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and talk about how no one likes them. When what were talking about is kids who torture and kill the family pet, lock parents in basements, set fire to the house. I had one last month. Thirteen. A cutter. Couldn't get her to say a thing the whole hour—not that that's a big surprise. But then when she gets up to leave she says, What's the big deal? It's just another cunt, that's all. I'm just opening it for them.'"
    Tracy had a warning of her own for me, about the gauntlet I'd be running. It would start with Sergeant Christopher Van Zandt, a man so devoutly incompetent that a new position had been created expressly to keep him—
    "Out of harm's way?" I ventured.
    "Out of the department's way."
    He was, she said, continuing education and informations officer.
    "And whose nephew?"
    "We're not quite sure. But he is a man in love with the sound of his voice, and no subject has yet been broached, be it deciduous trees or Polynesian dances, about which he did not know everything there was to know."
    "I believe we've met."
    "I'm sure you have." She smiled. "Many times."
    As I said, sometimes you just can't help yourself. With my remark about management, Van Zandt's locution ratcheted up a notch or two, tiny I?'s exploding in the air directly before his lips, t's clipped as though by shears. Complex sentences, dependent clauses, dramatic pauses—the whole nine yards.
    Finally, having survived the sally, not to mention those l?'s, we were passed along to someone who actually knew something. About the situation, that is.
    "I suspect we won't be seeing one another again," Sergeant Van Zandt said in the last moments, to make it clear we were done. He stood and extended his hand. "It's been a pleasure."
    I looked at him closely. There were two people shut away in there, each with only a nodding acquaintance of the other.
    We found George Gibbs in the break room staring into a cup of coffee as though everything might become clear once he reached the bottom. Periodically sweaty officers walked through from the workout room adjacent. Gibbs's mug was flecked with tiny paste-on flags and read WORLD'S BEST DAD. A gift from his kids, he told us—two weeks before his wife packed up and moved them all off to Gary-fucking-Indiana.
    George, it seems, played bass with country bands, which had become increasingly a cornerstone for the friction between them, standing in for all the other things that went wrong and unspoken. "Ain't no self-respecting black man alive that would play that shitkicker music," his wife kept telling him. At least he didn't have to listen to that anymore, he said. Hell, country music was what he liked.
    George Gibbs had sixteen years in, Tracy had told me. He was solid, looked up to by almost everyone, a man no one on the force would hesitate to trust with his or her life.
    I told him about Eldon and his music, and he laughed.
    "Banjo! Now that does beat all."
    George had responded to the call about Isaiah's friend Merle. Owner of a used-furniture store was unlocking his store that morning, caught a glimpse in the window glass alongside, went across the street to look. A body. Smack in front of the old paint store and half a block or so down from a bar, The Roundup, that was about the only thing open around there at night.
    "Near as we can tell," Gibbs said, "he stopped to ask directions. Easy to get lost that side of town. Get caught up in there, everything looks the same—and there was a map half folded on the passenger-side seat. . . You know how it is: Maybe someone'll get wasted in The Roundup and start talking and that'll get back to us, but probably not. And maybe it didn't have anything to do with The Roundup. I could pull the report for you."
    "Taken care of," Tracy told him.
    "You read it?"
    "Not yet," I said. "Wanted to hear you out first."
    Gibbs nodded. Approvingly, I thought. "He was stabbed three, four times. With a small knife, probably just a ordinary pocketknife. ME thinks the first one was in the neck, of