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pair.
    Lieutenant Abigail Lang worked the Sex Crimes detail alone. Two years earlier she had managed to sheer the detail off of Crimes Against Persons—CAPers, as the dicks referred to it—but not without resentment, both of her rank and the power her separated detail afforded her. Dart had admired the move, one that had required a great deal of political savvy to accomplish, but he’d never had any interaction with Lang. Until the moment this file was shoved at him.
    She wore her straight blond hair turned in at the shoulder, and had the kind of Nordic looks that might have stopped traffic ten years earlier. In her mid-forties, she was a handsome woman with bright, interested eyes, a coy smile, and a small, slightly upturned nose. On television, she might have played an attorney or a nurse.
    Dartelli accepted the folder and felt obliged to thank her, but she was squeezed by two sides of a competing verbal exchange, and all but her perfume disappeared, leaving Dartelli drinking in a deep inhale.
    â€œNice,” the other dick said, looking in her direction.
    â€œAgreed,” answered Dartelli, who didn’t have time to think about Abby Lang, although he furtively searched for a second glimpse of her. If he had taken a moment, he might have realized that he had sat alone in his apartment for too many months since his break up with Ginny, had awakened to a television screen filled with electronic lint far too many times, trapped in the darkness and solitude of a beer-induced coma. Had retreated too far into himself.
    Control was his issue. His mother; Zeller; the women in his life—he always granted control to others, surrendering himself to their whims, desires, and emotions. During his worst depressions, he allowed himself to believe that he had been a puppet for most of his adult life, never navigating his own way, but dancing along with the strings that dictated his actions from high overhead. This feeling of being at the will of others could nearly paralyze him at times. Secretly he wanted to believe that he stood behind the wheel of his own ship.
    As he glanced at the folder, it was not the name GERALD OBRIGHT LAWRENCE that caught his attention but instead, the two letters that preceded the booking number, SC—Sex Crimes. Had Dart not ignored the evidence gleaned late in the Ice Man investigation, evidence that confirmed the Ice Man was in fact the serial rapist dubbed the Asian Strangler by the media—for his Asian victims—then that file too would begin with these same two letters.
    But he had chosen to ignore the evidence for the sake of a precious friendship. Sergeant Walter Zeller’s wife had been viciously raped and murdered by the elusive Asian Strangler, and the evidence discovered by Dart irrefutably identified the Ice Man as the Asian Strangler. With the very real possibility that Zeller had cleverly avenged his wife’s brutal killing, but with absolutely no concrete evidence supporting this, his partner and protégé had chosen to let the evidence slide, electing not to put Zeller through an ordeal that ultimately could not be proven anyway.
    And now, like the great white whale resurfacing, this folder brought the Ice Man back.
    Dartelli, file in hand, navigated his way out of booking and down the hall to CAPers. He examined the opening pages of the report.
    Gerald Lawrence had been detained seven times on suspicion of sexual molestation of minors; he had been arrested and convicted only once, late the previous year. Having served five months of a four-year sentence, he had been released and paroled on probation eleven weeks earlier.
    Lawrence had hanged himself four weeks later.
    Dartelli stared at the file. A suicide. A sex offender. His best ideas rarely came to him in flashes of brilliance, instead seeping into him as a trickle, a faint voice that suddenly, for reasons unknown, gained in both volume and clarity. As he sat before this file, he asked himself,