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over substance.
    â€˜What I’m gonna do here,’ Webber explained, ‘is take this to the house, voucher it and send it on to the lab. Meanwhile, I called for a tow. They should be here in about fifteen minutes.’
    â€˜I appreciate that, sarge.’
    â€˜Good, because I got a rape on Troutman Street that needs lookin’ after, so if you’ll excuse me . . .’
    For a moment, after Webber left, I stood where I was. The sun was still high enough to filter through the tracks above me, to throw bars of light over the red car across the street. Broadway is the dividing line between the neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick. Not only was the TEC-9 a weapon of choice in both, the J Train running above my head would carry you to any number of similar communities.

FIVE
    I spent the next half-hour, until the tow truck arrived, making careful notes of the Ellen Lodge interview while a succession of J Trains contributed to the layer of greasy soot coating every object beneath the El. As a rule, I don’t take notes in the course of an interview. Writing not only distracts the subject, it draws attention to those elements of the subject’s story that most interest me. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.
    With cooperating witnesses, like the Hinckles, it doesn’t matter all that much. With Ellen Lodge? Let’s just say that I wanted to get her story on paper in case a few inconsistencies turned up at some later date. Of course, I might have asked her to sign a statement, as I had with the Hinckles, but I had no desire to telegraph my suspicions.
    Adele was looking over my shoulder, adding a generally critical comment from time to time. As she couldn’t do this without our bodies coming into contact, I didn’t mind the back-seat driving. My physical attraction to Adele had begun on the day we became partners, long before I really got to know her. I could invent any number of reasons to justify this attraction: her confidence and poise, her clear indifference to the opinions of her peers, her advanced policing skills. But that’s all in retrospect, more justification than explanation. I only knew that my desire for her, even a year later, was intense and immediate, and that the closer I got, the stronger it became.
    The sad part was that I still hadn’t dredged up the courage to put a move on her, though there were times when I sensed that she was ready. I told myself that I was waiting until she and her husband finally split up, but I think it was more likely that I feared the consequences if my overtures were rejected. Adele’s tongue was rough enough to grind glass.
    There was a second reason for my timidity as well, a compelling reason that played in my head with the intensity of a police siren. Without ever intending to, I’d made a career of short-term relationships, enduring a string of failures so long I’d managed to convince myself that short-term was the best I could do. Adele, on the other hand, was all about commitment.
    David Lodge was right where we’d left him, on his back, staring up at the wide blue sky. The Crime Scene Unit was through with him, the morgue wagon still waiting. I walked through the open gate, squatted down and went through his pockets, gathering his personal effects. They didn’t amount to much: a watch, a comb, a wallet and thirty-eight cents in miscellaneous coins.
    Adele was standing alongside me, her hands on her hips. ‘A contact wound, Corbin. You see the pattern?’
    The skin around the entrance wound on Lodge’s right temple was split into lines that radiated outward from the wound. This star-shaped pattern could only have resulted from the barrel of the gun being in contact with Lodge’s temple when the fatal shot was fired. The chain of events was simple and easily recognized. When the trigger was pulled, heated gases had poured from the barrel. These gases had bounced off the bony plates of