Someplace with water and a beach, he thought. The Cayman Islands?

He shook his head to clear it and reached for his trousers, which lay hanging over the chair by the door. Flipping on the light, he pulled a shirt from a hanger in the closet. It was wrinkled. He frowned as he slipped it on. Brenda usually didn’t miss things like that. It wouldn’t look professional to report for duty in a wrinkled shirt, even if it was early in the morning. He skipped the tie and grabbed a dark jacket from the back of the closet. It smelled of mothballs.

He turned to the nightstand, where he always put his badge and gun before going to sleep. He reached for the drawer and saw that there was no drawer to reach for. What was going on? Maybe Brenda had bought a new nightstand. He’d been working lots of overtime, at least it felt like it, and she’d had to run the household on her own this year. But then he always worked overtime. He searched around the edge of the bed on both sides. Maybe she had put his badge and gun in the lockbox they kept under the pile of old clothes in the closet. He looked, sifting through pairs of men’s shoes, stacks of shirts still in their wrappers, and behind a clutter of umbrellas. No lockbox. No pile of old clothes. Brenda must have been doing some cleaning.

A part of his memory suddenly recalled where he’d stashed his old badge: in the pocket of his overcoat. He slipped the coat on and fished around in the pockets. There it was. He stared at the badge, thinking it didn’t feel right that it was tucked away in a pocket way back in the closet. He should be carrying it with him always. But what about his new badge? The one they’d given him to replace the old one. Where was it now? He’d have to ask Brenda later what she did with it. Slipping on his shoes, he pushed the badge back into a side pocket and left the room. The sirens were fading now.

He followed the dying sounds out his front door. Sunlight was just beginning to mark the sky with bands of pink and purple and gold. He stood on his lawn, his shoes untied and wet from the morning dew, trying to track the sounds. Somewhere to the south. He reached into his pants pocket for his keys as he opened the door to the sedan parked by the curb. No keys. He searched his coat pockets. Nothing but the badge there. As he slid into the driver’s seat, he wondered where his keys had gone. Then he saw them stuck in the ignition. He shook his head and started the car, looking out at the beams of his headlights as they shined down the road. Which way had the sound come from again? South. He turned the car around and headed down the road toward the crime scene.

It took a bit of driving to find it. Finally, after circling back and forth down endless blocks, he saw the bubble lights of the police cruisers parked ahead of him. Lots of people were milling around. Many seemed to be just passersby, but a few were in their robes or pajamas. He hoped Darby had cordoned off the area. Lots of patrol cops trying to corral a crowd of onlookers and witnesses meant evidence was likely being tramped over or destroyed. They’d have to sift through what the crowd had left behind as well as any traces left by the criminal they were looking for. That was a sloppy way to investigate a crime scene.

He saw that one of the cops was questioning someone by the open back door of a patrol car. Probably a witness. Someone he would need to talk to as soon as possible.

He parked his car behind the last cruiser on the scene and stepped out into the chilly air. The sky was beginning to brighten. Daybreak was coming. That was good. You lost too many things in the dark. Too many things you couldn’t get back. He glanced around and spied an irregular shape beneath a sheet farther up the hill from where the cars were parked. A couple of plainclothes policemen were standing over it. He could see that the ME had arrived and was taking preliminary measurements around the body. He couldn’t see Darby anywhere. Maybe his partner had missed the call. He’d have to tell one of the men standing around – what were they called? Officers, that was it. He’d have to have an officer call Darby at the precinct and get him over here. Or was Darby at home in bed now with his wife? Did Darby have a wife? He’d have made the call himself, but he saw that his radio was somehow missing from his car.

The officers were busy keeping the curious passersby away from the scene and talking to potential witnesses. One patrolman was laying flares across the road while another redirected traffic. The second officer watched him with a wary eye as he walked away from his car and tramped slowly up the hill toward the body and the two detectives. He waved and fished out his badge, flashing it in the patrolman’s direction. The officer nodded and went back to motioning to cars.

The detectives had stepped away from the body and were comparing notes at the top of the grassy hill. They stopped talking when they saw him approach. He stopped in front of the sheet and showed them his badge, then bent down with an effort and lifted the edge of the cloth. The girl who lay there on the wet grass couldn’t have been more than sixteen. She had long brown hair with red streaks in it, and her face was round and smooth and delicate, like a doll’s. He thought she looked a little like his daughter. Karen, no, it was Shannon, wasn’t it? Shannon had always reminded him of one of those porcelain dolls. Her skin was so clean and smooth, like glass. He’d been afraid to hold her when she first was handed to him in the hospital. Shannon, no, no, Karen, had looked at him with big round eyes. Blue, he thought when he stared back at her and smiled. They were blue. He stared down and wondered what color this girl’s eyes were.

“Excuse me, Detective?”

The girl had been stabbed in the stomach. There didn’t seem to be any other marks on her. There wasn’t much blood, but he figured it might have seeped into the soft ground beneath her. He looked around for bloody footprints but didn’t see any. There were no stains on the grass leading away from the body. Perhaps the perp had killed her somewhere else and dumped her body here. He doubted it. This little hill was a popular place for young lovers to meet. There was a park nearby, and plenty of trees to hide it from the main road. Maybe they had known each other. Well enough for the killer to get close enough to stab her without a struggle and run off before anyone could see him.

“Detective?”

He bent down further and saw a small piece of thread near her left arm. It was small, very small. He didn’t pick it up. He’d leave that for forensics, but noted that it was two-tone, red and blue together. It looked like the kind of thick thread that he pulled regularly from the sweaters that his wife – Brenda, was it? – always made for him. He could have used one of those sweaters now. He smelled something now too. Something lingering in the air. It was almost like cigarette smoke, but not quite. This was a bit heavier than cigarette smoke, even those high-tar brands some of the older men smoked. He thought maybe a cigar, one of those smelly little ones he’d seen the teenagers and twentysomethings smoking on the streets these days. Or was that back when he was just a young patrolman himself? No, they hadn’t been available back then, had they? He stared down at the girl again and sighed.

“Lieutenant, can I speak with you please?”

He stood up, expecting that they would give him all the information they had and let him and Darby get on with the job of finding the killer. He looked around, studying the grass, the sidewalk below, and the street. There were lots of people still hanging around. He wondered if one of them might be the killer. Sometimes they hung around to see what the police were able to figure out. They feared being caught by something they left behind. Sometimes their guilt prevented them from keeping away. There were no signs of a struggle. He was sure of it. If the girl was killed here, then she knew her attacker, probably a boyfriend. Had they argued? About what?

He’d have to interview her parents eventually, break the bad news to them about the loss of their daughter. He always hated that part of the job. He’d ask about her dating habits, find out if they knew of any jealous or possessive boyfriends. Boys, men, could be like that. He remembered not letting his daughter, whatever her name was, date until she was seventeen. At least not the kind of dating that amounted to anything serious. There had been plenty of arguments on that subject. He recalled fighting with both his daughter and his wife over it. Or had it been over something else? Did he and Brenda ever really fight over anything? His daughter and he had. Hadn’t they? No, their relationship had been good. She had married and done all right, hadn’t she? He stood there on the grass and tried to recall if she had ever married at all.

“Lieutenant, can you tell me what precinct you’re with?” One of the detectives took him by the arm and pulled him away from the body. The edge of the sheet fluttered from his fingers and settled back over the girl. The ME probably wanted to take a look at her. Collect whatever evidence he could before taking her down to the morgue. He should tell them about the thread and the cigar smell he’d noticed.

“Can I see your badge again?” the other detective asked him.

He handed his badge over, scanning the area to see if Darby had arrived yet. Hadn’t one of the patrolmen called Darby? He’d given them the order to ring his partner, hadn’t he? He looked around for Brenda – no, not his wife, not her this time, for his partner. He looked at the faces of the milling crowd. People shifted on the street, craning to get a look, whispering to one another and pointing up the hill. Something caught his attention. Was it Darby? He searched the faces of the crowd more earnestly now. No, it was something else. Not Darby. Darby was back at the house, or at the station, wasn’t he? He examined eyes, expressions, arms and legs moving in the crowd. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but he knew it was important.

“This badge belong to you?” one of the detectives asked him. The other was walking down the hill toward one of the patrol cars. He watched the detective reach in through the front window and speak into the radio. Maybe he was talking to Darby, telling him his partner was already on the crime scene.

“Are you supposed to be here?” the other detective asked him.

He didn’t answer. He looked back at the crowd. More eyes, faces, legs, bodies, floating in the darkness before him. Something was out there, just beyond his vision, just at the nearest edge of his memory. He looked back at the body of the girl beneath the sheet. The end of the sheet hadn’t covered her outstretched hand when it came out of his grasp, and he stood and stared at the tiny, delicately thin fingers splayed out on the grass. God, was that his daughter under there? Shannon, dead? He felt his chest tighten. Something cold crawled into the center of his stomach. Had Karen been killed by that boy who always came around the house? What was his name? Roger? No, that was her husband’s name. Had he been the one who kept coming around? Why would Roger have wanted to kill his daughter? They’d had cookouts together once a month, long ago, hadn’t they? Was it so long ago? He took a step toward the body, but the detective took hold of his arm and didn’t let go.

“That’s a retired badge,” the other detective said, jogging back up the hill from the patrol car. He stopped next to his partner and leaned close to whisper. “Don’t be too hard on the guy,” he told the other detective. “He ain’t right.”

“He’s a detective?”

The other man nodded. “Was. Retired twelve years ago.”

There was no time to retire. A criminal was getting away with murder. He pulled his arm from the detective and stood staring into the faces of the crowd. Eyes and mouths flashed at him in the dark. He thought he saw his wife’s face, Brenda, or Karen, or something. He knew her face. At least parts of it. He stood and tried to pull the pieces of her together in his mind. And where was his daughter? She had to be somewhere below, didn’t she, with her husband, Larry, or Roger. Had she married twice? Then he saw someone he recognized. A face in the crowd with the right arms, the right clothes. That was Darby, wasn’t it? His partner was the one moving slowly through the crowd. No, not Darby, but someone else he was looking for.

“It’s not his fault,” the detective who’d been speaking to Darby on the radio said. “Dispatch says he was retired because he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”

“Alzheimer’s? How did he get here?”

“He’s been pulled in before for showing up at disturbances, especially late at night. The sirens seem to be a trigger for it. He doesn’t know any better. Dispatch said his daughter is aware of the problem. She thinks he needs to be in a nursing home, or something like that.”

“Well, one thing I know is he doesn’t belong at a murder scene,” the other man replied. “Get him out of here, make sure he gets home. Tell his daughter to come get him. Tell her that she needs to bring her father home.”

“She lives in another state, according to dispatch,” the detective said.

“Well then, call a nursing home and have him carted away. And keep that badge away from him. He flashes that in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he’s going to get himself or somebody else killed.”

The first detective put a gentle hand on his arm as he was still searching the crowd. He turned and looked at the man. He wasn’t the one. He wasn’t wearing a sweater. He was in a coat and tie. White shirt, black coat. No cigar smell on him. He pulled himself free and pointed down at the crowd below.

“He’s down there, just to the left at the end of the block, standing by the hedge.”

“Come on, now,” the detective told him, trying to take hold of him again. “We have to get you home. Your wife must be worried.”

“Dead,” he told the man, not taking his eyes from the crowd, from the man at the edge of the block. “She’s dead.”

Who was dead? Brenda? How could she be dead? Hadn’t he just left her back at home in bed? No, she had already been off to work. She was off to work overtime every day, trying to save, like he was, trying to save until the overtime became too much to take. No, not Brenda, not dead, not now. That was years ago. Long ago and buried. The girl on the hill under the sheet with the doll-like face just like his daughter’s was dead, now, tonight, and he had a job to do. Even without Darby there to help him. Even without Brenda to live somewhere there in the back of his brain.

“Is there anyone we can call for you?” the detective asked, holding him.

He used his free hand to point into the crowd. “There, see the teenager moving along the sidewalk at the edge of the block? The one in the blue-and-red sweater?”

“Come along, now.”

“He’s smoking a cigar, a little thin one. Can’t you see the ember burning at the edge of his mouth? Can’t you smell the smoke around the body? Cigar smoke, like those smelly things the kids like. There’s a thread by her right arm there, no, her left. Can’t you see him down there?”

“God, he’s right.” The other detective, who had bent down to examine the body again, held a small piece of thread in his gloved fingers. He looked at it in the beam of a flashlight and then stared at his partner. “Is there a guy down there like that?”

The other detective pulled his walkie-talkie from his belt and spoke into it. Two patrolmen looked up. They spoke back to the detective and sighted in on the teenager moving faster down the street. They moved away from the hill and started toward him. The young man bolted then, churning his legs and arms to get away, but the patrolmen drew their guns and ordered the suspect to stop. The kid skidded to a stop. His breath came out in frosty chokes. They were on him in a heartbeat. He watched them lie him down, cuff him, and drag him to his feet. The patrolmen took him to one of the cars by the curb.

The detective who’d been bending over the body took off down the hill. The young man was crying and shouting by the time he got to him. “I didn’t mean to do it!” he cried as he was stuffed into the back of the patrol car. The detective got in the passenger seat in front of him.

He watched as the car drove off. Turning back to the body, he wondered if Brenda would be here soon to help take care of Shannon. He didn’t think he could do it on his own. How could he possibly bury his own wife? No, his daughter, wasn’t it? Then he remembered that it wasn’t Shannon, or Karen, underneath the sheet. She was away at college, wasn’t she? Or was she married now? Who was this dead girl, then?

The other detective came over to him and handed back his badge. He took it and looked at the bright shield nestled in its black case. He was glad the other detective had found it. Had he accidentally dropped it while he was examining the crime scene?

“You did a pretty good job here tonight,” the detective told him.

He nodded. “That’s the job we’re supposed to do.”

The detective smiled. “I guess you’re right. Hey, would you like a ride home?”

He looked down to where he had parked his car. He could drive home all right. He’d gotten here, hadn’t he? He’d solved the case too. They’d found the killer. The girl’s parents could at least have that. Darby was with the killer now, probably getting a full confession from him. No, he could drive all right. But as he stood there staring at his car, thinking he should get home before Brenda worried about him and called the station, he thought he could use some help from the detective after all.

“I’ll be all right driving,” he told the other man. “But could you tell me where it is exactly that I live?” He stared at the badge in his hand again. It was bright and heavy and felt as if it belonged there. “For the life of me, I can’t seem to remember.”

Detective Edrow Fluett leaned the aluminum shovel carefully against the shingle siding, brushed snow off one boot, then the other. It was a laugh; the snow was inside his galoshes. They were as old as the siding, and just as cracked. Better he should have shuffled up and down the driveway a few times, scooped up snow with the gaps in his boots, instead of risking a heart attack, shoveling.

He eased open the kitchen door, lowered himself to sit at the top of the basement stairs. Blanche’s snoring came through the ceiling, steady and righteous, but a nickel bouncing in the next block or, God forbid, a drop falling from his galoshes, could jerk her awake, angry, in an instant.

He bent to pull off his right boot. Too hard; his foot popped out with a sudden, loud sucking sound, like he’d freed it from a swamp. Out too came water, puddling onto Blanche’s linoleum.

He held his breath, strained to listen. Upstairs, she slept on.

Every winter, he told her there was no more fixing the boots, showed her the patches curling away like shriveling corn plasters. But every winter, she refused to hear, turned back to the television, telling him he should use better glue.

Slower this time, he pulled off the other boot, peeled off his drenched socks. His naked feet were gray and wrinkly, ghost prunes. Carrying the dripping boots and socks, he padded down the stairs, made wet footprints of flat arches as he crossed the cold concrete. He set the boots by the floor drain, the socks atop the pile of laundry, crept back up the stairs to the kitchen.

The slow, steady engine of Blanche’s snoring continued above his head.

Gently, he separated two paper towels from the roll on the wall. Blanche had fits when he used them for the floor, but he’d forgotten to bring up the sponge mop, and his frozen feet were in no mood for another walk down to the basement. So long as he remembered to take the towels out, hide them in the neighbor’s trash, she might not know.

He dropped the towels on the puddle by the door. In an instant, they were drenched. Two sheets wasn’t enough, but there was no sense risking a third. Blanche was known to keep track of the sheets on the roll. He bent to pick them up, cupping one in each hand, like melting snowballs. With luck, the floor would dry and he’d be gone before she came downstairs.

“Edrow,” Blanche screamed, firing his name like a cannon shot through the floor.

Splat, splat, the soaked paper snowballs hit the linoleum, loud enough to hear upstairs. “It’s barely six o’clock,” he yelled, hurrying to pick them up, as though she could see through the floor. “Go back to sleep.”

“You made it impossible with that ruckus, shoveling.”

No. She’d heard him taking the paper towels, here-a-penny, there-a-penny, from the roll. “There’s a foot of snow, wet like fresh cement. Heart-attack snow,” he shouted, hustling to set the dripping wads in the sink.

He just had to remember to take them with him when he left for work.

“Couldn’t you have pushed the snow instead of scraping it so loudly?” she shrieked.

“Lucky for you that damned snowblower hasn’t started for ten years. That would have really been loud.”

“I told you, you got to drain the gas from it every spring.”

“You told me to buy that blower from the bandit at the Closeout Hut. Piece of crap. It doesn’t even have a name on it.”

“Don’t leave boots by the back stairs.”

“They’re in the garbage, draining,” he shouted, pleased by his wit. “I’m buying new ones, fifty-dollar ones.”

“Glue,” she screamed.

“No more glue,” he yelled.

There was silence, maybe a whole minute’s worth, and then the bedsprings groaned. “The Closeout Hut ran an ad for boots. Seven ninety-five.”

Her voice had lost a decibel, maybe two. His feet were winning. He pressed. “Their stuff is crap,” he shouted to the plaster.

The bedsprings groaned again. “Don’t slam the door,” she yelled.

The two deaths occurred sometime in the early morning, in the parking lot of the public boat ramp off Fruitville and Route 41, also known as the North Trail. The bodies were discovered by a homeless man who’d spent the night at the Goodwill facility on 10th Street a few blocks from the bay and who was prowling the waterfront in search of some peace and quiet. He saw blood on the driver’s-side window of a Ford truck and wandered over to investigate. He viewed the bodies from both sides of the vehicle and checked the doors before threading back through the traffic on the North Trail to the Chevron station on the other side, where he told the attendant to call the police. Then he took off.

I was fifteen when my stepfather died. I don’t remember much about it. The doctors said I didn’t want to. “Selective amnesia,” they called it. Whatever it was, I thanked God for it. For years, I managed to put that time out of my mind. For years, everything was fine.

Until the Snow case.

They still talk about Chrissie Snow on West 86th Street. They still whisper about how she looked coming down, like a doll, with her T-shirt billowing out and her hair trailing behind her. She didn’t claw at the air or put out her hands in any desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable.

She simply came down. Fast.

It was three o’clock on an icy Saturday afternoon in mid-January. My partner and I caught the call. Chrissie was still warm when we got there.

Even sprawled on a sidewalk, in a pool of blood, she was lovely, with a mass of soft bronze hair and ebony eyelashes that beat any they sell over the counter. She couldn’t have been much more than sixteen – seventeen, at most. She wore a pastel-pink T-shirt with strawberry-colored bows dotting the collar, light-blue jeans, and pale-blue socks. She was on her stomach, her hair fanned out, blood trickling from her ears, her right leg bent at an impossible angle. Stab wounds punctured her chest. Her right hand gripped a panel of curtain. The left side of her face was crushed, but her right eye was good, and it was open. She moved her lips, struggling to speak or breathe, but nothing came out – nothing but a bubble of blood.

Seconds later, her struggle was over.

Such a pretty girl, said an inner voice. The words chilled my soul.

We were standing before an old tenement from the early 1900s. Six floors up, I could see an open window, and a curtain flapping in the breeze.

The emergency medical team declared the girl dead at the scene. The uniforms held back rubberneckers and questioned those on the street. Ellis Bates of the Crime Scene Unit photographed and measured the scene and the body. My partner and I checked her for ID.

Lee went through her pockets. “Found something,” he said, and pulled a note from her back pocket. “It’s got the name of a hotel. Very expensive, very first-class. You’ll recognize it.”

When I saw it, I did.

The place was swanky, all right. Nothing you’d think a kid could’ve afforded on her own.

Lee and I joined Bates in going into the building. The lock on the front door was broken, and so was the one on the inner door. Stylish, it wasn’t, but the place was a rare haven in Manhattan for low-income, rent-stabilized tenants. A narrow, creaking elevator took us up in a jerky ride. We got off on the sixth floor and walked down a narrow, funky hallway, counting doors till we came to the one that seemed right.

It was unlocked.

We entered the apartment to a gust of frigid air. It was a two-bedroom that looked as though it had been cut off of a neighboring unit. The kitchen wasn’t much more than a sliver. The place was austere, devoid of knickknacks. It was immaculate, with the precise cleanliness of an institution.

The apartment ran along the front of the building. I went from room to room, checking the windows. Those in the kitchen, living room, and bathroom were fine; the one in the bedroom was not. There were the gaping window and the flapping curtain I’d seen from the street. Dark-red dots spattered the wall next to the window and the hardwood floor.

A school ID card lay on her desk. It gave her name and birthday. She was all of fifteen years old.

It was not the room of a typical teenager. There was nothing of the sweet jumble of jeans, sweaters, sneakers, photos, posters, stuffed animals, and heart-shaped makeup kits of my niece’s room. Nothing personal here. Nothing childish. There was something very adult about this place, something that said this little girl had put her toys away a long time ago.

Such a lucky girl, whispered that inner voice. I rubbed my temples and tried to repress a shudder.

Bates gestured to the window. “She didn’t go easy, but I don’t think she fought either – didn’t have time. Probably taken by surprise.” He nodded toward the blood on the walls. “Looks like she was driven back and then fell… or was pushed. Of course, it’ll be a few days before we know if the blood is hers.”

A search warrant was obtained. Lee and I walked the scene, beginning with her bedroom. He went through her desk. I checked the night table, looked under her pillow, her mattress, her bed, all the usual places. Bates continued his work, systematically checking for trace evidence, fingerprints, a weapon, etc. Lee left to check the roof, and a minute later a uniform ducked in to say, “We got a guy here, says he’s the father.”

“Bring him in,” I said.

He was in his late forties, had short gray hair and thick bags under pale-blue eyes.

“I’m Detective Stone.” I flashed my shield.

“What happened here? Who are you people? Where’s my daughter? Where’s my Chrissie? Downstairs, they said… They tried to tell me that…”

I stepped outside into the hallway. There’s no way to sweeten bitter news. I’ve found that it’s better not to try. He put a fist to his mouth to stifle a groan.

“Mr. Snow, we need to know where you were when it happened.”

He was mute with shock.

“Mr. Snow?”

“Downtown,” he whispered. “I wanted to buy her a sweater. I didn’t see anything I liked, so I came back and… I don’t believe this. It can’t be real.”

Lee returned and answered my unspoken question with a shake of his head. Nothing on the roof.

“Mr. Snow, why don’t we step inside?” I led him into his own kitchen. He sat hunched at the table. Lee followed and leaned against the countertop, and I continued the questioning. We got a description and explained that we’d have to seal the apartment.

“When can I see her?” he asked. “Downstairs, they wouldn’t let me. They…”

“You can see her later, sir.” I watched that sink in, then asked, “Where’s Chrissie’s mother?”

“We’re divorced.”

“You got custody?”

“No. Chrissie and her mother fought all the time, and that man Angela married… Chrissie hated him.” He clasped his hands to control their trembling. “Chrissie moved here only last September.” A bittersweet smile touched his lips. “She said she was going to take care of me. Can you imagine? She was a child, but she was going to take care of Papa.”

Papa will take care of us if we take care of him. Just give him what he needs, and we’ll be fine.

“How’d her mother feel about her moving here?”

The sweetness left his smile, leaving it bitter. “She was against it.”

“Did anything happen to precipitate Chrissie’s moving in with you?”

“No. I would’ve taken her sooner, but… I was in prison.”

Lee and I exchanged looks.

“When did you get out?” I asked.

“In August. I told Chrissie to wait until I got settled and found a job. But she wouldn’t.”

“How’s it been?”

“Rough. I can’t find work.”

“What do you do?”

“Bookkeeper.”

“What’d you get sent up for?”

“Embezzlement.”

Well, that explained that.

I asked him about enemies. Did Chrissie have any?

Snow blinked to hold his tears. “Why would anyone hurt her? She was a great kid.” He put a hand over his eyes and sobbed.

“We’d like you to take a look at her room, sir. Tell us if anything’s out of place,” I said.

“Sure,” he whispered, and dragged himself to his feet.

Bates was still at work. He glanced at the father and gave a polite nod, then kept on working, dusting for prints.

“Mr. Snow, did Chrissie keep a diary?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You never seen her scribbling in something?” I asked. “When I was a kid, all my girlfriends kept diaries.”

“Did you?” Lee asked me.

“No… but I was a tomboy. So what about it, Mr. Snow? Did she have one?”

“I told you, I don’t know. She was more of a computer person.” He nodded toward the PC and webcam on Chrissie’s desk.

“Maybe she had a blog,” I said. “One of those online diaries. My niece has three of them.”

“How things change,” Lee said. “When I was growing up, a girl would kill you if she caught you reading her private stuff. Now, they put it out there for the world to see.”

“It’s called ‘hidden in plain view.’” To Snow: “We’re going to have to take the computer.”

He nodded.

“This thing’s pretty expensive,” Lee said. “And the cam’s not cheap either. Mr. Snow, how could you afford this if you don’t have a job?”

“Angela married a rich man. Chrissie had the computer when she moved in. She has a friend – Claire. They were always working on it.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “We’ll need the names of her friends.”

“Other than Claire, try Abigail and Susan. I don’t have their numbers, but they go to Chrissie’s school. The teachers’ll know.”

We found Chrissie’s cell phone in her backpack. Numbers for Abigail Dixon, Susan Bradford, and Claire Wilkerson were on her speed dial.

It happened on a Friday, which had always been a bad day for Will Blackstone. Ever since college, he’d had a habit of relaxing at week’s end with a few drinks or a joint. It had lost him a pretty good job and more than one girlfriend. Sadie Murray was finally interested enough to stick by him, and it was she who got him the job at Techno-Bio, a firm whose specialty was cleaning up the remains at particularly messy crime scenes.

He liked the work, and it brought him into contact with a number of city detectives. One night over coffee, after a double-suicide cleanup, a detective named Tim Press told him he’d make a good cop. “I passed the exam once but didn’t make the cut,” Will told him.

“Why don’t you volunteer a few hours with the police auxiliary?” Press suggested. “We got two men in our squad started out as auxiliary cops. It looks good on your record, gives you an in.”

It sounded worth a try. Soon Will was putting in ten hours a week as an auxiliary, wearing a basic uniform and badge that were impressive even if they didn’t quite look like the real thing. Santos, head of the clean-up crew, kidded him about it. “You big Dick Tracy guy now!”

“Hardly! They’ve got me on park patrol. Last weekend I stopped some kids from throwing stones at the ducks.”

He’d been on the auxiliary force for three months, working Friday evenings and weekends in addition to his regular job. Sadie was pleased that he’d stuck with it and that he was thinking again about taking the police department exam. “You passed it last time, Will,” she told him. “And you’ve done well with the auxiliary. That should help.”

It would have helped, if it hadn’t been for that damned Friday. It was toward the end of the summer, on one of those rainy August weekends that seem to tell you autumn is just around the corner. No one came to the park on evenings like this. Sitting in his car, he’d found a half-smoked joint in his jacket pocket and decided to finish it. He’d just lit up when his supervisor came by.

Will tried to palm the joint, but its odor lingered in the car. “What’s that I smell, Blackstone?” the supervisor asked. He was a grizzly old man named Cranston who went by the rule book.

“I… I guess I – ”

“Are you smoking pot while on duty?”

“I had maybe one puff.”

“That’s one too many. You know the rules. Finish your shift tonight and then turn in your badge. You’re finished with the auxiliaries.”

“Yes, sir.” He flicked the butt out the car window into a puddle.

Sergeant Mendez, there’s some nutcase on line two. Can you figure out what he wants?”

Bonita Mendez did not reply, so deep in the maddening details of the Rivas/Escobedo case that she didn’t notice the uniformed officer in her doorway. For the twentieth time that morning, she read the note: 8:35 p.m., March 2, Mrs. Claudia Padilla (821 Pacific Circle) hears a bang and, a few minutes later, a car accelerating. She picked up the second page, torn from her notebook, to read: 8:49 p.m., 911 call. Young, panicky voice reporting shooting at 814 Pacific Circle (cell phone/Mrs. Adriana Torres/used by daughter, Jasmina, 13). Stuck on to this page were two Post-it notes with related information: Jasmina (Mina) says phone was lost the week before (phone records requested). Then, added the day before: Calls thru March 1 match usual pattern – ask? The two pages lay on either side of the laconic Patrol car arr 9:04 – Gloria Rivas (16) babysitter 814 Pacific, doa/gsw.

“Sergeant Mendez?”

It was shaping up to be one of those cases, the kind that brought you in on your days off and sat at the front of your mind when three a.m. came around on the bedside clock. What haven’t I seen? Sixteen-year-old babysitter Gloria Rivas, dead on arrival, of a gunshot wound to the neck. Twelve-year-old Enrique Escobedo, her charge, missing. Here on Sergeant Mendez’s desk, a sheet of lined paper with a series of apparently random notes: Friends of EE absent March 3 incl. Jasmina Torres, Ernesto Garcia, Todd Stevens, Crystal Pihalak, Gilberto Oliveras. The name “Jasmina Torres” is underlined, simply because it has come up twice. 11:14 p.m., Joseph “Taco” Alvarez $500 Shell ATM at the Shell station north of town – gas, gone. In translation, this means that local gangbanger Taco Alvarez withdrew money from the Shell station ATM, filled his tank with the same ATM card, and drove off into the night. This note was included because Mendez learned from two witnesses that Taco had threatened Gloria Rivas not only because she had refused to go out with him but because she was going out with his younger brother, and she had further compounded her insult by talking the brother into not going through with the gang initiation he was supposed to face.

The entrance of Taco Alvarez onto the scene had reduced the uncomfortable possibility that Enrique – twelve, a good student, with no record – had shot his babysitter and fled.

“Um, Sergeant Mendez? The telephone?”

Sergeant Mendez knew the name Taco Alvarez; she’d even arrested him once for tagging, back when he was a smart-mouthed fifteen-year-old headed toward his own gang initiation. She wasn’t surprised that he’d shot someone or that he’d successfully fallen off the map – Taco had a brain. What did surprise her was that he’d apparently snatched up Gloria’s charge, Enrique, as a hostage.

“Sergeant?”

“What?”

“There’s some wackjob on line two. I hung up on him once, but he called back. I thought maybe you could tell what he wants.”

Mendez stared at him for a moment, then flicked her eyes to the phone that lay half-buried by the Post-its, notebook pages, refolded California maps, and scraps of paper that covered her desk. The phone’s light was blinking, which meant the caller was safely on hold and couldn’t have overheard Danny Scarlotti’s insulting remark: it had happened before. She scowled at the uniformed boy in the doorway. “Why give it to me?” she asked, although as she said it, she knew it was a stupid question. She was the only detective dumb enough, or obsessed enough, to hang around the station on a Saturday morning.

“Because you’re here,” Scarlotti answered, sounding like a teenager – although he had enough sense not to roll his eyes while he was in the room with her. She wondered if uniforms were this casual in a big-city police department or if it was just her.

“I’m busy. And Paul’s the one on call today. Can’t you figure out how to transfer it to him?” She looked down at the stray scrap of paper in her hand, on which she’d noted: March 2, p.m., Mrs. Escobedo hysterical; March 3, phoned five times; March 4, not answering phone.

“Well, he’s at his daughter’s tournament today, and I sort of thought…” Scarlotti’s voice trailed off, and Mendez knew that the answer was no, he couldn’t figure out how to transfer the call. She sighed, knowing she was going to regret this, wondering why on earth they’d hired a kid who couldn’t speak Spanish and therefore interpreted the language as a lunatic’s ravings.

“Sergeant Mendez,” she snapped, in English, to see if she could unsettle the caller, maybe make whoever it was just hang up.

Instead, the voice that came into her ear was real English – the kind from England, like you heard on the television, and not the hard-edged regional accents either. A man; an older man; a voice deep and oddly melodic, as if its owner were reciting on a stage. “What am I? An infant crying in the night,” it said. Then it stopped.

Her head snapped up and her eyes grew wide, then narrowed. Danny boy’s diagnosis of “nutcase” might not be far off. “Sir, you have reached the Rio Linda Police Department. Do you have a crime to report?”

“Man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”

It was what her English teacher would have called a non sequitur, and what most people would call lunatic ramblings, but something in his voice, some pressing intelligence, kept her from hanging up the phone and going back to her fruitless perusal of the material related to the death of Gloria Rivas and the disappearance of Enrique Escobedo. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

“Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.”

She pinched her fingertips hard into the inner corners of her tired eyes. When did she last have a solid eight hours? The Rivas/Escobedo case had crashed down on them on the second, and it was now the fifteenth, with no arrest and no sign of the boy. Going on two weeks of gathering evidence; interviewing family, friends, and neighbors; getting alone with one after another of Gloria’s high school friends and trying to find a wedge to drive under those blank walls. Long, fruitless conversations with the police of Chiapas, where Taco Alvarez was from and therefore where he might be headed, and of Oaxaca, where the Escobedos had lived before they came north in the seventies. Dead ends for the murder, a complete puzzle for the boy’s disappearance, the weight of it settling heavily on all their shoulders. Hang up on this guy, Mendez. You’d do everyone a lot more good if you went home and got some sleep. But the caller’s voice had none of the slurred consonants of drink or the edginess of drugs. His brief statements, though nonsensical (and now rhyming), did not resemble the ravings of any lunatic Sergeant Mendez had met. He sounded polite and calm. Determined, almost. Maybe the English accent was deceiving her, but he sounded like a professor, one trying to deliver a particularly challenging lesson. Okay, see how he dealt with a bright student.

“Well, sir, you called me. If you want me to pick up the fruit of sense, you’ll have to drop it where I can find it.”

“Truth can never be told so as to be understood.”

“Yeah, ain’t that the pits? So, if you can’t tell me the truth, why are you calling?”

“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face-to-face.”

This, anyway, was something she recognized, although what First Corinthians had to do with anything, she hadn’t a clue. “Sir, if you want to discuss the Bible, why don’t you go down to St. Patrick’s and have a nice chat with Father – ”

The man broke in, his voice forceful as he repeated his first words: “An infant crying in the night.”

Detective Bonita Mendez sat and thought about that for a minute. “Are you telling me that a child is in danger?”

The voice boomed into her ear, rotund with approval: “It needs a very clever woman to manage a fool!”

Something about that final word set off a tiny twitch in the back of Sergeant Mendez’s mind, a pulse of recognition, or apprehension. But a tiny twitch was all, little more than a faint aroma in the air, and it was gone. She looped back to her own beginnings: “I think you ought to come into the department and tell me all about it, sir.”

“So near, and yet so far.” He sounded wistful.

She looked at the number on the display, saw it was local in both area code and prefix, and knew he couldn’t be too far away. Maybe he was disabled somehow. Other than mentally, that is.

“You want me to come to you?”

“Come before his presence with singing.”

She hoped this didn’t indicate that her caller thought of himself as God; she really didn’t have time to get involved with a psychiatric hold. The paperwork alone would sink her little boat. Damn it, she wasn’t even on call today. “So where are you located?”

“Absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.”

Her cop’s mind snagged for a moment on the word “pain” before it moved on to the possibility that “tell my story” might be where the man’s emphasis lay. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think…” She stopped, only half-hearing the sounds coming down the line: the faint crackle; the build and fade of a diesel engine in the background; the voice of a child giving forth a long, unintelligible Spanish monologue. When she was a child, not much older than the owner of that piping voice, she’d had an aunt who lost both sons to a drunk driver and who responded to her agony by joining a church. The aunt’s church was one of those that lived and breathed the Bible, that consulted Proverbs and Job for advice and to make sense of daily life, that referenced any decision, from ethical action to what to have for breakfast, by summoning a verse. Some verses were strikingly apt – the Bible is, after all, a large and diverse book – but for other references, meaning was stretched past the snapping point, leaving the aunt and her audience staring at one another, dumbfounded. Rather as she felt with this man on the telephone, in fact. “Are you by any chance talking about Felicia? The elementary school?”

“My library was dukedom large enough,” he responded, with faint stress on the second word.

“You’re at the Felicia library?”

“I give you a wise and understanding heart,” the Englishman said, in an approving voice that made her feel oddly warm.

“Okay, it’ll take me maybe fifteen, twenty minutes to get there. Will you wait for me?”

The phone went dead, which she guessed meant yes.

She sat for a minute, tapping her middle fingernail on the desk, wondering what the hell she’d just been listening to. There remained the tiny, faraway sense of familiarity in the back of her mind, but for the life of her, she couldn’t tease it forward. Something years back and not here, but an echo… The Bible, snippets of poetry, Shakespeare – she’d caught both Hamlet and The Tempest there – it was an odd conversational form, to be sure. But conversation it appeared to be, albeit of a convoluted and inadequate style. She felt a stir of interest at this welcome distraction from frustration – and then caught herself.

She had to be careful. This thespian-voiced Englishman could be some honest-to-God nutcase setting a trap for a cop. A small backwater town like Rio Linda might not shelter as many purely vicious individuals as a big city, but that didn’t rule viciousness out.

When in doubt, take backup.

And always be in doubt.

Mendez closed the Escobedo file on her computer and hunted down the location of the number the Englishman had been calling from. Yes, a public phone, located at the little Felicia Public Library, as he’d said. Or sort of said.

She shut down the computer and began shoveling the stray papers back into their file. “Scarlotti!” she shouted.

“Yeah?” came the formal answer.

“Yes, Sergeant Mendez,” she muttered, locking up her desk.

“What?”

“Nothing. Who’s on patrol down in Felicia?”

“What, you mean now?”

She looked at him from the doorway where she was standing, adjusting her gun for comfort.

“Yes, I mean now,” she told him.

“Um, let me see.” He pawed through the mess before him, came up with the right piece of paper, and read from it. “Torres and Wong.”

“Patch me through to them, will you?”

It took him only two tries to do so, and when she had Jaime Torres on the line, she asked if the two patrolmen could swing by the front of the library in fifteen minutes, just to provide a little backup, in case.

There was a pause before the puzzled voice responded, “That’s where we are now.”

“What, at the library? Why?”

“Someone called in a report of a suspected terrorist in Arab robes hanging around out front.”

“An Arab terrorist? In Felicia, for God’s sake? Hey – I don’t suppose it’s a guy with an English accent?”

“Don’t know about the accent. We just pulled up, but there’s an older white-haired male sitting on the bench near the phones. He’s got a knapsack on the ground next to him, but I’d have to say he looks more like a monk than an Arab. Doesn’t have a turban or anything.”

“Look, would you mind not approaching him until I get there? Unless he’s actively causing problems, that is. I’m just at the station.”

“Sure, he’s just sitting there, looking pretty harmless. You want us to watch him from the car or from the café across the street? There’s a clear line of surveillance from there.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and take your break, sit where you can keep an eye on him? I’ll be there in twelve minutes if I make both signals.”

“Take your time. Wong’s got the prostrate trouble – he’s happy to piss for a while.”

The line cut off but not before she heard the beginnings of an outraged partner’s voice. She smiled, figuring that Wong had no “prostrate trouble” at all but that Torres had heard that Detective Mendez was unattached again, and was pulling his unmarried partner’s leg.

The Felicia library was a tiny building with a few thousand books, two computer terminals, and one part-time librarian. It survived on the goodwill of a small army of largely Hispanic volunteers and had to argue its budget to the city almost every year. But since the Felicia District of Rio Linda, surrounded by fields of strawberries and lettuce, was the kind of neighborhood where few houses had computers (or books, for that matter), and the only other forms of entertainment in walking distance were the roadside bar a mile south and the dusty general store/café across from the library, it made the Felicia Public Library the place to go for homework, after-school gatherings, job searches, ESL classes, and visiting-nurse clinics. It also made for some great numbers to show the state auditors, and the low-income patrons had justified a regular trickle of state and federal grants. Without a doubt, the people here adored the place and kept it both busy and spotless.

Which might explain why some concerned patron had called in a stranger hanging around the public phone out front. As Mendez pulled into the pitted surface of the small parking area, a young mother and her two young kids were coming out the door, and all three patrons gave the man a wary look. He lifted one hand, two fingers pointing skyward like a benediction; when the woman came down the steps, she was smiling.

Mendez got out of her car and could understand why the woman had smiled. The figure in the brown robe – which was no more Arab than the shirt and khaki pants she was wearing – resembled a tall, thin, brown-clad Father Christmas, down to the twinkle in his eye. There was, as Torres had told her, a battered blue nylon backpack tucked under the front edge of the bench, and a walking stick, tall as a man, leaning against the far armrest. His skin was weathered, although he was clearly Anglo. A pair of nearly white running shoes peeked out from the hem of his robe.

The man saw her, and he made her instantly for a cop, but he watched her watching him with no indication of the wary or defiant manner that brought a cop’s reflexes to attention. She half-turned to look over her shoulder, wondering if Torres and Wong had been paying as much attention as the skinny Father Christmas had.

In perhaps thirty seconds, the two uniforms came out of the onetime garage that was now plastered with neatly painted signs advertising strong hot coffee, breakfast burritos all day, and menudo thursdays. The two men hitched up their heavy belts as they crossed the deserted side street, not needing to look for traffic. They joined her at the car, taking their eyes off the man for only the brief moment necessary to greet her.

Torres, she had known for years, and she’d met Wong (who couldn’t have been more than thirty, further marks against the prostate story) a couple of times, although she’d never worked with him.

“He’s just been sitting there,” Torres told her. “Occasionally says hi to someone going in or out, but otherwise just cooling it.”

“Okay, I don’t think there’ll be a problem here, you might as well go back to work.”

“We’ll hang on for a minute,” Torres said firmly. Jaime Torres was a few years older than she was, and she’d been friends with his sister in high school: this was a brotherly thing. She wouldn’t even try to argue him out of it.

“Okay,” she agreed, and led the way up the library’s walk.

The bearded monk rose as she approached, not like a wary suspect but like her maternal grandfather, who’d been incapable of sitting when a lady entered the room. The resemblance ended there: her grandfather had been shaped by a lifetime of work in the fields, but even if he’d lived a life of leisure, he wouldn’t have been much more than five and a half feet. This man was well over six feet and of a willowy build that wasn’t far from gaunt, creating hollows in the cheeks above his beard. She figured him for a homeless man, what with being a stranger in the area and carrying that worn knapsack, but if so, he was a very clean and tidy homeless man. He reminded her of a portrait of a saint in church school.

“Sir, I believe you called the police department?” she said.

“When constabulary duty’s to be done,” he replied, one eyelid drooping infinitesimally in a near wink.

“Could we have your name, sir?” she asked.

Instead of answering, his right hand went toward the side of the brown robe, where a pocket might be; instantly, both men at her side leaped forward to seize him, yanking his arms around and making him stagger back with a grimace of pain.

“Wait, wait!” she told them. “Don’t hurt him. Sir, do you have any weapons in your pocket? Anything sharp?”

He shook his head.

“Do we have your permission to check for ourselves?”

He nodded.

“Would you please lean with both arms against the back of that bench? Let him go,” she told the two uniforms.

The old man turned and leaned his arms onto the bench, automatically spreading his feet apart as he did so: he’d been patted down before. Then again, anyone who looked like this would have been picked up regularly, no matter his behavior.

His pockets, accessible through slits in the seams of the brown robe, held no gun or knife. Some coins, a pencil stub and folded sheets of paper, and a nearly flat wallet. She held out his wallet to him. “Is this what you were after?” she asked.

In answer, he took it from her and opened the billfold portion. There was no money that she could see, but he took out a piece of folded newspaper and offered it to her.

“You want us to look at his pack?” Torres asked her.

She met the brown eyes above her. “Sir, do you mind if we take a look at your belongings?”

“What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine,” the monk said, extending one hand in a sweeping gesture toward the beat-up rucksack on the ground. Torres picked it up and unbuckled the top, while Mendez picked apart the ancient folded square of newspaper.

It was the upper half of a front page, seven-year-old San Francisco Chronicle. In the center was a photograph showing four people, standing in conversation.

Although the page was all but worn through on its fold lines, she recognized the figure with the white hair, the dark robe, and the long walking stick with the knob on top that was currently leaning against the end of the bench – in the grainy newsprint, the stick was tucked against his shoulder as he leaned forward to listen to a dark-haired woman not much taller than Mendez herself. To the woman’s left stood the familiar image of a black man wearing a dashing hat who could be only the then mayor of San Francisco. Next to the man in the robe was the fourth figure, a middle-aged man whose face was vaguely familiar.

When she read the caption, she realized why:

“Mayor Willie Brown and Inspectors Martinelli and Hawkin of the SFPD talk with the self-styled ‘Brother Erasmus’ at the funeral of homeless woman Beatrice Jankowski on Saturday, St. Mary’s Cathedral.”

Hawkin, she knew that name. And Martinelli – they’d been involved with a couple of cases that got a lot of press.

The faint bell of memory rang slightly louder. Hadn’t one of those cases been something extremely quirky to do with the homeless population of San Francisco? A murder case in which a sort of patron saint of the homeless population had played a part? One Brother Erasmus?

She opened her mouth to ask him about it, but suddenly Torres exclaimed and thrust out the object in his hand. It was a small, thick leather-bound book with onionskin pages, closely printed in some heavy writing.

“Arabic!” he exclaimed. “And it’s got notes to himself in the same language!”

For a moment, just an instant, it crossed Mendez’s mind that there might be a terrorist cell here in Rio Linda, the world’s least likely place. She shot a glance at the accused man’s face, but the old bearded man had one white eyebrow raised in a look that was more quizzical than guilty. Of course, it was possible that terrorists had now started enrolling in acting school…

“Let me see that,” she said. Torres gave her the book and transferred his hand to the butt of his gun, flipping off the snap to be ready when the old man reached for the trigger of his vest bomb. She opened the book and immediately shook her head – she had no idea what the words said, but she’d watched enough television news to know what she was looking at.

“This isn’t Arabic, Torres, it’s Hebrew. And for heaven’s sake, take your hand off your weapon.”

“Hebrew?”

“Sure, it’s all square and boxy – Arabic is all curves and curlicues. Haven’t you ever noticed the banners and signs on the news?”

“So… what? A Jewish terrorist?”

“This is a Bible,” she said. “No, look, don’t bother going through the rest of his pack. I know who this is. You’re Brother Erasmus, aren’t you?” she asked.

“A muddled fool, full of lucid intervals.” His smile was like a beatitude as he held out his hand to her.

“Er, right,” she said.

She gave him her hand and felt it wrapped in a smooth, strong, warm grip that again evoked her grandfather, who had grasped the wooden handle of a hoe until the last day of a long life. But this man’s fingers were long and thin and considerably less bashed about, and reminded her of that Dürer engraving of praying hands that used to be so popular when she was growing up. “Sergeant Bonita Mendez,” she told him.

He held her hand a moment, then let her go.

“Thanks, Torres, you and Wong can get back on patrol. I’m fine here.”

Reluctantly, and not without protest, the two patrol officers separated themselves from the library forecourt and returned to their car. Watching the two men swagger off, Mendez regretted, not for the first time, that a uniformed officer’s equipment belt encouraged such a gait.

She turned to the man at her side and said, “Sir, I’m going to need to make some phone calls. Do you mind coming with me to the station house? You could have a cup of coffee or something,” she added, lest he think of it as an arrest.

He stretched out a long arm for the rucksack Torres had abandoned, half-searched, on the bench, retrieved the carved staff, and walked beside her to the unmarked she’d driven there.

She put him in the front, threading the staff over the seat back, and pulled out of the library parking lot. Neither of them spoke on the drive into town, although it was not an uncomfortable silence, merely restful. At the station, she helped him get his walking stick out and led him inside.

“Sir, I’m going to put you in an interview room for a few minutes, and I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve made my calls. Is there anything you need? Coffee, soft drink, something to eat?”

“I am glad I was not born before tea,” the old man remarked.

“Tea? I’ll see what we can do. Officer Scarlotti, would you please make a cup of tea for the gentleman in Interview Room One?”

“Tea?”

“Yes, there are some bags in the cabinet. And take him the milk and sugar, in case he wants them.”

“Milk and sugar?”

“And offer him the package of cookies,” she added, and closed the door before he could repeat that as well.

It took four calls to track down Inspector Kate Martinelli of the San Francisco Police Department, but eventually Mendez reached her at home. A woman answered; a child was talking in the background; Martinelli came on the line; and the background noise cut off.

Mendez began to explain: odd phone call; enigmatic remarks; the caller tracked to a local library; seemed to match the identity of the man known as Brother Erasmus; and she wondered -

“Our Holy Fool is there? In Rio Linda?” the detective interrupted.

“Apparently.”

“Good Lord, I’ve often wondered what happened to the old man. How is he?”

“He looks fine. Thin but healthy.”

“If I wasn’t in the middle of ten things, I’d be tempted to drive down and say hello. Tell him hi from me, would you?”

The affection in Martinelli’s voice was not the usual reaction of a Homicide detective to a witness and onetime suspect, Mendez reflected.

“I wanted to ask you about him, whether you’d say he was reliable, but it sounds like you’ve already answered my question.”

“I don’t know about reliable, since Erasmus might well have his own agenda, but I’d say he’s the most honest man you’ll meet.”

“If you can figure out what he’s saying,” Mendez said.

“Does he still talk that way? Everything in quotes?”

“Are those all quotes?”

“That’s how he talked then. It took us forever to figure out what he was trying to say.”

“Why does he talk that way?”

Martinelli was silent for a moment, then said, “He would probably call it penance for his sins. He lost his family, years ago back in England, in a way he felt responsible for. Personally, I thought he was trying to keep his mind so busy, he didn’t have energy left over for his own thoughts. He is actually able to speak directly, in his own words – he finally did when he was helping us with our case – but it seemed to be very hard on him. I think you’ll find that, if you listen carefully, his meaning becomes clear. Have you figured out what he’s after?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said he called you and said something about an ‘infant crying in the night.’ Has he suggested yet how he can help you?”

“You think he knows something about one of my cases?”

“People open up to him, even the most unlikely people.” Something about the way the detective said this made it sound like an admission. “And if he didn’t know anything, why would he have called? Do you have a case involving a child?”

Mendez was silent, picturing the abandoned bedroom of twelve-year-old Enrique Escobedo: neatly made bed, rock poster on the wall and a Lego spaceship below it, bulletin board pinned with drawings of friends and celebrities, dozens of science-fiction books on the shelf unit. “I might.”

“Well, he had some reason to come to you. You might start there.”

Mendez thanked her, repeated the promise to pass her greeting on to the old man, and hung up. She then phoned the priest at the Catholic church downtown – not her own parish priest, but she knew him. He knew immediately whom she was talking about.

“The kids call him St. Francis, because he has a way of coaxing birds into eating from his hand. He’s been at Mass a few times over the past few weeks. I’m not sure where he lives or how he supports himself, although I’ve seen people slip him money, and they often bring him something to eat.”

“Elijah’s ravens,” she commented.

“Exactly. Nice fellow, odd, but a calming influence. There was a scuffle in the food line one day, and he stepped forward and put his hands on the two men’s shoulders, and they calmed right down. What’s more, he had them eating lunch together afterward, talking up a storm while he sat with them and nodded.”

“Have you talked with him?”

“Don’t know if I’d call it talking with him, but I’ve sat and talked to him several times myself. Very restful kind of fellow. Knows his Bible better than I do.”

“But you’d say he’s a trustworthy sort?”

The priest did not hesitate. “I’d say he’s a saint of God.”

When she hung up, she sat tapping the desk for a while, then returned to the interrogation room. When she glanced through the door’s small window, she could see the old man, long hands tucked together in his lap, gazing in silent contemplation at his staff, which was leaned in the corner. She turned the knob and stuck her head inside.

“I need some lunch. You want to join me?”

He rose and picked up his knapsack and staff, and followed her out of the station.

They walked down the street to the take-out burrito stand, which was doing brisk business with an assortment of children in soccer uniforms, the playing fields being just two blocks away. They waited their turn, the old man ordered by laying a finger on the vegetarian option, and two minutes later they had their fragrant meals before them on one of the stand’s heavily scarred wooden picnic tables. She peeled back the paper and bit in; Erasmus was of the fork-and-knife school, taking a fastidious surgical approach to the object with his plastic utensils. His staff lay stretched out on top of a low concrete-block wall, and for the first time, she noticed that the fist-size swelling at the top was not an amorphous knob of wood but a heavily worn carving. Studying it, she realized that when it was new, it must have resembled its owner – beard, flowing hair, hawklike nose. She smiled.

“I spoke with Inspector Martinelli in San Francisco,” she said.

“Subtle and profound female,” he murmured.

“Yeah, she seemed to admire you as well, and asked me to say hello. She also said that you might have some information regarding an active case. That it might be the reason you called.”

He put his fork down and reached through the pocket-slit of his robe, pulling out a folded scrap of newsprint that was considerably fresher than the one she had found in his wallet earlier. He laid it in front of her, resuming his fork as she picked up the clipping.

The Escobedo boy’s grinning school picture looked out at her.

She knew what the article said without having to look – she felt by now that the words had been carved on her heart. It had been published on March 9, one week after Enrique Escobedo had vanished from his house, and his babysitter, Gloria Rivas, had been gunned down on the front walkway of the home. When the article was written, Rio Linda was still quivering with apprehension; they were now coming up on the two-week anniversary, and Detective Bonita Mendez hadn’t slept an eight-hour night in thirteen days.

“You have information about this?” she demanded.

He frowned at the rice and beans spilling out of their wrapper, and she could see him decide on an appropriate quote. “Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.” The stress placed on the final word suggested the direction of his meaning.

“Look, sir, can’t we just drop this whole quotation business? This isn’t a game.”

He raised an eyebrow in sympathy and said, “The rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.” He chewed a mouthful, watching her intently. She propped her head in her palms and shut her eyes.

“You’re telling me that you don’t actually have any direct knowledge that could lead me to Enrique Escobedo,” she said. “You have only guesses, except that I have to jump through hoops to try to figure out what you mean, when I’m so tired that even if you were talking sense, I’d have problems sorting it out. I have to say, if you’re trying to help, I wish you wouldn’t. You’re wasting time that I don’t have.”

She felt his touch then, the dry firmness of his skin as his fingers wrapped around hers, gently pulling her hand from her face. She looked into his eyes, dark into dark, and saw her torment reflected there.

“To every thing there is a season,” he stated, as if the words had never been said before. “A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak. There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.” The repetition of the word alone was soporific; Mendez wanted to lay her head onto her arms right there on the picnic table. “Take up thy bed. And if we do meet again, why, we shall smile.”

“You’re telling me to go home and have a nap.” His eyes crinkled: Yes. “You’re probably right. But you haven’t told me what you wanted me to know, about Enrique Escobedo.”

“Those that have eyes to see, let them see.”

“Do you have any idea how irritating this is?” she snapped.

“The discourse of fools is irksome,” he agreed.

“So why do you do it?”

The crooked smile he gave her was filled with apology and empathy. He said, “He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a beggar’s rags,” she told him.

But Brother Erasmus merely said, “Like him that travels, I return again.” He set the tip of his first finger against the table: Here. Then he spread both hands out on the dented wood, all fingers outstretched except the thumb of his left hand, tucked under the palm.

“You want me to meet you back here at nine o’clock?” she interpreted. “Tonight?”

By way of answer, he folded the paper around his half-eaten burrito, tucked it and the plastic fork and knife into his knapsack, and walked away, his staff beating a syncopation to his steps. The carved head was pointing backward; it seemed to watch her as it rose and fell.

She shook her head to get the ridiculous notion out of her mind. But in one thing, the man was surely right: she did need some rest if she wasn’t to be utterly useless. She phoned the station and told Scarlotti that she was going home and wasn’t to be disturbed for anything short of a catastrophe. Inevitably, he wanted to know what she meant by “catastrophe,” but she slapped her phone shut and tossed her debris in the trash.

She drove home, fed the cat, kicked off her shoes, and crawled into bed, pulling the covers up over her head. And although she expected perhaps twenty minutes of fitful rest, Bonita Mendez slept like a babe in its mother’s arms, her dreams filled with the warm brown eyes of wise old men.

When she woke, it was dark, and the bedside clock told her it was nearly seven. She fried up some eggs, onions, and jalapeños, wrapping them in some of the tortillas her mother had made, topped with her sister’s fiery homemade salsa. Rested, fed, and warm inside, she then took a long, hot shower, washed her hair, dressed in plain clothes with a jacket to cover her gun, and went by the station in the vain hope that something – anything – had come to light in the case. There was nothing.

Mendez had no intention of meeting the old man. It was ridiculous, to waste her time listening to his colorful but meaningless talk, when she could be out reinterviewing the friends of Gloria Rivas she’d suspected hadn’t told her everything they knew, or -. That reminded her. She called the Torres number, got Jasmina’s mother again, and was told that no, Mina wasn’t home that day. She had been in earlier and went out again with friends to a movie. Did Sergeant Mendez have Mina’s new cell phone number? Yes, Sergeant Mendez had it, and now tried it, but the phone was either turned off or in one of the county’s numerous dead zones.

Mendez looked at the clock again: 8:52. Oh, hell, why not?

When she turned down the alleyway near the burrito stand, it appeared empty, until the old man stepped out of the shadows, a swirl of dark robes and a gleaming staff. He pulled open the car door, slid the stick inside with the ease of long habit, tucked himself into the passenger seat, and had the door shut again before the car had settled into stillness.

“Where are we going?” she asked, reaching up to flick on the overhead light.

He held out a scrap of paper, a torn-off section of the local AAA map, showing Rio Linda and the outlying countryside. Near the upper right corner, twelve miles or so from the center of town, was a penciled circle.

“You want me to go here?” she asked, tapping the circle.

In response, he pulled his seat belt around him.

She put the car into gear and drove off.

She didn’t have to check his map again – one thing Bonita Mendez knew, it was this valley. She had been born in the Rio Linda community hospital, had attended schools here, had gone to college just over the range of coastal hills, and had come home, after a brief fling with the bright lights of the Bay Area, to work and live. She’d learned how to drive on the roads near the map’s circle, remote farm lanes where a beginner could learn the intricacies of the stick shift without endangering the driving public; she’d patrolled there when she began at the police department; and she’d helped dismantle a meth lab a little farther along the road, five years later. Before that, she remembered, the INS had raided a farmworkers’ camp, carved into the hills by undocumented workers desperate to save every dollar to send to their families back home.

It was dark out there, miles from any streetlamp. When she let the car slow, the last house had been nearly a mile before; the last car they’d passed, ten minutes before. Even the headlights behind them had turned off at the final junction, when they’d left the main road.

“Okay?” she said, making it a question.

The old man’s hand moved into the glow from the dashboard, one long finger pointing straight ahead. She gave the car some gas, and in a hundred yards, when his finger shifted to the right, she steered down a gravel track between fields.

They went on that way for about a mile in all, gravel giving way to dirt, then ruts. Eventually, his hand came up, and she stopped.

She would’ve had to stop even without the signal, because she had reached the end of the road. The fields on either side came to an end at a creek with a cliff on the other side, thrust up by an underground fault line. Her headlights illuminated a dirt turnaround and a wall of greenery. The camp of illegals had been very near here, as she remembered – the men had used the creek for water, the hills for shelter, and the trees for concealment. In the end, it had been the smell of the cook fire that had given them away.

Just as the smell of smoke as she got out of the car gave this encampment away.

She had her hand on the weapon at her side, easing the car door shut with the hand that held the big Maglite. The old man, however, had no such urge to silence, and before she could stop him, he had slammed his door with a bang that could be heard for a mile.

The very air seemed to wince. Her companion walked toward the turnaround and spoke over his shoulder. “Venga.”

She was already moving before the implications of his command struck her. Unless he’d come up with a very short quotation from some Spanish book, he had just addressed her directly. She trotted after him, switching on her flashlight as they plunged into a shadow of a space between some bushes.

Yes, there was a creek here, with stones laid across it to ensure dry feet. And yes, the smell of wood smoke grew, as did signs of human occupation – a pair of folding chairs that looked as if they’d literally fallen off the back of a truck, with duct tape and a stick holding one leg together; a full black garbage bag with its neck tied shut; a heap of empty plastic gallon-size milk jugs. At least the place doesn’t reek like a toilet, she thought, grateful that she wasn’t picking up disgusting substances on her shoes.

The ground under their feet began to rise, and Mendez thought they were coming near the sandstone cliff in which the illegals had carved their dwellings. The trees grew thin, the path more defined, and suddenly Erasmus came to a halt before her.

“Hola, niños,” he called. “’Stoy aquí con mi amiga. Permiso?”

There followed a long and tense silence, during which Mendez’s fingers worked at the strap on her gun, and then an answer: “Vengan.”

She nearly dropped the flashlight in surprise: the voice was indeed that of a child, although she’d thought Erasmus had used the word as a priest would have: “my children.” She took her hand off her gun and warily followed the shifting outline of his robes.

A barrier had been constructed, jutting out of the sandstone cliff in an L-shaped wall made of splintered pallets, tree branches, and a sheet of warped plywood with tire tracks down its length, the whole held together with duct tape and twine. Just past the end of the patchwork barrier stood the smoking circle of a burned-down campfire; around its back lay the entrance to a cave dwelling, one that either had gone unnoticed when the previous lot had been destroyed or else had been carved anew. Light came from within, and the hiss of burning propane. Erasmus started forward, but she held his shoulder and pushed past him, peering cautiously at the hole hidden by the barrier. Her hand on her weapon again, she peered inside.

The cave’s three occupants, adolescents all, were standing in an apprehensive half-circle, separated from the adult intruders by an upended plastic milk crate draped with a square of cloth that had once been a pajama shirt. The girl on the right, tallest of the three, was Jasmina Torres. The boy on the left, small and dark, was Ernesto Garcia, a friend of Enrique Escobedo’s whom she’d interviewed along with two or three dozen other middle school students.

The boy in the middle, clothes dirty but chin up, was Enrique Escobedo himself.

The woman in Mendez wanted to vault the plastic crate and seize the boy in ecstatic relief, then turn on the other two and deliver a tongue-lashing they would not recover from fast. She wanted to dance and sing and yank out her cell phone to tell all the world he was safe, but the cop in her nailed her boots to the ground and sent her eyes traveling across the contents of the cave, to keep the kids dangling. It was, she had to admit, dry, neat, and surprisingly well equipped. Half a dozen of the plastic milk jugs, filled with water, were stacked against the wall, along with a plastic storage bin showing the gaudy wrappers of packaged food within. A stack of neatly folded bedding – a wool blanket, a mover’s pad, and a sleeping bag patched with duct tape – leaned against the storage bin, with a second propane camp light. Thought had gone into the hideout, and care – most kids would have dumped a pile of charcoal in the middle of the cave and lit it, suffocating to death by morning.

Mendez studied the impromptu tablecloth and wondered if it had been put there, and the cave tidied, just to impress her. A demonstration of their responsible behavior, perhaps.

Not going to work.

“You guys having fun here?” she said in a hard voice. “You playing at Peter Pan or something? The city’s spent a fortune looking for you, half of us haven’t slept in two weeks because we’ve been searching for your body, and your family is going nuts.” At the last accusation, the boy’s defiance hardened, and he glanced past her shoulder at the old man. His lack of guilt confirmed a suspicion.

“Your mother knew, didn’t she? That you hadn’t been kidnapped. That’s why she stopped phoning me every couple of hours, two days after you disappeared.”

“Mina told her,” the boy confirmed, gesturing at the girl. “I didn’t want her to worry.”

At that, Mendez lost it. “Why the hell didn’t you come to the police?” she shouted. “Why are you hiding out – ”

Click, as the penny dropped.

“You saw it, didn’t you? You saw Gloria die, and you’re afraid her killer will come after you.” It really wasn’t much of a leap of inspiration – this sort of thing happened all the time, in a community dominated by gangs, where one crime, or even an accident, could lead to an escalation of violence and retribution until eventually the police managed to wrap official hands around it all and smother it.

The boy nodded. His defiance suddenly melted away, and he looked small and scared. Mendez sighed, rubbed at her face, and decided to start over again.

“Okay, let’s sit down and talk about this.”

The three kids looked hugely relieved and settled onto their dusty pads. Mendez took the camp light off the table and put it on the ground, pulling the table back toward the entrance as a chair. She glanced around to see what the old man would sit on, but he was not there – leaving the police to their work, or maybe just a recognition that the cave would be stifling with one more body in it. Or perhaps he had some kind of Zorro complex, so that when his job was done, he would fade into the night.

“Digame,” she said. The boy was so eager to do so, his words tumbled in a rush of Spanish and English, with his friends contributing the occasional comment or clarification.

The first thing he wanted Mendez to know was that Gloria hadn’t really been his babysitter, although his mother paid her for staying with him when she was working nights. He was twelve and didn’t need a babysitter. But Gloria’s family was large and she was serious about getting into college, and she could work more easily in the silence of the Escobedo house, so they all pretended she was a babysitter.

Mendez blinked at the boy’s sense of priorities but decided to let him tell it as he wanted. She nodded solemnly, and he went on.

“So anyway, a little after eight, Gloria got this phone call on her cell. She got all funny when she heard who was on the line and took the phone outside so I wouldn’t hear, but she didn’t talk for long and wouldn’t tell me who it was. Then a little while later I was upstairs, getting ready for bed, and I heard this knock on the door, and I looked down from the window and there was this guy there, and I figured it was the same guy who’d called.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Well, she was angry when she saw him, and she wouldn’t let him in, and they went out in the yard and talked for a while, angry but in low voices.”

“Did you know him?”

“I’d seen him around once or twice. He’s big in one of the gangs, or at least that’s what someone told me. They call him Taco.”

“Go ahead.”

“Like I said, I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, not without opening the window and hanging out of it, but it looked like he wanted her to do something, and she wouldn’t. After a while, he got really angry and he hit her – not with his fist, with his hand, like a slap, but he knocked her back, and I was going to go down and make him stop, but he turned and walked away. But Gloria went after him and grabbed his arm just before he got to the car, and then he turned around really fast and I heard this bang, and Gloria fell. It took me a minute to realize what had happened, and I just stared at Gloria lying there and this Taco guy looking down at her. It was… I kept waiting for her to stand up, you know?”

The boy’s stricken expression, the tears in his eyes, were strong reminders of the first time Mendez had seen a dead person, the unreality of it. She nodded again, with no humor this time.

“And then he looked up and he saw me in the window. He started running toward the house, and I could see the gun in his hand then, and I got the hell out of there.”

“How?”

“Out the window. You can climb out onto the porch roof and down the whatchacallit, the trellis, but I sort of shot off the roof and hit the ground and ran. I was down the street before I heard his car take off, but I was afraid to go home again. I mean, I saw him, and he’s got a lot of friends.”

“So what did you do?”

“I sneaked down to Mina’s house, and she gave me her phone, and she and ’Nesto and I hid out at her house until morning. ’Nesto had a cousin who’d lived down in these caves for a while, before La Migra deported him, but he said there wasn’t anyone using them right now, so we figured I could hide out here until you guys had arrested Taco.”

“That was your plan?”

“If I led you to Taco, his homeys would come after me, maybe even my mom. But I thought that if everyone knew you couldn’t find me, they wouldn’t go blaming me when Taco got arrested.”

In the backward logic of the gang world, it made sense. “So why did you have Brother Erasmus bring me here?”

Enrique’s defiant look wavered, and his gaze dropped. “I realized I was just thinking about me. Me and my mom. But then Erasmo asked about Gloria, and so I told him about her and how she was really nice and she really wanted to go to college and all, and when I was telling him about her, I began to think that I wasn’t being much of a friend to her. I have a responsibility to her too.”

The trio across from Sergeant Mendez seemed to sit a little straighter, either shouldering their responsibility or squaring off for the firing squad. Two twelve-year-old boys and a girl who’d just turned thirteen, facing her as if prepared for the fate she would march them to.

Must’ve been some conversation with that old man, she thought.

“Thank you for being willing to come forward,” she said. “It would have saved us all a lot of grief if you’d called me ten days ago, but you’ve done so now, and that lets me get on with my responsibility, which at the moment includes protecting you.” For a second, just a flash, she felt a powerful urge to stand up and walk away, to leave these kids to the safety of their hideout, far from vengeful gangbangers and the inadequacy of the legal system. But she couldn’t do that – they were lucky they hadn’t run into some adult animal out here before now. Or been inside when an earthquake collapsed the cave. Time to bring them home.

She told them to gather their things, a process that consisted of picking up two already full backpacks and standing expectantly. She stuck the flashlight in her belt and exchanged it for one of the propane lamps, running her eyes across the sanctuary. How much of the organization had the girl been responsible for? she wondered. Young Jasmina showed signs of becoming a formidable woman. Mendez was smiling to herself when she ducked her head through the entrance of the cave, but the moment she was out, standing between the sandstone cliff and the wood-and-duct-tape wall, she heard a noise that wiped away any thought of a smile, a sound that froze the blood in her veins and made her hands shoot out to block the children behind her.

“Back!” she ordered. “Get back!”

A shotgun, racking its shell into place.

She was blind, with the lamp in her left hand dazzling her sight of the darkness beyond, but she knew that sound, oh yes, and although it set her guts to crawling and the impulse to fling herself to the ground was almost more than she could resist, she was not about to let these three children walk into it.

The kids hesitated in confusion, then to her relief she felt them retreat, back into the dark and inadequate depths of the cave. She kept her hands outstretched, her face and chest crawling with the anticipation of the deadly blast. It couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away, no one could miss at that range, but if she turned her left side toward the gun, she might live long enough to get out her weapon and take him down as he climbed past her into the cave. She straightened slowly, leaving her hands out but shifting a fraction to the right as she moved.

“I want the kid,” said the voice from the night.

“You don’t want those kids. They’re just vagrants camping out here. I’d suggest you leave before my partner arrives.”

“You don’t have a partner. You left the station by yourself.”

Which was true, although he’d missed her brief stop to take on Brother Erasmus. It was also worrying. “You’ve been following me?”

“Just the last couple of nights. One of my boys heard you were on to the kid. He was right.”

“Those were your headlights I saw behind me, on the road.”

“Didn’t need to follow you closer. I could see where you were coming. Now, get out of the way.”

“I can’t do that,” she said. “And whoever you are and whatever you’ve done, you really don’t want to shoot a police officer.” If he thought she had no idea who he was, he might possibly be more inclined to back off, leaving Enrique for another day.

She heard a step, then another, and braced herself for action – throwing the lamp, dropping to the ground, or just dying, she didn’t know.

Then came a sound that didn’t fit: a patter of rainfall on a dry night, off to the side. She knew it had to be Erasmus and drew breath to shout a warning, but before the words could leave her mouth, there was a scuffle and a thump beneath a sudden exclamation. Then came the huge noise that she had been dreading and the brilliant flash that lit up the hillside.

What seemed a long time later, Mendez lifted her head off the ground. She was blind. And half-deaf, but over the ringing in her ears she could make out a high-pitched noise, a chorus of noises – screams – the kids, in the cave! She scrambled to her feet, vaguely grateful that she could move, that she hadn’t been cut in half by the shotgun blast. She staggered, crashing into something that gave way and bit at her hand: the pallet wall. She reached out more cautiously, then remembered the flashlight on her belt. She yanked it out and thumbed it on, and over the noise in her ears, the screaming voices seemed to diminish slightly.

Two steps took her to the cave entrance, and a quick sweep of the light showed the three kids wrapped in one another’s arms against the back wall, terrified but unharmed. Ernesto was the only one still screaming, his eyes tight shut, but the other two blinked against the light, and the girl’s mouth moved in speech: no blood, no shooter.

Mendez ducked back out the door, shining the beam along the path: nearly collapsed patchwork wall, smashed propane lamp, near-dead fire circle, path along the cliffs, a pair of feet.

Taco Alvarez lay stretched out with his feet toward the cave, blood on his forehead, hands empty of weaponry, one hand beginning to stir. The beam continued on and came to another pair of feet, white sneakers beneath a dark-brown robe.

Brother Erasmus stood, wooden staff in one hand, shotgun in the other. He blinked when the beam hit his eyes, but the smile on his face was beatific.

“Was he alone?” she asked. First things first.

“Alone, alone, all, all alone.”

She took the gun from him, peeled the shells out of it, and laid the empty weapon to one side. As she knelt to slap the handcuffs onto the groaning Taco Alvarez, the old man went past her to the entrance of the cave. When she looked up, all three children were wrapped around him like limpets on a rock, weeping.

Her cell phone, of course, couldn’t get a signal.

She was not about to leave these three kids out here while she went to summon help, and she was loath to put them into a car with their would-be murderer. In the end, she left Taco, cursing in two languages and with his feet bound by lengths of duct tape, in the gentle care of Brother Erasmus.

“I’ll send someone as soon as I get in range of a cell tower. You sure you’ll be okay with him? I could just leave him tied to a tree.”

“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art… watching, with eternal lids apart.”

“I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near an eternity. Maybe twenty minutes, half an hour.”

By way of answer, he placed his hand on her shoulder and smiled down on her.

She glanced around at the children, who had passed through the terror phase and were now beginning to talk madly about the adventure, words tumbling over themselves. She looked back at him and said, “Thank you. He’d have shot me for sure. I should have been more cautious, coming here.”

“There is no fool like an old fool,” he said, as if to excuse her.

She laughed. “You’re right there. The last thing he could’ve expected was an old man with a cudgel.”

“Every inch that is not fool is rogue,” he said, his eyes sparkling.

“Well, I thank God for that. Okay, I’d better get these kids home. I’ll see you at the station.”

He merely smiled and leaned on his staff. She gathered up Enrique and his pair of protectors, got them across the creek dry-footed and into the car.

When she turned back, she saw Erasmus still standing there, outlined by the glow from the second propane lamp. “I met a fool in the forest,” she murmured, as a line from one of the summer Shakespeare productions percolated into her mind, “a motley fool.”

She got a signal for her phone two miles from the cave and called in her report. As she made her calls, she was dimly aware that the kids had moved on from reliving the moment of the gun going off to speculation about Erasmus. Enrique thought he was a hero in disguise. Ernesto wondered if he’d just dyed his hair and painted lines, to make himself look old. But Mina, with the superiority of age and the wisdom of her sex, said he was an angel, and that shut both the boys up until they reached the station.

Bonita Mendez thought all three might be right.

Of course, she could never be sure, because when the police arrived at the turnaround and followed the light to the thoroughly trussed Taco Alvarez, Brother Erasmus was no longer there.

They lifted my rag-wrapped body off the top of a munitions wagon and left me in Stratford County, Kansas, where I remained unconscious for the better part of two months due to infection, pain, and an excess of laudanum. Eventually the leg wound healed over and my addiction came under control. My aversion to the battleground remained, however; so when Stratford asked me to serve as part-time marshal, I was quick to raise my saber-scarred right hand. Thus ended my part in the great War Between the States.

I was still young in 1864 and I believed that, except for a slight limp, the personal effects of the war were over for me. But as most career lawmen will tell you, at least once in a lifetime some case will come along that offers you an education, and if you’re lucky it will touch your head, your heart, and your gut in equal measure. For me, such a case involved the burying of Mr. Henry: an event that came to represent everything I’d observed about the War Between the States and about the myriad odd effects it had on those who survived it – especially those made less by their exposure to that war. Many wished they could simply forget, transform, and become somebody else. A few of us succeeded, even if only for a short while.

I had never considered becoming a lawman, but it turned out to be a good decision for me. The only talents I’d developed during the war were a knack with a Colt firearm and – I like to think – a level head when it concerned my fellow man. Before the conflict began, my family had paid my ticket into the territory, so that I could cast a vote on whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state. Dear God, that the issue of slavery could have been resolved so simply. Anyway, coming out of my somnolence that painful November, I realized that I could hardly face the thought of returning to clerk in my father’s office.

I considered the possibilities, and it took me no more than a few days, maybe a week or two, before I decided that I could probably pass as a local. What might have been a temporary job as marshal grew into my permanent position. At my retirement in June of 1893, I had served in that capacity for twenty-nine years. The day I started, my constituents numbered just over sixty, but toward the end I had close to twelve thousand people under my jurisdiction.

In 1864, Stratford was pretty much unsettled, like any of a dozen other cow towns growing up around an assortment of settlers who came from as close as Illinois and as far as the steppes of Russia. Most of the older men had fought along the Missouri line, and most of them wanted never to see fighting again.

It looked to be an easy job, even during cattle-drive season, when the town might swell from sixty to a hundred fifty. I had an affinity for those young boys driving cattle for weeks on end. Many of them had no idea how to settle down because, even as young as twelve and thirteen, they had been forced to take up arms for one side or the other and fight for survival. It wasn’t so much that they couldn’t recover from the experience as it was that they’d had no chance to experience a life worth recovering. And so they had to be protected, lest they stumble inadvertently beyond gambling and minor crimes into a shoot-out at dawn where death didn’t matter; they’d already seen too much of it. For them, the world remained a great lawless universe, and my job was to give them rules to live by – at least within the Stratford city limits.

That uneasy balance shifted when the Kansas Pacific Railroad came through about a half-mile west of downtown. Even before those tracks could be tested, the permanent population of Stratford swelled to three thousand people. In addition to the cowboys and the settlers, I began to deal with railroad workers, buffalo hunters, Mexican vaqueros, former slaves hoping to stake a claim for freedom, ex-soldiers still battling over abolition, and even some wealthy Easterners looking for adventure, come to see what all the hoopla was about. I had to deputize Arlen Dexter to help me keep order.

Arlen played a very important role in the Mr. Henry case: first, because he was my part-time deputy, and second, because he was Stratford’s fulltime undertaker. We never spoke about it, but I’m pretty sure Arlen saw no service in the war. Plenty of red-blooded Americans lost themselves in the territories until the war was over, and – some may not recall – plenty of red-skinned Americans found themselves on the front lines, defending both sides of the slavery issue. For the most part, the nondrinking community members avoided the topic of who fought where, when, and why, lest bloody Kansas should begin to hemorrhage again.

I never really cared much for Arlen. He had a limited sense of humor and was way too fussy about clothing for my sensibility. He had a tendency to evaluate people based on the way they looked. And if a handsome young cowboy died, Arlen also had a tendency to show up a few weeks later in the same clothes that the cowboy had expired in. Still, while he might not have been the most scrupulous undertaker, he was a very good deputy. He was always prompt to the scene when there’d been a shoot-out. After all, it was in his best interest both as deputy and as undertaker to claim the victims. Somebody had to arrange for those burials.

If no kin came forward, the town would pay pauper’s fees, but Arlen was diligent about finding family, even months after the last rites. More times than not, Arlen would shame some relative into paying for the coffin and decent black suit that the undertaker said he’d provided the corpse, claiming that, come Judgment Day, every rising soul had a right to look decently saved. This was still in the days when the soul’s salvation meant something to those who considered the West to be God’s gift to the white man.

I often had a suspicion that Arlen’s clients went out of this world wearing only the suit they’d worn coming into it, except when the family lived close enough to attend the services. Even then, I suspect that Arlen’s decent black suit had been altered to fit the frame of more than one back-shot drunken cowboy.

Arlen had an eerie sense about people, both living and dead. Sometimes he would be looking out the office window and see seven or eight young boys coming in to unwind from a long cattle drive, some of them still wearing butternut-dyed Confederacy pants. For those especially, Arlen would jot notes about suit measurements. I came to appreciate how sensible Arlen’s observations could be: anyone crossing the Missouri line still wearing Confederate colors would very likely drink himself into first a shouting and then a shooting match. Arlen’s foresight still didn’t sit well with me.

The other annoying thing about Arlen was his feeling toward women. Generally speaking, he didn’t like them. Nor they, him. Of course, this led him to hold very little regard for the institution of marriage. That fact came to play an important part in the Mr. Henry case. Until Mr. Henry, I was under the impression that Arlen had never enjoyed the company of a woman who wasn’t paid for the interaction.

Arlen’s distaste meant that I had to handle all the disappearing-wife cases. I might get two or three of those in a year, more if the winter had been exceptionally long or the summer unusually hot.

The summer of 1866 was a scorcher. Whatever corn made it to full growth was cooked on the stalk, and since farmers couldn’t sell it to buy anything else, that’s all some people had to eat. Corn, both on the cob and off. Corn bread, corn mash, corn gruel, corn grits, corn pudding, corn dumplings, and, for the really special occasion, corn cakes.

I remember about the corn because when the emaciated Esau Bandler first walked into my office, the thought came to mind that he must have known a pretty steady diet of corn. His skin had that bleached-through color, and his hair looked to be the texture of thinned-out silks. He moved with an air of stoic resolve, passing through our door in the summer heat, wearing a Union greatcoat scarred with rips and tears like a map of warring nations across his constricted back.

I didn’t pick him for a disappearing-wife case, but Arlen did. Arlen usually left the office when some abandoned husband came in, and Esau had hardly begun his speech before Arlen was gone. Arlen had no patience. I could hardly ever help in those cases, but I’d always let the man talk. Although I stayed off the stuff myself, I usually kept a bottle of medicinal whiskey in my drawer to help these stricken men tell their tales. If the wife had been gone for more than a month, there was a good chance the husband hadn’t spoken to another human being in the past six weeks.

Most abandoned-husband stories ran pretty much to type, depending on the age of the disappearing wife. Six to eleven children if she was over thirty, often with one or two recently buried. Some women could get through the death and burial well enough, but they couldn’t seem to bear watching the hot prairie wind blow their children’s mounded graves away like last year’s crop gone to seed.

If the wife was originally from somewhere like Ohio or Kentucky, the husband stood a good chance of getting her back. I never heard any of them say as much, but often all those women needed was a look at some real trees and a few nights’ sleep in a bed raised off the floor. The women always came back for their children, even if they disagreed with their husbands on slavery issues.

Arlen hated hearing the husbands’ stories. Most likely added to his permanent sour on marriage. He’d also handled one too many birthing deaths. Probably the nicest thing he ever said about women was that if he had ever found himself in the unfortunate circumstance of being born one, he would have gone straight to the nearest convent. Odd, because the only time Arlen Dexter ever spent close to God was at the grave. And the only tenet he religiously held was one against hard liquor. He had been a drunk in his early years and had sworn never to touch the stuff again. He couldn’t even keep that faith because I personally gave him another drink, all because of Mr. Henry and Esau Bandler.

In 1862, Mr. Esau Bandler left his wife and four children homesteading on 320 wheat-seeded acres in northeast Kansas and rode south to join the frontiersmen fighting in the War Between the States, in an area where Kansas lost more men than did any other state in the Union.

Jump ahead to 1865, the war ending and Esau riding back home to his wife and family. Except that when he got home, there was nothing there. No wife, no children, no house, and no crops. Some men would have toughed it out and gone about the business of rebuilding their lives. Not Esau. By the time he got to me, he had already tracked down some neighbors who had gone into longhorn punching in north Texas. They were able to tell him what had happened to his children: cholera.

Nobody knew anything about the wife except that she had done her best by the children, and when the time came, she was the one who dug the graves, sold the animals, and lit the house afire. After that, she disappeared. A thinking man would have written her off as long gone. A gentle one would have hoped her happily settled somewhere else. Only one man in ten thousand would believe he could find her again and that, if found, she would still be available to him. Esau was that one in ten thousand. A man who had taken unto himself a wife.

By the time Esau had finished the telling of his personal tale of woe, there was only one man I could think of who might be able to help him: Mr. Henry.

I think I’ve mentioned that Stratford in 1866 was beginning to grow, and we could offer some accommodations. We had a hotel with four single rooms and two doubles. Ole Johansen’s Outfitting Store and Walter Goddard’s Barbershop were both standing then. So was Sokolov’s Dry Goods, and he took the post in there too. And of course there were the five saloons, two gambling houses, and one dance hall butting one another on down the wrong side of Main Street.

The best of those establishments was the Stratford House, next door to my office. You could buy a drink there and a decent meal and a reasonably lenient woman if you wanted. In most of my disappearing-wife cases, I would suggest that the bereaved husband get himself one, two, or all three items, depending on how hungry and hurt he looked at the time. But Esau Bandler didn’t seem like the kind who would enjoy any of those things, as badly as he might need them all.

That’s what led me to think of Mr. Henry.

Actually, I met Mr. Henry through Arlen Dexter. Mr. Henry had an uncommon tolerance for the neediness of the human beings who found their way through the open gates of his hundred-acre ranch. And Arlen found his way there often, although the trip took sixteen miles, both ways. Mr. Henry’s women would clean and mend whatever clothing Arlen might have recently acquired, and whenever he rode back to town, the hammered-tin badge on his chest would sit polished and straight.

I wouldn’t say that Mr. Henry and I were friends, but I liked him. He was a small man who carried himself well, and he always seemed to have the respect of the women who worked for him. It wasn’t a place to go for immoral women, although occasionally one of the bordello gals from town would get fed up or old or wise, and usually Mr. Henry would let her try working his piece of the countryside. Most of the women there seemed to make ends meet by serving hot food spread out on cottonwood tables. They offered up some choice provisions: eggs and butter, vegetables, and the occasional buffalo steak. Their chairs were overturned laundry tubs that they’d used to scrub clothing early of a morning.

To all outward appearances, Mr. Henry was a fine, upstanding man. In fact, one time in the early years, a woman stumbled into my office who had been horsewhipped across the face. Doc patched her up, and I took her out to Mr. Henry, who put her in a room off the kitchen and taught her to cook. That’s another disappearing-wife tale, but you can be sure her husband got no direction from me.

So the story on Mr. Henry was that he might at any given time have between two and twenty women living with him. Not the kind of high-stepping fancies that the saloon and dance hall carried. His women were the kind who could have been your sister, if you had a sister who’d known a streak of bad luck. More than a few were women whose husbands failed to return from the war, or returned so damaged that they forgot their wives were on the good side. I should have considered that before I sent Esau into their welcoming fold.

Mr. Henry’s general clientele were mostly older men, many of them looking for a wife, a night away from home, or just some friendly conversation. And surprisingly, it turned out that what a lot of those wild young cowboys from town really wanted, or wanted soon after the drunk wore off, was a good meal, a clean shirt, and a kind woman’s touch. So long as they behaved, Mr. Henry made room for them too. He had one boy staying with him for several months, cleaning up around the barn, talking to the women, learning to get over that fear of loud noises in the night.

I stayed there once or twice myself over the years, and I never found it to be anything but a clean and decent and honestly run affair. Mr. Henry’s was one of the few places that allowed the emigrant railroad workers to visit, although he made it clear in any language that he could and would shoot a gun in defense of his women.

When Mr. Henry lost a woman, it was usually because he had married her off to some widower out in the hinterlands. If the woman wanted to go, the man would give Mr. Henry whatever he could in exchange. Sometimes money, sometimes labor. Mr. Henry had some of the best produce to be gotten in the whole of Kansas, what with the cattle drivers, the farmers, the railroaders, and the women themselves coming back to visit.

So, looking into the cold religious fervor of Esau Bandler’s prairie-blue eyes, I figured that Mr. Bandler needed a dose of what Mr. Henry’s place could offer. I walked him through the door and across the splinter-board sidewalk to where I could draw a proper map in the dry dust that then formed Stratford’s Main Street.

Bandler had been gone an hour when Arlen came back to the office. I told him what he’d missed by way of Esau’s story, and when I finished by saying Esau should be renewing his soul at Mr. Henry’s by now, Arlen bet me we hadn’t seen the last of Esau Bandler. I remember joking about how maybe I’d sent him to the wrong kind of house; since maybe his was the wife who’d joined the convent. Arlen said no, but not joking back. A wife running from Esau wouldn’t join a convent because living with Esau himself would be closer to the wrath of God than most women could ever abide.

If it wasn’t the next day, then it must have been the day after. One of Mr. Henry’s women rode in to tell us there’d been trouble and asked if Arlen could come back to the ranch with her. I told Arlen to stay – I’d take this one. That’s when the woman broke down enough to tell us that Mr. Henry had been shot dead and they wanted both him and Esau Bandler to have a proper burial in the Stratford Cemetery. No blown-away grave for their Mr. Henry.

Ordinarily either Arlen or I tried to stay within shooting distance of Main Street, but the day Mr. Henry died, we left the cowpokes and the card sharks to fend for themselves while we rode the sixteen miles to Mr. Henry’s place.

It was one of those unforgiving hot, dry days with too much sun and too little shade. I remember thinking, as we bowed to pass through the open doorway into Mr. Henry’s personal quarters, just how low Esau Bandler must have had to stoop to gain access. It was a sparse room, with two of its sod-caked walls canted to one side. The remaining walls stood relatively straight, being propped up by additional structures that were added over the years: a kitchen wing and a large space where the women slept around the perimeter, while leaving an open area in the center. The complex of rooms smelled heavily of burnt buffalo dung, which the women scoured from the plains in summer and stockpiled in winter. Mr. Henry’s two windows were covered with an oiled paper that contributed to the smoky air of mystery within his private space.

He was dead, all right. Shot neat and clean through the chest. Right beside him lay Esau Bandler, who had turned the gun on himself after firing it into the heart of Mr. Henry. There wasn’t much for me to do, nor for Arlen either. Mr. Henry’s women all told the same story and they had already bathed and dressed both bodies in what looked to be matching black suits. Only thing left was to bury the pair.

I helped Arlen load the two of them into his burial wagon, and since the women had already said whatever words they’d wanted over Mr. Henry, I rode alongside them to the cemetery and then returned to see if the longhorns had left the town in a standing condition.

Fortunately it worked out to be a quiet afternoon. I sat by the window in my office and meditated on how little I actually knew about Mr. Henry. Stratford had grown dramatically in the past two years, but looking out on the facades along Main Street, I saw that the real nature of the buildings behind them was barely disguised by the gaudy signs designed to draw in the miscellany who passed our way. If even the buildings had something to hide, then why not Mr. Henry? At first it occurred to me that Esau Bandler might have proposed something unacceptable to one of the women. Maybe he enjoyed inflicting pain. He didn’t look like a man who readily accepted no for an answer. But to kill for a yes? That didn’t explain why he shot Mr. Henry.

Maybe those two had some unfinished business left over from the battlefield. God knows I had experienced a few tense moments myself, in the fear that some newcomer to town might remember seeing me at the shooting end of a Confederate rifle. I tossed this off as unlikely; neither of them talked enough to confirm any suspicions on that score.

A religious problem? Perhaps Mr. Henry belonged to that religious sect that felt themselves entitled to marry all those women at his ranch. It wouldn’t be the first time some counterbelieving zealot like Esau Bandler decided to save womankind from a life of multiple wifehood.

Where in hell was Arlen? I sank back in my chair and nodded to the passing gamblers, with their finely groomed handlebar mustaches, cultivated to camouflage lips that might quiver while bluffing at the table. A pair of prospectors passed, wearing full beards: those two should be so lucky as to have something to hide.

By the time Arlen had finished the undertaking half of his job and come back to the deputy half, I’d run through a half-dozen other whys and wherefores on Esau Bandler that I wanted to try on him.

But all Arlen wanted was a drink.

He came through the door with a bundle under his arm, threw it onto the chair by the window, and waited while I unlocked my drawer and poured him a whiskey. Alcohol does funny things to a man who’s been an abuser but hasn’t tasted it for years. Arlen sank like a two-day drunk.

“I probably never told you this before,” he said, “but I had a wife once. She was a good woman, strong and fine and courageous. She made a better man than I did, and one day after I’d drunk half a gallon of cheap sugar rye, I got on a horse and rode until I hit the Kansas border. I hardly ever think of her anymore.”

“Doesn’t surprise me, Arlen,” I said. “I’m sure there are lots of men out there who have left a woman behind. Most of them manage to find someone else.” I wanted Arlen to feel good enough to talk but not so good that he couldn’t. I poured him a second glass of whiskey and capped the bottle. “What about Mr. Henry, Arlen?”

Arlen tossed down his second helping and pushed the empty back to my side of the table. “Something else I probably never told you is that I rustle the clothes off dead bodies.”

I knew about that, of course, but at the time it seemed to be one of his lesser sins. It certainly wasn’t a topic I wanted him to elaborate on at that moment. “Arlen, what about Mr. Henry?”

Arlen indicated his empty glass and waited until I poured him another. I held on to the glass until he shrugged and picked up his bundle. Finishing off this third drink, Arlen opened the bundle and laid four pieces of fabric out neatly across the floor. “Maybe you didn’t have time to notice the fine jacket and the fine pair of trousers Mr. Henry was laid out in. And this other set here, equally fine, came from the corpse of Mr. Esau Bandler. I mean, what undertaker in his right mind could cover clothes as fine as these with ashes and dust and corn-poor Kansas sod?”

“I guess not you, Arlen.”

“I guess not me, but I certainly will next time.” Arlen indicated his glass again.

After no more than a second’s thought, I set a container for myself next to his. “I’m losing patience, Arlen. Pretty soon you’re going to kill another half-gallon of whiskey. Tell me what you know about Mr. Henry and Esau Bandler.”

“I know I should have planted those two, side by side and fully dressed, just the way Mr. Henry’s women and the good Lord intended it.”

“Why, Arlen?” At the sight of Arlen’s puckered face, I poured myself another round.

“Because then tonight I wouldn’t have to go to sleep knowing that Mr. Henry, without his clothes on, was Esau Bandler’s wife.”

I just sat there as Arlen picked up my bottle and put it under his left arm. “You mean…”

“I mean that when Mr. Bandler’s children died, Mr. Bandler’s wife decided that she had had enough of what mankind and nature had thrown her way, and she set out to become someone else.”

I had nothing to say.

“You know what I’ve learned from this?” Arlen reached across his chest and unhooked that deputy-marshal star from the side of his vest. “I’ve learned that a person’s secrets – a person’s past – ought to be respected whether living or dead.”

I remember feeling the effects of the liquor – similar to those I’d known when tapering off from the laudanum. I don’t know if I told him I agreed. I don’t even know if it took me a few moments to realize my agreement. The next thing I became aware of was watching Arlen Dexter walk out the door, across the boardwalk, and out into the street, where he unhitched the horse from his burying wagon, cinched up a saddle, and then rode slowly out into the world to become somebody else.

I don’t know why Arlen and I were shocked. It was no secret that a man could ride throughout the open plains and become anything he had the mind and the courage to be. Many of us had passed out of the nightmare of the War Between the States covering our wounds in whatever fashion might ensure survival. Who was I to cast that first stone? After all, would those kindly soldiers dressed in abolitionist blue have dropped me off behind Union lines if I’d been dressed in the Confederate brown of my own affiliation?

I don’t know how long it took me. Days, maybe. No more than a week or two. But I was always thinking. Finally, after I considered all the possibilities, it seemed to me that if the men could do it, why not the women? I do know that I got up one morning shortly thereafter, saddled up my own horse, and rode out to Mr. Henry’s place to see how I might help them begin anew. It turned out to be a good decision for me.

James Lopaka let out his belt two notches. Discreetly. Quietly. But nothing slipped past Auntie’s eye.

She rose to her feet, whisked away his empty calabash, and replaced it with another helping of poi. “You too thin, James,” she said, adding more laulaus, ripe mangoes, and a square of coconut pudding. “You cannot do a good job when you so thin.” Her muumuu blossomed around her ample figure as she lowered herself gracefully onto the woven mat. She waggled a finger. “No one respect a skinny hapa police officer.”

James dipped two fingers into the poi. That was the last notch on his belt. If he kept eating, he would have to remove it altogether. How would it look to have slipping-down pants? Never mind that his belt held his holster, which held his gun, and what was a police officer of the Republic of Hawaii to do without a gun? He sighed and reached for the pudding. Maybe by tomorrow night, after the seven-mile ride back to Honolulu, he would be able to fit his belt. Meanwhile, he was home, and although the occasion was sad and did not call for a celebration, he was going to enjoy Auntie’s food.

James was slicing his third mango when the dogs set to barking in the yard. Chickens squawked. James set down the mango knife, unfolded his 241-pound body, and walked to the door of Auntie’s pili-grass shack. His little brother, Richard, slid off his lathered roan and staggered toward the house, kicking his way through panicked fowl.

Richard’s voice was slurred and angry. The smell of liquor rolled off him. “Mary’s at Bolo’s. Again, godfunnit.” He pushed past James.

“Watch your mouth.” Auntie’s face was grim.

“I kill him already,” Richard said.

“No pidgin English in this house.”

Richard kicked at the stack of empty calabashes waiting to be washed. Koa bowls rolled across the hard-packed red-dirt floor. “You hear me, Auntie? Bolo’s.”

“Take off your boots,” Auntie said, and started to cry.

“I kill him. Dead.” Richard grabbed the mango knife from the mat. “I swear.”

James grabbed Richard’s wrist and twisted, and his little brother dropped the knife onto the swept dirt floor. James planted his bare foot over the handle. “Who told you?”

“Silva got a phone call.” Silva was the Portuguese owner of the Homestead Store down the road, next to the Ewa stop on the Oahu Railway. Last year, when the train company ran the phone wire from Honolulu, Silva took the opportunity to hook up a line to his store. No one in Ewa said anything to the company about Silva’s free line. Everyone shared the phone. “I stopped for a drink. Silva told me.”

“Who was it from?”

“A woman,” he said. “A lady.”

Auntie rose from her cross-legged position. “One more time, James. Go and get her one more time. Please.”

“How many times is ‘one more time’?” James had retrieved Mary many times from Bolo’s. She promised to stay. They took turns sitting through her shaking and moaning, and when her head came clear, it would happen again. And again. James felt the familiar anger in his shoulders. “How many times is ‘one… more… time’?”

“No more ‘one more time.’” Richard scooped up the mango knife. “Pau already.”

“Give me the knife.”

“You gonna arrest me?”

“I made an oath.”

Richard kicked James in the shin and punched him in his stomach, one-two, right into the tight belt. James doubled over, and Richard lurched out the door.

“Boys, for the love of God, we’re ohana,” Auntie said, running after Richard, who was looking for his roan. He found the horse ripping into the grass by the outhouse. He was in the saddle when Auntie reached for the reins.

“Pray instead, Auntie,” he said. He kicked, and the startled roan skittered through the poultry.

James’s stomach hurt like hell. He sat on the bench by the door and picked up his boots from the neat row of slippers. He tried to pull them on quickly, but his belly was in the way. He stomped his feet into the boots. They stuck. He hobbled to the horse pen. Popolo was feasting on elephant grass. She would not take the bit. Richard put two fingers into the side of her mouth and rubbed her gums. She flattened her ears and opened her teeth. A gob of green slobber rolled out and onto James’s shirt and badge.

In the distance, James could see Richard on his roan, riding away faster than James could get Popolo saddled. Auntie brought out an armful of banana leaf-wrapped packets of food. “I’m sorry you have to go so soon.”

“I’m sorry too,” James said, unpinning his slobber-covered badge. He stuffed it in his pants pocket while Auntie stuffed food into his saddlebag.

“I thought you would be here two days.”

“I thought so too.” James had told his supervisor, Wong, that his mother was sick, and thus he must go to the country for two days. Wong knew the truth, of course, and so did his Chinese partner, Kam, and the Filipinos and Japanese: no officer with Hawaiian blood would report to work on August 14, 1898.

How could he get up in the saddle with his belt so tight? Enough already. He unbuckled his belt, wrapped it around his holster and gun, and tucked them next to Auntie’s packets. Auntie promptly put in three ripe mangoes and closed the latch.

“I’ll cook more food when you bring Mary home.”

James stroked her waist-length gray hair. “I have to hurry now to catch that brother of mine.”

“A hui hou,” she said. Until we meet again.

Popolo trotted sullenly down the road. The sun was low over the Waianae Mountains. Shadows of pandani and palm trees fractured the blinding light that covered the Ewa Plain. Richard had a head start. But Richard was drunk, and his roan was tired. With any luck, James would find his brother sleeping beside the road.

He turned in the saddle. Auntie stood in front of her pili-grass house and waved. James lifted his hand in response. He reined left, riding toward Honolulu, the setting sun at his back.

Tommy found the badge on the third day of his summer holiday at Blackpool, the first holiday without his father. The sun had come out that morning, and he was playing on the crowded beach with his mother, who sat in her striped deck chair, smoking Consulate, reading Nova magazine, and keeping an eye on him. Not that he needed an eye kept on him. Tommy was thirteen now and quite capable of going off alone to amuse himself. But his mother had a thing about water, so she never let him near the sea alone. Uncle Arthur had gone to the amusements on the North Pier, where he liked to play the one-armed bandits.

The breeze from the gray Irish Sea was chilly, but Tommy bravely wore his new swimming trunks. He even dipped his toes in the water before running back, squealing, to warm them in the sand. It was then that he felt something sharp prick his big toe. Treasure? He scooped away the sand carefully with his hands while no one was looking. Slowly he pulled out the object by its edge and dusted off the sand with his free hand. It was shaped like a silver shield with a flat top and seven points. At its center was a circle, with METROPOLITAN POLICE curved around the top and bottom of the initials er. On its top were a crown and a tiny cross. The silver glinted in the sunlight.

Tommy’s breath caught in his throat. This was exactly the sign he had been waiting for ever since his father died. It was the same type of badge he had worn on his uniform. Tommy remembered how proud his dad had sounded when he spoke of it. He even let Tommy touch it and told him what er meant: Elizabeth Regina. It was Latin, his father had explained, for the queen. “That’s our queen, Tommy,” he had said proudly. And the cross on top, he went on, symbolized the Church of England. When Tommy held the warm badge there on the beach, he could feel his father’s presence in it.

Tommy decided not to tell anyone. They might make him hand it in somewhere, or just take it off him. Uncle Arthur was always doing that. When Tommy found an old tennis ball in the street, Uncle Arthur said it might have been chewed by a dog and have germs on it, so he threw it in the fire. Then there was the toy cap gun with the broken hammer he found on the recreation ground – “It’s no good if it’s broken, is it?” Uncle Arthur said, and out it went. But this time Uncle Arthur wasn’t going to get his hands on Tommy’s treasure. While his mother was reading her magazine, Tommy went over to his small pile of clothes and slipped the badge in his trouser pocket.

“What are you doing, Tommy?”

He started. It was his mother. “Just looking for my handkerchief,” he said, the first thing he could think of.

“What do you want a handkerchief for?”

“The water was cold,” Tommy said. “I’m sniffling.” He managed to fake a sniffle to prove it.

But his mother’s attention had already returned to her magazine. She never did talk to him for very long these days, didn’t seem much interested in how he was doing at school (badly) or how he was feeling in general (awful). Sometimes it was a blessing, because it made it easier for Tommy to live undisturbed in his own elaborate secret world, but sometimes he felt he would like it if she just smiled at him, touched his arm, and asked him how he was doing. He’d say he was fine. He wouldn’t even tell her the truth because she would get bored if she had to listen to his catalog of woes. His mother had always got bored easily.

This time her lack of interest was a blessing. He managed to get the badge in his pocket without her or anyone else seeing it. He felt official now. No longer was he just playing at being a special agent. Now that he had his badge, he had serious standards to uphold, like his father had always said. And he would start his new role by keeping a close eye on Uncle Arthur.

When it was my turn, it was a son of a bitch coming at my head with a bottle of Widmer Brothers Drop Top Amber Ale while two of his drunken friends cheered him on.

The drunk swung from the outside, sidearm style, like he was throwing a slider at the plate. If he’d been swinging it like a bat, I’d have been able to step back and out of the way. But the guy went with the changeup and at the last second released the bottle from his hand. It hit me just below the left eye, high on the cheek, shooting pain through the bone and bursting light through my head.

I didn’t drop. I staggered, but I did not drop, no matter what Morrison told his buddies later. I fell back against the car, sure, and I could hear the drunk calling me a bitch, and it sounded like he was at the bottom of a nearby well when he did it. My vision was spinning out of control, beer somehow up my nose and down my shirt all at once. I needed a hand on the spotlight to keep from going down, but in the end, I kept my feet.

Which turned out to be a very good thing, because when I finally found my vision again, what I was seeing was the drunk with a fresh bottle, this one unopened, winding up for another pitch. I lurched out of the way, shouting for Morrison to back me up. Even though I was slow and sluggish, the drunk was worse because he was a drunk. The shot missed, the bottle exploding against the side of my cruiser.

The drunk’s friends had stopped cheering, maybe realizing that they’d graduated from drunk and disorderly to assaulting a police officer. I was swearing at both Morrison and the drunk, but the drunk was the only one answering me. Apparently, I reminded him of his ex-wife. He didn’t like her very much either.

My stick was still on my belt, along with all my other non-lethals, but I just reached out and met the back of his neck with one hand, and the back of his right knee with my foot. He didn’t know I was coming, and the takedown worked just the way it was supposed to. He hit the parking lot hard, and it didn’t do his face any good, I guess, but then he hadn’t done mine any either.

Then I had my cuffs on him, shouting at Morrison to please, in the name of God and all that was holy, give me some fucking cover.

She stands out like a cactus blossom in the desert, seated in the roll-call room beyond the eight men in sky-blue shirts and navy-blue pants huddled in the back row like juvenile delinquents in remedial math class. The minute Brett lays eyes on her, he knows she will be his for the evening.

Her attire is simple, understated: a white blouse and blue slacks with white pinstripes. Sensible, flat-soled shoes. Long black hair caresses the shoulders of her blouse, which is open demurely at the neck. In her right hand she grips a pen, which hovers over an open steno pad resting on the desk affixed to her chair. A burlap satchel sits at her feet. She doesn’t look up when he enters.

The room is wide but shallow, containing three meandering rows of simple student desks, the sergeant’s podium, and a TV suspended from the ceiling. Printouts listing suspect information decorate the podium. Behind it, next to the door, American and Texas flags flank an empty table. A poster features the sergeant from Hill Street Blues saying, let’s be careful out there.

It’s nearly three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, so the television is broadcasting a Texas A &M football game. The Astros play later on, which means Brett’s radio will be filled with chatter every time someone scores.

Two bulletin boards sealed in glass cases cover the wall at the far end of the room. One features mug shots, wanted notices, and BOLO fliers. The other contains approved job postings for officers looking to supplement their income. Most are for night watchmen or nightclub-security positions. Brett has no interest in these – he already works the department maximum forty additional hours.

The comfortable weight of the gear on his utility belt – service revolver, radio, handcuffs, nightstick, and Taser – adds to his swagger. Two colleagues look up from their conversation when he takes the last empty seat in the back row. Phelps raises his eyebrows and tilts his head an inch toward the woman. Brett scrunches his mouth into an appraising pucker and nods. Not bad is the silent message they exchange. He doesn’t waste any time checking her out, though. He’ll have the next eight hours to do that. Guaranteed.

When the sergeant emerges from his office, he mutes the volume on the television but leaves the picture up. He reads a policy-change sheet and advises officers whose body armor is more than five years old that they have three more weeks to turn it in to be replaced. He has an orientation video available for anyone taking the sergeant’s test. After reading the names of officers who need to sign subpoenas before they go on duty, he assigns cars by unit number.

“Hoskins,” he says, “you have a ride-along.”

Which comes as no surprise to Brett. Nine times out of ten, he gets the riders. The only question is why she’s here. Most civilian passengers are either media or members of a mayoral task force. Her attire doesn’t provide any clues, but he appreciates the way her blouse clings to her body. If he had to bet, he’d say media. It doesn’t make much difference. Either way, he has to mind his p’s and q’s, keep the bawdy banter to a minimum, and not bust anyone’s chops unless they deserve it. It also means, however, that he has an excuse to handpick the cushier calls.

The sergeant makes no introductions, merely points Brett in the woman’s direction. She’s already gathering her possessions and heading toward the podium. Her eyes are the color of roasted chestnuts. The long black hair framing her narrow face has been teased into gentle waves. He glances at her left hand – no ring. Her complexion is dark, making Brett wonder if she has Hispanic blood and whether that will be an issue during the shift. Many of the perpetrators he encounters over the next eight hours will be Hispanic.

“Follow me,” he says. “It’s a bit of a hike.”

He leads her along the corridor, down a narrow staircase, outside the central station, across a gravel parking lot, into the garage, and up to the third level, where his ride, 1 Adam 25 E, is parked. The car is where he left it the day before, which probably means no one used it since then. The department is short staffed, so he’s not surprised.

“Hoskins,” he says by way of introduction when they reach the car.

Panting slightly from the stairs and the fast pace he set, she sticks out a hand. “Meredith Knight.”

Her skin is smooth and soft, and he maintains his grip on her hand about two seconds too long. After he releases her, he pulls out a well-worn ignition key, opens the door, and clears the lock on her side. The car is seven years old and has more than a hundred thousand miles on it. He listens for the roof speaker to crackle when he starts the engine. “Some officers like to check all the lights, the siren and stuff. I know everything pretty much works. At least it doesn’t change day to day, especially since the car’s not driven around the clock. Means I don’t have to change the seat, the mirrors, the radio station.”

She starts taking notes immediately, which is a little strange. Reminds him of a high school keener, writing down everything the teacher says.

“How come I never get a ride-along?” Phelps says in a singsong voice on his way to his car. Brett shrugs and grins.

The radio is set loud enough to hear the music without having it drown out the dispatcher or other radio chatter. He boots up the computer, which runs an obsolete operating system; loads the com software; and logs on with dispatch. The crowded quarters, the front seat jammed with computer equipment and other paraphernalia, makes it feel as if they’re unusually close. Her perfume, mild and floral, reaches his nostrils. “Reporter?”

“Writer,” she answers. “I’m doing research for a novel.”

That’s a new one. “Interesting.” With two jobs and an ex-wife, Brett has no time for novels. Of the three, the ex-wife is the most demanding. Still, he relaxes a little knowing that his activities over the next eight hours likely won’t end up in tomorrow’s newspaper or in a report on the mayor’s desk.

“They pretty much just give you paperwork to read over and then say come ride, right?” He knows the routine, but he’s looking for a way to break the ice.

“If I get shot, beaten, or otherwise maimed, it’s my own damned fault,” she says. “At least that’s what the forms I signed say.”

“I’ll do my best to keep that from happening. I’ve never lost a ride-along yet.” He likes her spunkiness, so he answers in detail her questions about the minutia of his routine. He shows her how to use the outdated computer with attached microphone that is his lifeline to central dispatch. “If I’m getting my ass whooped, don’t worry about calling 1 Adam 25 E. Just pick this mike up and say, ‘Hoskins needs help.’” He points at a second microphone. “That one is for yelling at people on the PA. This is the one for saving my ass.”

“Got it.”

The computer pings every time a dispatch message comes through. If he ignores them long enough, a robotic female voice chides him. “Three new messages waiting.” He picks some of the easier call slips to handle first to clear the backlog. Reports of suspicious people that rarely pan out or complaints about illegally parked vehicles that he will ticket and ultimately have towed if they stay there long enough.

Unsure of what she’s looking for, he describes the neighborhoods on his beat and tells anecdotes about interesting calls he’s taken in the past. Without mentioning his divorce or admitting that all he can currently afford is a dingy apartment in a rough neighborhood, he points out houses he’s looked into buying, though they’re all beyond his means. She compliments his ability to drive, operate the computer, and talk with her all at the same time. When she isn’t writing in her steno pad, she’s recording him on a digital voice recorder, a device smaller than a cell phone that beeps and chirps from time to time.

When he returns without getting a response at an apartment where a silent 911 was reported, he tells her, “The front door was locked. No noise coming from inside. Nothing more I can do – you just can’t go around kicking people’s doors in.” He types “C UNF” into the computer and clicks “send.” “That’s ‘clear/unfounded.’ We get a lot of those around here. It’s a Hispanic neighborhood, and part of Mexico has a 911 area code. Sometimes they forget to dial the ‘001’ first, so they hang up.” He waits to see how she will react, but she’s too busy taking notes.

As work goes, it’s drudgery, but Brett puts the best face on it. He feels compelled to both entertain and impress. He gets most of the ride-alongs because of his reputation for being easygoing, but he wants to be more than that for Meredith. If I play my cards right, maybe I’ll get to show her my billy club at the end of the shift, he thinks with a barely suppressed grin.

She expresses interest in the mundane. The operation of the computer and what all the codes and responses mean. How he selects which call slip to answer. He allows a hint of pride to creep into his voice when telling her how he reads between the lines, discerning when a call should be assigned a higher priority than it seems to merit at first glance.

He elicits a laugh when he says, “Please don’t steal the police car,” before he goes to ticket a Hispanic teenager who ran a stop sign. The driver’s-license number triggers a warrant flag, so he confiscates the ignition key and returns to the cruiser to await confirmation from TCIC/NCIC.

“Seven minutes is the timer on a stop,” he says, typing a code into the computer. “I’m telling the dispatcher to restart the clock. Otherwise she’ll start sending messages or calling me over the radio to make sure I’m okay.” He twists in his seat to watch the occupants of the other car and make eye contact with Meredith at the same time. He has to be prepared in case the driver decides to run away. “Saturday usually starts out quiet like this and then picks up when the sun goes down. What’s your book about?”

She shrugs. “I don’t like discussing story ideas until they’re finished.”

“Have you published anything?”

“Some short stories. This is my first novel.”

He wants to ask more, but he knows so little about writing and books in general that he’s afraid to look stupid. Awkward silence fills the air between them, interrupted only by the garbled chatter on the radio, including frequent updates on the Astros game. Though it’s early October, it’s warm sitting in the car without the AC running.

When he notices her checking her watch after fifteen minutes, he decides to cut the driver loose with just the ticket rather than waiting for dispatch to respond. Priority-one queries, where the information determines whether or not someone will be arrested, are supposed to take less than ten minutes, but sometimes a request gets lost between the dispatcher and the person who keys it in. Thirty seconds after the other car drives off, the report comes back positive for two delinquent traffic tickets, so he flashes the lights, blasts the siren for a few seconds, and pulls the car over again, this time placing the driver under arrest. He turns the keys over to the passenger after ascertaining that he has no outstanding warrants.

Once he has the prisoner handcuffed and belted into the backseat, he says, “At least now you’ll get to see the jail.”

It takes nearly twenty minutes to drive to the Southeast Jail, where prisoners arrested on minor complaints are held. After they arrive, they have to wait another ten minutes for the garage door to open on the sally port, which is little more than a glorified parking garage with a few podiums. Here, the prisoner’s handcuffs are removed, he is frisked again, and a jail employee asks in a bored tone if he has any medical conditions or any forms of mental illness and if he’s ever attempted suicide. The guy is cooperative and untroubled by the process, which leads Brett to believe he’s been through this before.

Brett ushers Meredith into the small office behind the podiums, where he hands over his paperwork. The other officers waiting in line look her over approvingly and give him subtle thumbs-up signs or winks.

By the time they leave the sally port, it’s nearly six o’clock. Normally he’d have dinner with one of his buddies, but he called to cancel when Meredith was in the powder room at the jail. He doesn’t want to share her with anyone.

“Hungry?” he asks. “There’s a place up here I’ve been meaning to try out.”

“Sure. My treat.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s the least I can do. You must be getting tired of all my questions.”

“It’s good to have the company, to be honest.”

“On TV they always show the cops riding with partners.”

“If we weren’t so understaffed, maybe. You saw how many people were at roll call today? That was a big turnout for a Saturday. Usually we have two or three less than that. A couple of nights ago, there was a house fire, and another unit and I had to do traffic control. You should have seen the call slips piling up. I had nineteen when I got back to the car. Some of them had been holding for eight or nine hours from day shift.”

He wheels into the restaurant parking lot and escorts her into the dim interior. It’s a place where he knows he can get good food and quick service, two important factors to someone who could be called out at any moment. He likes the way she looks in the flicker of the candle on the table, and he takes the opportunity to discreetly appraise her while she studies the menu.

“This must be boring as hell for you,” he says. “Nothing like what you see on TV.”

“That’s exactly what I’m looking for. Reality, not drama.”

She focuses her attention on him, as if every word he says is gospel. Normally it’s the uniform that makes him feel noticed. Today, it’s being seen in the company of this beautiful woman. He wonders if it’s too soon to ask her to join him at a nightclub after he gets off shift. He usually goes out on Saturdays because he has Sundays off. Maybe he should work that into the conversation first.

“You’ll get a kick out of this,” he says after they give their orders. “A woman was chasing a sexual-assault suspect the other day in her car. She calls 911 and tells the call taker where they’re headed. Then she goes, ‘I’ve got a pistol and I’m going to shoot him… I’m getting ready to shoot him.’ It goes out on the radio, and the responding officer calls back in this deadpan voice, ‘Um, ask her to hold off on that.’” It’s a funny story, much older than he lets on and always good for a laugh. A burst of adrenaline rushes through his veins when she reacts as if it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard.

He tries to ask her questions, but she always turns the conversation back around to the job. Departmental hierarchy and the size of his beat, boring stuff like that, but if that’s what turns her crank, he’s only too happy to explain. He outlines the subtle but important difference between drawing his weapon – which he does occasionally – and actually pointing it at someone, which happens far less frequently. He admits that he has never fired his gun in the line of duty.

“I’m all for the Taser, as long as we can use it the way I feel it should be used. I shouldn’t have to fight anybody anymore, because when you do, you sprain or strain something. People complain when some perp dies after being zapped because he refused to follow orders, but they don’t want to pay officers injured on duty to sit at home because things got out of hand, you know?” It’s one of his pet rants, and he stops himself before he really gets rolling. She has a few questions about the way the Taser works, which he answers simply and directly before changing the subject.

After dinner, he responds to a noise complaint – a band playing outside a restaurant – investigates a missing sewer grating, and calls a wrecker to tow an abandoned vehicle, identified by a chalk mark he made on the left rear tire during the previous shift. The work is so mundane, he’s embarrassed. She’s probably not going to think much of the reality of the job when all she sees him doing is writing tickets and getting cars impounded. If she expected Cops, she must be terribly disappointed.

He scours the screen for something a little more adventurous, a little sexier. Normally when he has a ride-along, he picks calls that are unlikely to turn ugly. Now he wants something that might give him a chance to impress her.

“What’s that one?” She taps a coral-red fingernail on a new entry.

“Silent alarm on Westheimer.”

“Like a break-in or something?”

He can tell she’s intrigued by the way her breathing changes. Her right foot taps on the floor mat next to her burlap satchel.

Against his better judgment, he claims the call, knowing he could end up spending the rest of the night filling out paperwork instead of catching the perps in the act. He has a brief fantasy about Tasering a guy while Meredith watches in fawning adoration, after which she agrees to meet him at Numbers for a couple of drinks before sidling up next to him and suggesting in a steamy whisper that it’s time to go somewhere else. Somewhere private.

“No lights or siren?” she asks. She sounds disappointed.

“Don’t want to warn them we’re coming,” he says.

“Is another unit responding?”

“I’ll call for backup if I need it. After I check out the situation.”

“Do you get scared, answering calls like this?”

He considers lying but thinks the truth might impress her more. A chance to show his sensitive side. “I get scared every time I pull someone over for a traffic stop. You never know who’s behind the wheel, what their day’s been like. If they’ve just had a fight with their wife and are looking for someone to take it out on. Or if they’ve just robbed or killed someone and the only thing standing between them and freedom is me. I’ve got two rules for every shift.”

He pauses, waiting for her to ask what they are. When she does, he continues. “First, to go home in the same condition I was in when I came to work.”

“And the other?”

“Get a bite to eat sometime during the shift. That one doesn’t always work out.”

She laughs gently, tossing her long dark hair back. It’s a good moment. He’s about to broach the subject of nightclubs and drinks when he realizes they’re a block from the scene. He keys in the code to let dispatch know he’s on the scene and then focuses his attention on the surroundings. The address corresponds to a jewelry store squeezed between an antiques shop and a joint with a neon condom hanging out front.

The place is dark and looks empty. After wheeling around the corner to check the alley, he stops and uses the handle near his head to direct the spotlight at the back door. He’s about to get out to make sure it’s locked when a set of headlights materializes in his rearview mirror. His chest tightens when he considers the implications of a vehicle suddenly pinning him in.

Meredith bends over in her seat. Brett wonders if she saw something that alarmed her and is trying to get out of the way. Then he realizes that she’s fumbling in her canvas satchel, though he can’t imagine why.

He’s about to reach for the dispatch mike when she straightens up and points a Taser exactly like his own at him. The red panic button on the corner of his keyboard is only inches from his hand. If he could hit it, an alert would go out to dispatch and all units in the vicinity, and his car’s engine and computer would be disabled. The space between them is far less than the weapon’s twenty-five-foot range. Its skin-piercing twin prongs would cover the distance faster than he could move an inch. The tension in her trigger finger is obvious – she won’t hesitate to stun him. He shifts his gaze from her hand to her chestnut eyes, trying to comprehend what the hell is happening. How in a few seconds he went from thinking about asking her out on a date to staring down the business end of fifty thousand volts.

Two people arrive beside the car. They yank the door open, pull him out, and pin him to the ground in the filthy alley, next to a row of garbage cans and a stack of empty crates. He feels a tug at his belt. A moment later his own handcuffs ratchet around his wrists.

“Relax,” Meredith says as she emerges from the cruiser. “Rule number one. Don’t struggle, and you’ll go home in the same condition as when you came to work.”

A male voice speaks for the first time. “You all set?”

“Don’t worry. I know all the codes to enter, and I’ve set up a few voice files on the digital recorder to answer routine pages from dispatch. I’ll let you know if something comes up I can’t handle.”

The second male voice says, “Stay down if you know what’s good for you. Don’t try anything.”

Brett is too frustrated and angry to answer. He shakes his head to acknowledge the order while trying to figure out how to extricate himself from this mess. He feels his service revolver, radio, baton, and Taser being stripped from his side. Without his weapons, all he has are some training and a badge, neither of which will stop a bullet or a paralyzing jolt of electricity. His body armor is in the trunk. He wonders if he’ll get to turn it in at the depot for a new set like his sergeant ordered a few hours earlier.

Two sets of footsteps walk away from him. He turns his head far enough to see the dark figures disappear through the back door of the jewelry store. Another set of footsteps approaches from his left. He twists around to watch Meredith pull a crate from the stack and drop onto it. She has the Taser in a firm grip, though it isn’t pointed in his direction at the moment.

“I don’t understand,” he says. “People know who you are. The community-relations officer who set up your ride ran a background check on you.”

“He ran a background check on Meredith Knight. Getting into a police car for a ride-along isn’t exactly like breaking into Fort Knox. Or,” she says, with a nod toward the nearby building, “a jewelry store. We did the whole thing by e-mail, phone, and fax. He never met me. All I had to do was fill out some forms with fake information, fax them off to him, and that was it. No one even searched me at the police department.”

“How could you know they wouldn’t?”

“It’s not my first ride-along. Just my first at your station. My first as Meredith Knight.”

Brett closes his eyes. “Seems like a lot of effort for a burglary.”

“Well worth it, though,” she says. “The main problem was the alarm. We didn’t know how to disable it, so the next-best thing was to distract whoever responded. If I couldn’t persuade you to take the call, my associates would have ambushed whoever showed up – but that would limit their time inside. This way, we have a few extra minutes to get the safe open. Excuse me.”

She steps past him and leans into the cruiser to enter something on the keyboard. He knows what she’s typing. He explained it all to her in detail. Unless the dispatcher needs to get in touch with him about something unrelated or starts to wonder why it’s taking so long to investigate, the next people likely to arrive on the scene will be the owners, to clear the alarm. They won’t be of much help unless they notice something, and that’s only if they’re in town and get here before the thieves take off. For all he knows, they’re at Minute Maid Park, watching the Astros game.

He still can’t believe the lengths to which they’ve gone for a robbery. Later tonight, after they let him go, he’ll sit down with the police artist and describe her so well that strangers will recognize her on the street. They’ll have video of her too, from police headquarters and the jail. Her picture will be all over the six o’clock news tomorrow, regardless of how this turns out for him.

“You look lost in thought,” she says, startling him. She’s on the crate again, cradling the Taser in her lap.

His approach when interrogating people at a scene is to always let the suspects think they’re winning. In this situation, at this moment, they are. All he wants to do is get through the night alive and with a minimum of humiliation. Losing his service revolver has been the biggest blow so far.

“I’m in a bad spot here.”

“Not if you stay cool,” she says. “Fifteen, twenty minutes, this will be all over. We’ll be on our way, and you’ll never see us again.”

“This must be some haul.”

“You have no idea. We’ve been planning it for two months.”

He tries to decide how much to say. He doesn’t want to give them any helpful information, but he also doesn’t want the volatile situation to get any worse.

“If you’re worried about the owners showing up,” she says, “don’t be. They’re tied up at the moment.”

Brett thinks she expects him to grin at the joke, but he doesn’t. He curses himself for being so entranced by her that he overlooked the possibility that she might have some ulterior motive. Writing a novel. As if.

Her cell phone chirps. She flips it open and glances at the display. Brett deduces that she’s speaking with her collaborators inside the building.

“Not long now,” she says in a chatty tone after she disconnects, as if they’re waiting for a pizza to arrive. “You probably don’t want to go out with me after this, right?”

“Huh?”

“You’ve been working up the courage to ask me out all afternoon.”

“You’re nuts.”

“A woman knows,” she says. “Under different circumstances, I might have said yes.”

“Fuck you,” he says. He’s in no mood for her banter anymore. Still, no matter how angry he is with her for setting him up, he’s more pissed off at himself for allowing it to happen.

“Yeah, and the horse I rode in on, I know. There, there.” She checks her watch. “Oops, almost missed the deadline.” She returns to the cruiser and resets the timer.

Brett releases a lungful of air and wiggles his hips to find a more comfortable position. Even without his weapons, his belt has enough pouches and compartments to make it awkward, especially lying on the ground in the paved alley.

“This is the point in the story where you’re supposed to ask me to explain everything,” she says once she’s back on the crate again. “Where I reveal all our secrets before the cavalry arrives to save the day.”

“I don’t read much,” he admits. “And you seem to have taken care of the cavalry.”

“You’re not happy with me.”

He can’t remember being madder in his life. Even his ex-wife never managed to get under his skin like this woman has in the past few hours. “No shit,” he says.

“Your very own femme fatale.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I can see the news tomorrow. Maybe they’ll come up with a nickname for me, like the Ice Princess, in honor of all the diamonds we’re stealing. That would be a good one. Feel free to use it.”

“How many diamonds are we talking about? Out of curiosity.”

“Let’s just say I’ll never have to work retail again. Are those dollar signs I see in your eyes? Looking for a cut?”

He turns his head away. More than anything, he hates the way she seems intent on taunting him. On humiliating him. It can’t be personal, because she couldn’t have known in advance that he’d be assigned to her for the afternoon. Unless it’s because of the way he acted toward her during the shift…

“I went out of my way to be nice to you,” he says. Even to his own ears, his voice sounds bitter and petulant.

“Yes, you did,” she says. “You were very sweet.”

Her phone rings again. She looks around the alley. After a car passes, she says, “All clear.” A moment later, her accomplices emerge from the rear of the store. They stay in the shadows, so he never gets a good look at them other than to note that one is about five-six, a hundred fifty pounds, and the other is closer to six feet, two hundred pounds. Caucasian, he thinks, but can’t be sure. He files these details away for later, but he knows he couldn’t pick them out of a lineup or from mug shots.

The black pouch the taller man tosses to Meredith seems absurdly small. It has golden tie cords at the neck. From the way she presses her face against it, he figures it’s made of velvet or satin. She tugs the neck open and sticks her hand inside, allowing the contents to filter through her fingers. Then she reseals the bag and tosses it back to the tall man.

After resetting the dispatch timer one last time, Meredith kneels on the ground beside Brett. “If we had a little longer, I’d show you,” she says. “So you’d understand.”

He doesn’t want to look at her, but he knows this is probably the last time he’ll see her, and he wants to remember her this way, framed in the amber light of a nearby streetlight, her features distorted by shadows.

“And you would,” she continues. “One glance, and they’d steal your heart away.”

He shakes his head, but he wonders if what she says is true. Look how easily she stole his heart.

She plucks the keys to his handcuffs from his front pants pocket. The brief contact is shockingly intimate and unexpectedly arousing. She grins. He knows that she sensed his reaction, but she says nothing.

“I’ll leave these over here,” she says, placing the keys on the ground in front of the trash bins. “Your gun and everything else are on the front seat. We have no need for them where we’re going, and I know how much paperwork you’d have to fill out if you lost your gun.” She winks at him. “You see, I’ve done my research. Maybe I will write a novel someday.”

The two men take the front seat of their car. After Meredith opens the rear door, she watches him for a moment. He strains his neck to look up at her, to meet her gaze.

“Tonight you’ll go home in the same condition as when you arrived at work. Maybe even a little better. It’s up to you.”

With that, she slides into the car and closes the door. A moment later, they’re gone, blending into the Saturday night traffic on Westheimer.

Better? he wonders. What did she mean by that? He struggles to his feet, lurches toward the trash cans on numb legs, kneels, and picks up the handcuff key. Fumbling blindly behind his back, he finally manages to insert the key into the lock, and his hands are free. The next step is obvious but degrading. In succinct, professional language, he describes his location and the vehicle and its occupants to his dispatcher. He even has the license number to give them.

A few minutes later, the first cruiser arrives on the scene. The Investigative Division isn’t far behind. They seal off the alley with crime-scene tape and make their way inside the jewelry store. Brett tells his story to one detective and again a few minutes later to another. His vehicle is part of the crime scene, so he can’t touch it. He rocks his weight from foot to foot and pulls out his cell phone but can’t think who to call. Which friend to share his humiliation with.

He puts the phone away and thrusts his hands into his pockets. Something sharp digs into the back of his right hand. It doesn’t feel like his handcuff key. He gets up and strolls to the end of the alley, which is cordoned off with a yellow ribbon of crime-scene tape.

After ascertaining that no one is paying attention to him, he pulls the item from his pocket. It gleams in the yellow streetlight, a little piece of carbon as cold as fire and as hard as the heart of the woman who placed it there.

In jazz I listen for her.

In rain.

Her laughter sends me to sleep at night and is the sound that wakes me in the morning.

Her name is Kayla Lightfoot. I say is because even though she’s dead, her name hasn’t changed.

Let me tell him for you, Jenny. You stay here and rest. I’ll bring Greg in after – when he’s thought it over a bit.”

Jenny didn’t have the energy to tell her partner, Officer Wayne Harvey, that there was nothing restful about lying in a hospital bed ten minutes after the completion of a rape kit. Thirty minutes after ingesting the morning-after pill and an HIV postexposure prophylaxis. Sixty minutes since the arrest. Three hours since the rape. That was her best guess – three hours, since it started, at least.

Talking to Greg would help her stop feeling this way that she didn’t want to feel anymore. Weak. Embarrassed. Broken. She was ready to feel like herself again. Until the DA needed her testimony, she was finished with her duties as a crime victim. If she talked to Greg, she might feel more like Jenny. She would be the arresting police officer, delivering the news as gently as possible to the victim’s family. She would also be his wife.

“No, Wayne. Go on home to Marcy. Just tell the nurse to get Greg for me.”

Through the open slats of the drawn blinds in her room, she saw Greg talking to a young woman with bright-pink scrubs and a blond ponytail. She knew both this process and her husband well enough that she thought she could actually make out some of the words. Your wife is ready for visitors now, Mr. Sutton. Greg looking worried still. Asking her something. Something like What happened? Was there an accident? The nurse looking down at her hands, wishing there was a chart or a clipboard – some prop there to employ as a distraction. Your wife needs you now. There’s nothing more I can say.

Greg opened the door and closed it gently behind him.

“You okay, baby? They won’t tell me what’s going on. Something happened on the sting?”

Jenny was one of two female patrol officers under the age of thirty-five working for the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department. Tonight she was the one tapped to work as a prostitution decoy at the truck stops along I-90. She loved the job but not this assignment. Half-naked in the bitter wind, the cold, dry air freezing the insides of her nostrils while an unwashed trucker eyed her over so she could negotiate an agreement of sex for money. But once the nasty part was over, it was easy. It was supposed to be easy. Drive around back, hon, and I’ll meet you there. Then the supporting officers would take him down. That’s the way it was supposed to go.

She patted the edge of the sterile blanket covering the bed, and Greg sat next to her. She held his hand. “I’m okay. A hundred percent. You understand?”

Her husband nodded, and some of the tension fell from his face.

“A dark-green Bronco pulled in, not a truck-driving kind of truck, you know, but a regular Bronco, so he could maneuver better in the lot. Wayne was watching me just fine, but I wound up at the passenger side instead of the driver’s. I made the deal.”

“What’s up, sweet thang?” Just looking for a date. “How much will that run me?” Twenty for a suck. Forty for straight sex. Fifty gets you half-and-half. I’m worth every penny. “Well, all right, then. That last one should get us started.” Just pull around back and I’ll meet you; sometimes the cops watch from the road.

“So I told him to drive around back. It happened fast, but he pulled me into the car. He took me to a house out by Nine Mile Road, not far from the highway. He… he assaulted me, Greg, but I got away. I arrested him. Wayne came out and made sure the guy got processed just right. No technicalities for the courts.”

“What do you mean, he assaulted you? You mean he – ”

She looked him straight in the eye. Not one tear. Not even a quiver. “It was a sexual assault.” He raped me, Greg. And despite that look on your face, it was far worse than what you’re imagining. So bad, I got to figure out a way for you never to know the details.

Greg stood, leaving Jenny on her own in the bed. “I don’t understand. How could they let this happen to you? How’d he get you out of that parking lot?”

“He sped right on out to the road. By the time Wayne got to his car, I guess a truck pulled in. The other guys were around back. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It happened real fast, Greg.” No, it didn’t. “I’m all right.”

“Where was your gun?”

“I can’t carry when I’m a decoy.” Underneath the tight outfits she wore undercover, the bulge of Jenny’s Glock was as prominent as a road sign. “I guess we’ll have to rethink the clothing in the future.”

“You think that’s funny?”

“I’ll take humor anywhere I can find it right now.”

“You couldn’t fight him off? You’re a cop. I’ve seen how strong you are.”

“He was the one with the gun. I was lucky to get it away from him when I did, but the point was to come out alive.” I got my chance when he reached for the Vaseline on his dresser. He told me he needed it to get his fist where it would hurt me most. He kept his left hand on me while he reached with his gun hand. That’s how he lost his balance. “All I was focused on was getting out alive and getting back to you.”

Greg’s face was angry and injured at once. He worked his hands into claws while he paced the small room. “Baby, I’m sorry this happened to you. I can work more hours at the mill – ”

“You work plenty.” Jenny took her husband’s hand and smiled up at him, hoping he’d see her face past the bruises that were starting to color. “How many times have you heard me say I’d keep working even if we hit the lotto?”

Greg helped Jenny change into the fresh clothes he’d been told to bring to the hospital. He even thought to take along his fleece-lined corduroy rancher’s jacket for her, the one she loved to wear. When the nurse insisted she be wheeled to the exit, he did the honors. He even kept her mind busy in the truck on the way home to Lolo, making the antics down at the pulp mill sound like slapstick, the way he always did.

In their bed at home, though, with the lights off and with his back to her, he asked the question she knew he’d been thinking all along: “Why didn’t you kill him, Jenny? When you got the gun from him, why didn’t you do it?”

She gave him the answer she’d been working on since the hospital. “It wouldn’t have been right. And I would’ve known it. And so I wouldn’t have been the same person ever again. All the rest of it, I can get past.”

Greg didn’t speak to her again that night. If he ever turned to face her, Jenny didn’t notice. Instead, she slept clenching Sushi, the stuffed purple goldfish that Greg won for her throwing rings at their first county fair together, the summer before they got married. I told you I’d never let you down. That’s what he said when he won Sushi for her.

The victim’s tiny body was left alone in the emergency room enclosure. The doctors, after halting their resuscitation efforts, had solemnly retreated and pulled the plastic curtains closed around the bed. The entire construction, management, and purpose of the hospital was to prevent death. When the effort failed, nobody wanted to see it.

The curtains were opaque. Harry Bosch looked like a ghost as he approached and then split them to enter. He stepped into the enclosure and stood somber and alone with the dead. The boy’s body took up less than a quarter of the big metal bed. Bosch had worked thousands of cases, but nothing ever touched him like the sight of a young child’s lifeless body. Fifteen months old. Cases in which the child’s age was still counted in months were the most difficult of all. He knew that if he dwelled too long, he would start to question everything – from the meaning of life to his mission in it.

The boy looked like he was only asleep. Bosch made a quick study, looking for any bruising or sign of mishap. The child was naked and uncovered, his skin as pink as a newborn’s. Bosch saw no sign of trauma except for an old scrape on the boy’s forehead.

He pulled on gloves and very carefully moved the body to check it from all angles. His heart sank as he did this, but he saw nothing that was suspicious. When he was finished, he covered the body with the sheet – he wasn’t sure why – and slipped back through the plastic curtains shrouding the bed.

The boy’s father was in a private waiting room down the hall. Bosch would eventually get to him, but the paramedics who had transported the boy had agreed to stick around to be interviewed. Bosch looked for them first and found both men – one old, one young; one to mentor, one to learn – sitting in the crowded ER waiting room. He invited them outside so they could speak privately.

The dry summer heat hit them as soon as the glass doors parted. Like walking out of a casino in Vegas. They walked to the side so they would not be bothered, but stayed in the shade of the portico. He identified himself and told them he would need the written reports on their rescue effort as soon as they were completed.

“For now, tell me about the call.”

The senior man did the talking. His name was Ticotin.

“The kid was already in full arrest when we got there,” he began. “We did what we could, but the best thing was just to ice him and transport him – try to get him in here and see what the pros could do.”

“Did you take a body-temperature reading at the scene?” Bosch asked.

“First thing,” Ticotin said. “It was one oh six eight. So you gotta figure the kid was up around one oh eight, one oh nine, before we got there. There was no way he was going to come back from that. Not a little baby like that.”

Ticotin shook his head as though he were frustrated by having been sent to rescue someone who could not be rescued. Bosch nodded as he took out his notebook and wrote down the temperature reading.

“You know what time that was?” he asked.

“We arrived at twelve seventeen, so I would say we took the BT no more than three minutes later. First thing you do. That’s the protocol.”

Bosch nodded again and wrote the time – 12:20 p.m. – next to the temperature reading. He looked up and tracked a car coming quickly into the ER lot. It parked, and his partner, Ignacio Ferras, got out. He had gone directly to the accident scene while Bosch had gone directly to the hospital. Bosch signaled him over. Ferras walked with anxious speed. Bosch knew he had something to report, but Bosch didn’t want him to say it in front of the paramedics. He introduced him and then quickly got back to his questions.

“Where was the father when you got there?”

“They had the kid on the floor by the back door, where he had brought him in. The father was sort of collapsed on the floor next to him, screaming and crying like they do. Kicking the floor.”

“Did he ever say anything?”

“Not right then.”

“Then when?”

“When we made the decision to transport and work on the kid in the truck, he wanted to go. We told him he couldn’t. We told him to get somebody from the office to drive him.”

“What were his words?”

“He just said, ‘I want to go with him. I want to be with my son,’ stuff like that.”

Ferras shook his head as if in pain.

“At any time did he talk about what had happened?” Bosch asked.

Ticotin checked his partner, who shook his head.

“No,” Ticotin said. “He didn’t.”

“Then how were you informed of what had happened?”

“Well, initially, we heard it from dispatch. Then one of the office workers, a lady, she told us when we got there. She led us to the back and told us along the way.”

Bosch thought he had all he was going to get, but then thought of something else.

“You didn’t happen to take an exterior-air-temperature reading for that spot, did you?”

The two paramedics looked at each other and then at Bosch.

“Didn’t think to,” Ticotin said. “But it’s gotta be at least ninety-five, with the Santa Anas kicking up like this. I don’t remember a June this hot.”

Bosch remembered a June he had spent in a jungle, but wasn’t going to get into it. He thanked the paramedics and let them get back to duty. He put his notebook away and looked at his partner.

“Okay, tell me about the scene,” he said.

“We’ve got to charge this guy, Harry,” Ferras said urgently.

“Why? What did you find?”

“It’s not what I found. It’s because it was just a kid, Harry. What kind of father would let this happen? How could he forget?”

Ferras had become a father for the first time six months earlier. Bosch knew this. The experience had made him a professional dad, and every Monday he came in to the squad with a new batch of photos. To Bosch, the kid looked the same week to week, but not to Ferras. He was in love with being a father, with having a son.

“Ignacio, you’ve got to separate your own feelings about it from the facts and the evidence, okay? You know this. Calm down.”

“I know, I know. It’s just that, how could he forget, you know?”

“Yeah, I know, and we’re going to keep that in mind. So tell me what you found out over there. Who’d you talk to?”

“The office manager.”

“And what did he say?”

“It’s a lady. She said that he came in through the back door shortly after ten. All the sales agents park in the back and use the back door – that’s why nobody saw the kid. The father came in, talking on the cell phone. Then he got off and asked if he’d gotten a fax, but there was no fax. So he made another call, and she heard him ask where the fax was. Then he waited for the fax.”

“How long did he wait?”

“She said not long, but the fax was an offer to buy. So he called the client, and that started a whole back-and-forth with calls and faxes, and he completely forgot about the kid. It was at least two hours, Harry. Two hours!”

Bosch could almost share his partner’s anger, but he had been on the mission a couple of decades longer than Ferras and knew how to hold it in when he had to and when to let it go.

“Harry, something else too.”

“What?”

“The baby had something wrong with him.”

“The manager saw the kid?”

“No, I mean, always. Since birth. She said it was a big tragedy. The kid was handicapped. Blind, deaf, a bunch of things wrong. Fifteen months old, and he couldn’t walk or talk and never could even crawl. He just cried a lot.”

Bosch nodded as he tried to plug this information into everything else he knew and had accumulated. Just then, another car came speeding into the parking lot. It pulled into the ambulance chute in front of the ER doors. A woman leaped out and ran into the ER, leaving the car running and the door open.

“That’s probably the mother,” Bosch said. “We better get in there.”

Bosch started trotting toward the ER doors, and Ferras followed. They went through the ER waiting room and down a hallway, where the father had been placed in a private room to wait.

As Bosch got close, he did not hear any screaming or crying or fists on flesh – things that wouldn’t have surprised him. The door was open, and when he turned in, he saw the parents of the dead boy embracing each other, but not a tear lined any of their cheeks. Bosch’s initial split-second reaction was that he was seeing relief in their young faces.

They separated when they saw Bosch enter, followed by Ferras.

“Mr. and Mrs. Helton?” he asked.

They nodded in unison. But the man corrected Bosch.

“I’m Stephen Helton, and this is my wife, Arlene Haddon.”

“I’m Detective Bosch with the Los Angeles Police Department, and this is my partner, Detective Ferras. We are very sorry for the loss of your son. It is our job now to investigate William’s death and to learn exactly what happened to him.”

Helton nodded as his wife stepped close to him and put her face into his chest. Something silent was transmitted.

“Does this have to be done now?” Helton asked. “We’ve just lost our beautiful little – ”

“Yes, sir, it has to be done now. This is a homicide investigation.”

“It was an accident,” Helton weakly protested. “It’s all my fault, but it was an accident.”

“It’s still a homicide investigation. We would like to speak to you each privately, without the intrusions that will occur here. Do you mind coming down to the police station to be interviewed?”

“We’ll leave him here?”

“The hospital is making arrangements for your son’s body to be moved to the medical examiner’s office.”

“They’re going to cut him open?” the mother asked in a near hysterical voice.

“They will examine his body and then determine if an autopsy is necessary,” Bosch said. “It is required by law that any untimely death fall under the jurisdiction of the medical examiner.”

He waited to see if there was further protest. When there wasn’t, he stepped back and gestured for them to leave the room.

“We’ll drive you down to Parker Center, and I promise to make this as painless as possible.”

James O. Born is the author of a series featuring Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent Bill Tasker. His newest novel, Field of Fire, follows the investigations of the ATF. His books capture the feeling and details of police work while following realistic procedure. He is a former U.S. drug agent and an agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. He has been writing for eighteen years and is published by Putnam.

Jon L. Breen is the author of seven novels, most recently Eye of God (Perseverance Press), and three short-story collections, most recently Kill the Umpire: The Calls of Ed Gorgon (Crippen & Landru). He won Edgar Awards in the biographical/critical category for What About Murder? (1981) and Novel Verdicts (1984) and is a book-review columnist for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Mystery Scene. Retired as a librarian and professor of English at Rio Hondo College, he lives in Fountain Valley, California, with his wife and first line editor, Rita.

John Buentello is a writer who lives in San Antonio, Texas. He has published stories in a number of genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He and his brother Lawrence have published the anthology Binary Tales and have recently completed the novel Reproduction Rights. John has been married to his wife, Ann, for sixteen years, which makes him the luckiest man on earth.

A former deputy district attorney, Alafair Burke graduated with distinction from Stanford Law School and is now a professor at Hofstra Law School, where she teaches criminal law and procedure. She is the author of four novels, Dead Connection, Close Case, Missing Justice, and Judgment Calls. Her fifth novel, Angel’s Tip, featuring NYPD detective Ellie Hatcher, will be published by HarperCollins in 2008. She lives in New York City. Visit her at alafairburke.com.

Michael Connelly is the author of eighteen novels and one collection of nonfiction crime stories. Among his novels are The Black Echo, The Last Coyote, The Poet, Blood Work, and The Lincoln Lawyer. He is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his family in Florida.

About himself, Jack Fredrickson admits little other than that, after something of successful careers in productivity consulting and owning and managing an interior-design/commercial-furnishings firm, he abandoned productive employment to write in dark places. His first crime novel, A Safe Place for Dying (Publishers Weekly starred review), debuted in November 2006. He lives with his wife, Susan, west of Chicago. Check him out at jackfredrickson.com.

Leslie Glass is a playwright and the author of fourteen novels, including Over His Dead Body, For Love and Money, and nine bestselling novels of psychological suspense featuring NYPD detective April Woo. The founder of the Leslie Glass Foundation, Glass worked in advertising and publishing, was a script writer for a soap opera, and wrote the Intelligencer column for New York Magazine before turning to fiction fulltime. She now writes a column for Sarasota Magazine and develops original screenplays with her daughter and partner, Lindsey Glass.

Paul Guyot is an award-winning television writer/producer whose credits include Felicity, Snoops, and the Emmy-winning drama Judging Amy. He is the creator and executive producer of the police drama Crimes Against Persons for A &E. His short stories can be found in numerous anthologies and online publications. He lives in St. Louis with his wife and family. More information can be culled from his Web site: paulguyot.net.

Diana Hansen-Young was born in Bellingham, Washington, in 1947, into a community of, as she called them, “depressed Mormon Swedish farmers.” In 1966 she moved to Hawaii, ran for the State Constitutional Convention in 1968, and won a seat by ninety-three votes. She went on to run for the Hawaii State House of Representatives, a post which she won. After losing a congressional race, she started painting little scenes of Hawaii and selling them. For the next twenty-five years, she painted Hawaiian women, which grew into a business. But in 1996, after developing severe arthritis in her right arm and hand, she could no longer hold a paintbrush. During those twenty-five years, she had been writing plays, novels, and short stories, and tossing them in boxes. She dusted off manuscripts that she’d never submitted, closed the business, rented the farm, and moved with her two daughters to New York City. She received an MFA from NYU, where she met composer Brian Feinstein, her collaborator on her thesis musical, Mimi Le Duck, which premiered off-Broadway in 2006. A member of MWA, she now writes fulltime in New York City.

John Harvey is the author of ten Charlie Resnick novels, the first of which, Lonely Hearts, was named by the Times (London) as one of the 100 Best Crime Novels of the Century. In 2007 he was awarded the British Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in crime writing. He lives in London.

Edward D. Hoch is a past president of the Mystery Writers of America and was a winner of its Edgar Award for best short story. He received the MWA’s Grand Master Award in 2001. He has been a guest of honor at Bouchercon, twice winner of its Anthony Award, and recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award. Author of some 950 published stories, he has appeared in every issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for the past thirty-four years. Hoch and his wife, Patricia, reside in Rochester, New York.

Laurie R. King is the New York Times bestselling author of the Mary Russell novels, the Kate Martinelli series (including To Play the Fool, featuring Brother Erasmus), and five stand-alone novels, most recently Touchstone. She has won the Edgar, Creasey, Nero, Macavity, and Lambda awards; her nominations include the Edgar, the Agatha, the Orange, and the Barry. She is published in twenty countries.

Polly Nelson is new to mystery writing, having had her first story published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s August 1995 issue, voted by EQ readers as among the year’s ten best. The British Crime Writers’ Association also selected a story for inclusion in the 2007 Fish anthology. Other stories have been published online at East of the Web and Mystery Scene Magazine. In a previous professional life, she directed children’s theater and worked with individuals dealing with mental illness.

T. Jefferson Parker is the author of fourteen crime novels and a two-time winner of the Edgar Award for best mystery. He lives in Southern California with his wife and sons.

Peter Robinson was born in Yorkshire. After getting his BA Honours degree in English literature at the University of Leeds, he came to Canada and took his MA in English and creative writing at the University of Windsor, then a PhD in English at York University. He has taught at a number of Toronto colleges and served as writer in residence at the University of Windsor, 1992-1993. His first novel, Gallows View, introduced Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks. It was short-listed for the John Creasey Award in the UK and the Crime Writers of Canada best first novel award. It was followed by fourteen more, the most recent being Piece of My Heart. The series has garnered many awards, including the Arthur Ellis Award, the Anthony Award, and the Barry Award, and has been nominated multiple times. He has also written the stand-alone novel Caedmon’s Song. His books have been translated into fifteen languages. Robinson lives in the Beaches area of Toronto with his wife, Sheila Halladay, and he occasionally teaches crime writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.

Greg Rucka was born in San Francisco and raised on the Central Coast of California, in what is commonly referred to as “Steinbeck Country.” He began his writing career in earnest at the age of ten by winning a countywide short-story contest and hasn’t let up since. He graduated from Vassar College with an AB in English, and from the University of Southern California’s master of professional writing program. He is the author of nearly a dozen novels, five featuring bodyguard Atticus Kodiak and two featuring Tara Chace, the protagonist of his Queen & Country series. Additionally, he has penned several short stories, countless comics, and the occasional nonfiction essay. In comics, he has had the opportunity to write stories featuring some of the world’s best-known characters – Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman – as well as penning several creator-owned properties himself, such as Whiteout and Queen & Country, both published by Oni Press. His work has been optioned several times over, and his services as a story doctor and creative consultant are in high demand in a variety of creative fields. Greg resides in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, author Jennifer Van Meter, and his two children. He thinks the biggest problem with the world is that people aren’t paying enough attention.

Bev Vincent grew up in eastern Canada and lived in Switzerland before moving to Texas in the late 1980s. His American-born daughter recently moved to Canada to keep things in balance. He is the author of more than forty stories, including contributions to the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology From the Borderlands; Doctor Who: Destination Prague; All Hallows; The Best of Borderlands 1-5; Cemetery Dance; Corpse Blossoms; Shivers IV; and a mystery anthology featuring tales set in bathrooms called Who Died in Here? His first book, The Road to the Dark Tower, an authorized exploration of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, was nominated for a 2004 Bram Stoker Award. He coedited The Illustrated Stephen King Trivia Book, wrote reviews for Accent Literary Review, and is a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine. He is a monthly contributor to Storytellers Unplugged. His Web site, with links to his message board and blogs, is bevvincent.com.

Persia Walker, a New York City native, is the author of Darkness and the Devil Behind Me and Harlem Redux, mysteries set against the glittering backdrop of 1920s New York. A former journalist, Persia has worked for the Associated Press and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich. She has degrees from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Swarthmore College.

In her four critically acclaimed Charlotte Justice novels, Paula L. Woods has focused on her protagonist, an LAPD Homicide detective. In “Divine Droplets,” the focus shifts to Charlotte’s nemesis, Detective Steve Firestone, and fast-forwards from the 1990s to present-day Los Angeles. “Since his debut in Inner City Blues, Firestone has been a deeply flawed but increasingly peripheral character in the series,” she notes. “It was high time to tell his story and examine the errors he’s made in his career.” In addition to writing the series, Woods is also a book critic and pens reviews for the Los Angeles Times.

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