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apartment?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œBut that’s not all the hair revealed.”
    â€œWhat else?”
    â€œRohypnol.”
    â€œ
Row
-fin-all?” Carella asked.
    â€œR-O-H-Y-P-N-O-L,” Blaney said. “The brand name for a drug called flunitrazepam.”
    â€œI never heard of it.”
    â€œWe don’t see much of it in this city. No emergency-room episodes, no deaths resulting from its use. It’s a benzodiazepine, pretty popular in the South and Southwest. Young people use it in combination with alcohol and other drugs.”
    â€œI thought you said this was asphyxia.”
    â€œIt was. Bear with me. The hair results sent me back for another look at his blood. This time I was focusing on flunitrazepam and its 7-amino metabolites. I found only moderate levels of the parent drug—concentrations not significant enough to have contributed to the fatality. But enough to conclude that he’d definitely ingested at least two milligrams.”
    â€œIndicating?”
    â€œIndicating he couldn’t possibly have hanged himself. He’d have been unconscious. You’re looking at a homicide here.”
    And so it began.

2
    IT WAS raining relentlessly on the morning of October thirtieth, a Saturday, the day after the body of Andrew Henry Hale was found dead in his bed in an apartment on Currey and Twelfth. Carella and Meyer came running out of the precinct and into the parking lot behind it, drenched to the bone before they’d taken half a dozen steps. Rain banged on the roof of the car. Rain drilled Carella’s head as he fumbled the key into the lock on the driver’s side, rain smashed his eyes, rain soaked the shoulders of his coat and plastered his hair onto his forehead. Meyer stood patiently hunched and hulking on the passenger side of the car, eyes squinched, drowning in the merciless rain.
    â€œJust take all the time in the world,” he suggested.
    Carella finally got the key into the lock, twisted it open, hurried inside, and reached across the seat to unlock the other door for Meyer.
    â€œWhoosh!” Meyer said, and pulled the door shut behind him.
    Both men sat breathless for a moment, enclosed now in a rattling cocoon, the windshield and windows melting with rain. Behindthem, the precinct lights glowed yellow, offering comfort and warmth, odd solace for a place they rarely associated with either. Meyer shifted his weight, reached into his back pants pockets for a handkerchief, and dried his face and the top of his bald head. Carella took several Dunkin’ Donuts paper napkins from the side pocket on the door and tried to blot water from his soaked hair. “Boy,” he said, and grabbed more napkins from the door.
    Together, the two men in their bulky overcoats crowded the front seat of the “company car,” as they mockingly called it. They were partnered as often as not, the twin peculiarities of exigency and coincidence frequently determining more effectively than any duty chart exactly who might be in the squadroom when the phone rang. They had caught the Hale squeal together yesterday morning. The case was now theirs until they either made an arrest or retired it in the so-called Open File.
    Carella started the car.
    Meyer turned on the radio.
    The insistent chatter of police calls scratched at the beating rain. It took a while for the ancient heater to throw any real warmth into the car, adding its clanking clatter to the steady drumming of the rain, the drone of the dispatcher’s voice, the hissing swish of tires on black asphalt. Cops on the job listened with one ear all the time, waiting to hear the dispatcher specifically calling their car, particularly waiting for the urgent signal that would tell them an officer was down, in which case every car in the vicinity would respond. Meanwhile, as the rain fell and the heater hurled uncertain hot air onto their faces and their feet, they talked idly about Carella’s