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in Chinatown?”
    “Yeah, we’re here. But I need you
to get the hell over here right away.” Horvath lowered his voice, and Hank
couldn’t catch what he said next.
    “Didn’t get that, Horvath. Say
again.”
    “I said, Peralta’s had some kind
of a breakdown. She’s fallen apart. I called her husband and he’s on the way
but I need you ASAP. Jarvis is here and I don’t want him talking to her like
this.”
    The elevator doors opened and
Karen stepped inside. Hank followed, caught her eye, and shook his head.
    “I’ll be right there,” he told
Horvath.

 
    5
    There was no one to give him a
ride, so Hank caught a taxi. The home invasion had taken place at 1437 King
Street, half a block from Columbia Street in the heart of Chinatown. He told
the taxi driver to let him off on Columbia, just short of King. He walked
around the corner and showed his identification and badge to officers at the
wooden barriers blocking vehicular traffic.
    This section of King was a mixture
of tenements and small houses converted into grocery stores, tea houses, and
souvenir shops. An old man sitting on the bottom step of one of the tenements
watched expressionlessly as Hank walked past. A dog on the top step lifted its
head, following him with its brown eyes. Next door someone parted the curtains
in an upstairs window. A crime scene van trying to work its way down to
Columbia blipped its klaxon to warn off the clusters of young men smoking
cigarettes and talking in the middle of the street. By this time, Hank figured,
the scene would be processed and the technicians would be heading back to the
lab with their findings. He could see a number of police cruisers and unmarked
vehicles ahead, light bars and dashboard bubbles still flashing, but it looked
as though the medical examiner’s office had already transported the bodies and
cleared the scene.
    At the yellow tape bordering the
crime scene, Hank gave the leather wallet containing his identification and
badge to the uniformed officer controlling access to the house where the
invasion had taken place. She wrote down his particulars in the log on her
clipboard and handed back the wallet. Hank had never seen her before. Small and
blond, she looked young enough to be his daughter.
    “I hear it’s pretty bad,” Hank
said.
    “These people are animals.”
    Hank put the wallet back in his
jacket pocket and lifted the yellow tape. He walked up the steps onto the
porch, where the front door was propped open by a black equipment case
belonging to one of the crime scene technicians. The building was a duplex.
Next door, the other half was taken up by a tiny grocery store with dusty bags
of rice in the front window. A family by the name of Chee had lived in this
half, a couple in their late fifties with two grown sons.
    Hank stepped into the hallway,
nodding at a uniformed officer on his way out. The first thing was the smell, a
wave of vomit, excrement, and blood. Then it was Bill Jarvis, pointing a finger
at him.
    “Out of my crime scene, Donaghue.”
    “Where are Horvath and Peralta?”
    “Look,” Jarvis said, moving into
Hank’s personal space and tapping him on the chest with his index finger, “didn’t
you get the word? The chief’s decided that all violent crime in Chinatown will
now belong to my task force. Oh wait, that’s right, you don’t report directly
to Bennett, like I do. It takes time for news to filter down the food chain.”
    Lieutenant Bill Jarvis was
forty-two years old. He was short and a little thick around the stomach. His
dirty blond hair was thin and straight, his blue eyes were narrow, and his lips
were thin and tended to curl away from his teeth in a grimace he thought looked
friendly but wasn’t. Hank found him annoying and obnoxious, but he’d spent the first
four years of his professional life with the FBI and understood how to sell
that experience to the current administration.
    Detective Larry Carleson appeared
behind Jarvis and pointed with his