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how it worked when they were a team, questioning and challenging each other, wearing away what wasn’t solid or didn’t fit, until only the truth remained.
    Even if they might not like the truth.
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    Compared to most of the other New York papers, large and small, City Beat didn’t have much of a circulation. But Deputy Chief Wes Nobbler always picked up a copy, because he knew of the relationship between Commissioner Renz and Cindy Sellers. More than once Sellers had been Renz’s conduit to the larger media.
    Nobbler, a large, portly man with squinty blue eyes and a complexion that made him always appear to have been out in the sun too long, was thinking about City Beat now. His bedroom was still dark, but he couldn’t sleep, and the red numerals on the clock by his bed glowed the time to him: 5:02 A.M. Too early to get up, and too late to bother going back to sleep. And his bladder was swollen, though not to the point of urgency. Why get up, switch on the light, relieve himself in the bathroom, and then go back to bed?
    He couldn’t think of a good reason.
    Ten minutes passed. Now getting up or not wasn’t the question. He had to take a leak.
    With City Beat still on the periphery of his thoughts, he struggled to a sitting position on the squeaking bed, turned on the lamp, and plodded into the bathroom.
    Might as well stay up now. He put on his wrinkled uniform pants from yesterday, knowing a freshly pressed uniform just back from the dry cleaners hung in the closet. He’d change into the clean uniform later, after he’d showered and shaved. He slipped bare feet into his shoes and left on the gray T-shirt he’d slept in. He went back into the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, and used wet fingers to slick back red hair that hadn’t a trace of gray in it.
    Awake all the way now, he went into the kitchen and set up his Mr. Coffee to brew. Then he took a look out the window to make sure it wasn’t raining and left the apartment to walk to the end of the block and get a Times and City Beat from their respective vending machines.
    By the time he got back it was starting to get light out and traffic was just beginning to pick up. The apartment smelled of freshly brewed coffee, and he felt hungry and wished he’d found someplace open and bought some doughnuts. Not that he needed the calories.
    He poured a cup of coffee, added a dash of cream from the refrigerator, and sat down at the kitchen table.
    Nobbler glanced at the Times first. There was rioting in France, Congress was calling for an investigation into something Nobbler didn’t understand, and beneath the paper’s fold there was great consternation over the Yankees’s seven-game losing streak.
    The usual, Nobbler thought. All the money the Yankees had, you’d think they could buy some pitchers who didn’t have arms ready to fall off. He put the Times aside, took a sip of coffee, and looked at City Beat.
    Holy Christ!
    Nobbler forgot all about his appetite, the Yankees, and his coffee as he read.
    He’d known about the first female torso being found, and the second dead woman. He hadn’t known that, like the first victim, only the torso of the second victim was at the morgue. And he hadn’t yet seen the results of the ballistics tests. Commissioner Renz had certainly thrown a blanket of secrecy over the second woman, so it wouldn’t be obvious right away that a serial killer was at work. And the thing with the pointed stake or whatever it was—Nobbler hadn’t known about that, only that the first woman had been sexually penetrated. He had to admit he admired the way Renz had been able to maintain even partial secrecy over matters like this. Renz wasn’t shy about working the levers of power.
    Well, neither was Nobbler. And Renz had done something that really pissed him off. Frank Quinn was back on the scene, and on the Torso Murders case, along with his two