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stiffness. “Elizabeth came to pay her respects and it was very kind of her. And it’ll give us a chance to talk.”
    Wager was sure who the subject of that talk would be; he wasn’t so sure if he liked the idea. Cousin Frank’s half-muffled snort didn’t make him feel any better about it, either; but since childhood, Wager had heard one or another of the men of his family moan that God gave woman a tongue but the Devil gave her the will to use it. Now it was his turn to weigh the truth of that saying. On his way out, he nodded to the priest who was hurrying toward the front door.
    The crime scene was still roped off with police tape, the band of yellow plastic bobbing gently in the breeze of slowly passing traffic. Shiny black letters spelled POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS and LINEA DE POLICIA NO CRUCES. Golding was watching the tall, thin figure of Lincoln Jones angle his camera at the chalked outline on the sidewalk. The quick glare of a strobe starkly brought out the dark red of dried blood and the stray litter of a cigarette butt, a tatter of grimy paper, a smear of spit. Then Jones circled for another angle. Archie Douglas, bent close to the ground, was carefully walking down the joint between the sidewalk and the age-darkened brick of the building wall. A scattering of graffiti marked the walls where taggers had been busy; some of it Wager could read—the WSB of the West Side Boys, an elongated rooster of the Gallos—some he couldn’t. There were no doors or windows in the wall, and the nearest escape from the sidewalk was an alley about thirty yards away. Julio’d had nothing to fight back with and no chance to run anywhere.
    A uniformed cop, whose arm jerked irritably as he waved the traffic past, recognized Wager. “Can you believe these goddamn people?” Then to the gaping automobiles. “Come on, you can watch it at home on TV—come on! Nothing to look at now—move along, you’re blocking traffic!”
    Golding, dapper in tan slacks, tweed sport coat, and suede vest, didn’t seem too surprised to see Wager. “You know the victim, Gabe? One of your snitches?”
    “Relative. Cousin.”
    “Ah. Too bad.” Golding jotted the information in his notebook, just as Wager would have done. “Any ideas?”
    “No. I just heard about it. What happened?”
    “Drive-by. Victim exited that grocery store on the corner, was walking in this direction, and apparently a vehicle pulled up alongside him. I’ve got a witness at the grocery store heard three shots. Looked like at least two hit the victim, one in the body, one in the head. Victim crawled or rolled against the wall over there.” He pointed to where Lincoln Jones was squatting for another photograph, this one a low-angle shot to show the background to the location. A few feet away lay a grocery sack; something inside had broken and soaked the paper dark. “No witnesses yet to the incident, no idea yet what kind of car it was.” Golding shrugged. “Feels like another gang shooting to me.”
    “He told me he wasn’t in a gang.”
    Golding shrugged again. “Just a theory.” And they both knew that kids could lie. Especially to cops.
    Wager said, “I just got through talking to his mother.” He told Golding what little she had said.
    The detective wrote that down in his book, too. “Saves me a trip. Thanks.”
    “I explained that you’d probably be by.”
    “Yeah? Well, see how much time I have. What you tell me, she don’t know anything.” Golding glanced over the protocol sheet on his clipboard to check off the steps of the investigation.
    Then he looked up. “My guess, it’s going to be the usual, Gabe, and pretty soon somebody’s going to shoot their mouth off about doing this, and then we’ll hear about it. Until then …no witnesses, no evidence, no case.”
    Wager couldn’t argue against Golding’s statement. He’d seen a lot of shootings that worked just that way, and in fact he had one of his own: John Erle Hocks. And just because