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going to make it,” Farelli said morosely. “They got him on life support.”
    “Shit,” Jake hissed.
    “Yeah.” Farelli took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “Anyway, I’m going to that park to see if I can find an addict with a wallet and credit cards that don’t belong to him.”
    Joanna and Jake started down the steep dirt ramp. Joanna held on tightly to Jake’s arm and took slow, cautious steps. Her heels dug into the soft ground.
    “Walk in the tire tracks,” Jake advised. “The earth is firmer there.”
    Joanna kept her head down, watching her step and putting most of her weight on her toes. “Who is Billy Cunningham?”
    “A homicide dick I know.”
    “A friend?”
    “An old drinking buddy,” Jake told her. “We hung out together when I first joined the force. Then his wife got cancer and died, and Billy became a loner. He crawled into a bottle and stayed boozed up most of the time. It almost cost him his career. Then he met and married Cynthia, and she straightened him out. He’s been sober for over three years, doing real good until this morning. He walked into a convenience store for a cup of coffee, not knowing a robbery was in progress. The perp had a semiautomatic and unloaded three into Billy. Two went into his chest, one into his head.”
    “Oh, Lord!” Joanna moaned softly.
    “It happens,” Jake said matter-of-factly.
    Joanna glanced over at him, knowing that his tone of voice didn’t match his true feelings. It hit cops hard when a fellow policeman went down. And it was the same, she thought, when doctors learn that a colleague is dying. Then death is no longer impersonal. Now it’s right up on your doorstep, reminding you of your own vulnerability and mortality. And that it might be your turn to go next.
    Joanna pushed the grim thoughts from her mind, remembering something she wanted to discuss. “Jake, the next time you need me for a case, it might be best to call rather than send Farelli for me. He caused a little bit of a stir in the autopsy room.”
    “Yeah? What happened?”
    “Farelli strolled into the autopsy room when Simon Murdock was there,” Joanna told him. “And Murdock became upset because it’s a restricted area.”
    Jake rolled his eyes skyward. “As if Farelli had never seen a stiff, for chrissakes!”
    “That’s not the end of it,” Joanna went on. “Murdock and Farelli got into a word battle, and finally Farelli gave him an icy look and told Murdock to put a lid on it.”
    Jake smiled thinly. “I’ll bet Murdock shut up real quick.”
    “And how.”
    Most people misjudged Farelli on first glance, Jake was thinking. Farelli was short and stocky with a round face and tired eyes. Everyone thought he looked like a waiter in a neighborhood Italian restaurant. But he was really tough as a brick and took crap from no one. Anybody who crossed him did it only once. “Farelli is not a man you want to piss off.”
    “I think Simon Murdock found that out,” Joanna said.
    They reached the bottom of the ramp and stepped over a narrow trench. Then they walked around a giant earth mover. The ground was softer there, and they were sinking in deeper. Ahead was another trench, wider than the last one. Jake took Joanna’s arm and helped her across.
    They came to the corpse.
    Joanna slowly circled the body, getting an overall picture. The man was big—at least six feet tall—with broad shoulders and muscular forearms. He wore dungarees, a faded plaid shirt, and heavy-duty work shoes. His hands were callused, his fingernails cracked and dirty. He did manual labor, Joanna thought, with a fair amount of lifting. Her gaze went back to his shoes. The right one had a deep green discoloration on its toe. Quickly Joanna looked over at the corpse’s forearms. They were covered with loose dirt, but she could tell the right forearm was larger than the left. And it had a tattoo of a cross on it.
    Joanna moved to the man’s head with its lifeless blue eyes. His mouth was