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tourists had rushed to the rails to watch the crew launch a lifeboat.
    That evening the detectives interviewed a number of young Rob Thorne’s shocked school chums, baseball teammates and a few tearful girls he had dated. Chances were remote that anything in young Thorne’s life-style had led to his murder, but the investigators had nothing else and intended to leave no avenue unexplored. Rob Thorne was clean, or seemed to be. So was the Corley family. It had seemed depressingly clear from the start that the shooting had stemmed from a random encounter in the dark.
    â€œWhatta we do now, bro?” Jim said, as they wearily compared notes back in the office that night. He tossed a half-eaten slice of pizza back into the box. “Christ, this stuff is lousy. You can’t tell where the pizza ends and the cardboard begins. Why the hell do we order from them?”
    â€œBecause they deliver at three A . M ., and they won’t take any money from cops.” The low-pitched voice came from Detective Sergeant Rudy Dominguez in the next cubicle.
    â€œThey must be trying to kill us,” Jim grumbled.
    â€œIt must be bad if you won’t eat it,” Rick said. “It looks like the only thing left for us to do is finish the paperwork, beat the bushes one more time, talk to all the snitches and then beg. I’ll see the parents in the morning. I think they want to post a reward, and I won’t discourage them. We can appeal to the public for information, dangle the reward money, sit by the phone and hope somebody drops a dime on us.”
    â€œI sure as hell hope we come up with something, because if this one takes us years to solve, buddy boy, I ain’t gonna be here. I ain’t waiting around.” Jim worked the phones while Rick talked to a reporter from The Morning News . One of the unwritten rules of their partnership was that Rick was point man with the press.
    Quotable, photogenic and personable, he felt at ease with reporters and rarely shot himself in the foot. They flocked around him at major crime scenes, usually ignoring Jim, who liked it that way. He often said that if the best reporter in town was on fire, he wouldn’t piss on him, or her, to put it out.
    His attitude stemmed from an unfortunate incident following the rescue of a housewife abducted from a shopping center parking lot. A reporter—female—had asked if the victim was injured. “Nope,” Jim had said. “She wasn’t hurt. She just got raped.”
    He was quoted. What had begun as a positive news story ended in a public relations disaster. A storm of outrage boiled up among local feminists. One group named Jim as the Male Chauvinist Pig of the Month. The chief was furious once somebody explained to him why the statement was offensive. He issued a written reprimand. Jim had been sentenced to three months of sensitivity training, on his own time. The entire experience had taught him one important lesson: Never trust a reporter. “Burn me once, it’s your fault. Burn me twice, it’s my fault”—that was his philosophy when it came to the media.
    Hunched behind his desk in the glare of the electric-orange office partitions, his face settled slowly into a squinty-eyed scowl. Somebody in charge had decreed that bright international orange panels were de rigueur when the new ten-million-dollar police station was built. The panels offered a semblance of privacy to the hyper, the hysterical, the homicidal and the distraught as they were interviewed by detectives.
    Jim believed that the blinding orange agitated half-crazed suspects and caused even docile witnesses to grow irritable and argumentative. The color made his head throb, especially when he was short on sleep. Peering through reading glasses, he riffled through his telephone calls. “Oh shit,” he said. The message in his hand was brief and to the point: “I’m being poisoned again.”
    The full moon