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Jews.
    When I was released from the hospital, my unit was sent to the West Bank to deal with the first Intifada. My perception of the Israeli army—and of my own role as a soldier—was turned upside down. I spent my days chasing teenagers with rocks through the streets of
their
towns, not terrorists with AK-47s crossing into Israel; I was viewed by the Palestinians as a sadist, not a savior. I felt I was no longer protecting people, but repressing them. Still, whenever I hear about a suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus, or a Palestinian walking into a restaurant, maneuvering through a maze of strollers, and blowing up babies, young couples out for the evening, and pregnant women, I feel the urge to rejoin my old unit and mow down terrorists. Now, sipping my beer, listening to the music, I tried to expunge the images of severed limbs and shredded flesh.
    “Damn,” I grumbled. Duffy should have contacted me earlier. I was irritated that I had caught the case twenty-four hours after the murder, that the Harbor Division detectives had first crack at the fresh blood crime scene and the neighbors. I hoped Relovich’s relatives would provide me with some leads.
    If I could bag and tag this one quickly, maybe I would have time to work on the Patton homicide before I caught my next case. Fuck Duffy and his warnings. I would do it on the down low. During the past eleven months, I spent countless hours at home pouring over a Xerox copy of the murder book on my lap, searching for some trace, some hint of a lead that would spark a revelation. One afternoon, I decided to hit the streets and see what I could unearth. I started with Patton’s daughter. But before I could ask a question, she’d screamed at me, blamed me for getting her mother killed, and threw me out of the house.
    Apparently, she’d reported me to Internal Affairs, because the nextday an I.A. lieutenant called me at home and warned me to stay away from the Patton case. I told him that because I was no longer a cop, I could look into any case I wanted—as a private citizen.
    “If I get another call about you nosing around, I’ll write a search warrant for your place,” he told me. “And if I find you’ve stashed any pages from the murder book—or anything else connected to the investigation—I’ll write you up myself for theft of city property.”
    That shut me up and kept me away from the investigation for a while. But the past few weeks, I had been thinking about ways to interview people connected to the case without I.A. finding out. Now that I was back on the job, I wouldn’t have to worry about that any more. I had the entrée I had been searching for.
    I downed the rest of the beer in a swallow, crossed the room to the sofa, and pressed replay. I stretched out and listened to the dazzling opening bars of “So What.” Closing my eyes, I thought about the blood splatter pattern, the broken window in the back of the house, the dried blood on the floor, the dealer on the street corner. And I thought about Relovich. He was not some anonymous, faceless victim, one of several dozen killed every month in the city. He had been a cop, a brave cop from what I had heard. I felt a kinship with him, a responsibility to a fellow officer.
    And I felt a kinship with his daughter. I knew what was ahead of her, the emotional scars she would bear, the pain she would endure. I knew that her father’s murder would be the defining element of her life. Just like the murder of my grandparents, my dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins had been the defining element in mine.
    I had investigated enough homicides to know that solving Relovich’s murder would bring no closure to his young daughter. Every homicide detective soon learns that closure is a myth, a sound-bite word people use to try to describe the ineffable. Still, I believed that solving the case would bring some solace to her. If I caught her father’s killer, it would provide her with a sense that there was some