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film. But what this meant to Dartelli—what Gorman was suggesting—carried a personal agenda for the detective. The last thing that Dartelli wanted was to go hat in hand to Ginny Rice asking for favors. And she was the only insurance person that he could think of. I won’t do it, Dartelli promised himself.
    A promise broken with his next phone call.

CHAPTER 3
    By five o’clock on a hot August day, the Jennings Street booking room held an air of confusion: voices shouting; detainees complaining; attorneys arguing; parents protesting; police officers of every rank, dress, and both sexes attempting to manage the chaos. The special task force on gang violence had brought in twenty-three Hispanic teens for booking and questioning. Dartelli and others had been enlisted for the raid.
    The air-conditioning had failed two hours earlier. The air hung heavy with the tangy odor of perspiration and the deafening roar of constant cursing and swearing. The room, like the building, combined cream-colored cinder block walls with vinyl tiled floors in a urine white. The acoustic ceiling tiles were stained from the leaks that had been ongoing throughout the building for the past three years. The place reminded Dartelli of a cross between a post office and a prison. At the moment, it felt more like a high school principal’s office.
    Dartelli was consulting with a fellow detective on how to book one of the kids found in possession of a nine-inch switchblade. The two were speaking in normal voices despite the cacophony. He glanced up as a red file folder squirted between a pair of bodies, and he registered that this folder was directed at him. It shook, inviting him to take hold. And then he saw attached to the folder a graceful, feminine hand, and attached to this hand, an elegantly muscled and tan forearm covered in fine, sun-bleached hairs. Before he saw her face, he identified the voice of Abby Lang.
    “Joe? This is for you,” spoke that voice. The folder shook again. “We should talk.”
    He had never really looked at her arms before; he didn’t spend a lot of time looking at a person’s arms. But she had a nice 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.
    “Nice,” the other dick said, looking in her direction.
    “Agreed,” 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