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plastic barrette in the shape of a yawning kitten in her hair. “Victor Sandoval still the editor over there?”
    “ Oh yes,” she says.
    “Still drink his Sambuca from a Mountain Dew can?”
    “Is that what’s in there?” she asks, smiling.
    “Just a rumor,” Paris says, winking at Elliott, resigning himself to the task at hand. “Welcome to the Homicide Unit.”
    “Thank you.” She looks at her notebook. “You were involved in that incident next to The Good Egg Restaurant, weren’t you?”
    “Yes,” Paris says, already impressed with Ms. Cruz and her homework, flattered, as always, to be the subject of a young woman’s scrutiny. Even a young woman wearing a bright yellow kitty-cat barrette.
    “I followed the Pharaoh case pretty closely,” Mercedes says. “Young single woman alone and all.”
    “Of course.”
    The conversation stalls long enough for Elliott to make his move. “Well,” he says, “I’ll leave you two to iron out the details. Once again, nice to meet you, Ms. Cruz. Always a pleasure to work with our friends in the Hispanic community.”
    Elliott departs, leaving Paris and Ms. Cruz awkwardly standing face-to-face.
    “So,” Paris says, leading Mercedes Cruz into his office. “When would you like to get started?”
    “How about right now?”
    “Well, I’ve got a lot of reading to do at the moment. Nothing too exciting, I’m afraid.”
    “That’s okay,” she says. “I’m interested in every aspect of a homicide investigation.”
    Paris thinks: Is she going to watch me read ?
    It appears so.
    Mercedes Cruz drops her bag on the floor, positions her chair in the corner of Paris’s paper-besieged office, and sits down, her spiral-bound stenographer’s notebook on her lap, her pen at the ready. Paris notices that the cover of the notebook is festooned with an elaborate rendering of blue and red concentric hearts drawn with a ballpoint pen. A schoolgirl’s day-dream.
    And it’s only Day One, Paris thinks.
    “Just go about your business, detective,” Mercedes says, adjusting the kitten on her head. “You won’t even know I’m here.”
    The noise level is astonishing .
    As a veteran of an urban police force, he has, of course, been privy to a great many scenarios of audio overload. From automatic weapon fire on the range, to the sound of a dozen crackheads in a two-bedroom house all yelling at the same time, to the tremendous thunder of a five-unit pursuit up an alley, code three. He had even chased a suspect through the crowd at a ZZ Top concert at Public Hall once. There were moments during that madhouse scene when it sounded like he was on a runway at Hopkins airport, standing under the wing of a 747.
    But there is nothing, Paris has to admit as he steps into his ex-wife’s apartment on Shaker Square, nothing in the world quite as loud as the wall of noise produced by a half-dozen eleven-year-old girls at a pajama party.
    “What’s all this?” Paris asks. They are in one of Beth’s two spare bedrooms, thankfully past their small-talk threshold, having already fulfilled their conversational quota of job-related woes. For brief moments, at times like these, it was as if nothing ever happened to their marriage. Except that Beth is wearing a green velvet cocktail dress. And that she is going out without him.
    “Wild, huh?” Beth answers, clipping an earring in place. Her hair is butterscotch, falling softly to her shoulders; her lips, tonight, a soft claret. Now in her mid-thirties, her figure had not changed from that of the young woman he had fallen in love with more than a dozen years earlier. For Jack Paris, Elizabeth Shefler was, and is, the very criterion of beauty.
    He studies her for that moment, a little unstuck in time, knowing in his heart that he will never fall in love again. Not like he had with Beth.
    “Welcome to command and control,” Beth adds with a smile, clearly recalling the years of cop-talk, mercifully derailing his train of thought.
    On the