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the scalding sun. The lieutenant had arrived ahead of him. He was leaning against the waist-high ledge, gazing into the distance and smoking a cigarette with the vigor of a man trying to exhale his problems.
    Emmett joined him at the ledge. From that height, they had an unobstructed view clear to the river. The city was twenty-three miles square—a quarter of which was taken up by the airport, the seaport, and uninhabitable marshland—giving Newark the highest population density of any major city in the country. The statistics paled in comparison to the panorama of the New York City skyline ten miles to the east. By contrast, Newark seemed stunted, an undernourished sibling.
    “Are we sightseeing?” Emmett asked.
    “Figured you could stand some sun. You’re getting too white being in that basement.”
    For a full minute, Ahern said nothing else. He wasn’t the type who had conversations. He talked. Others listened. The lieutenant had built his reputation on what he didn’t do, not on what he did. Once, a detective had made the mistake of getting into a shouting match with him in the third-floor hallway in front of an audience of a dozen officers, intentionally making the argument public. Lieutenant Ahern calmly lectured the detective while backing him toward the stairwell. When the detective went to storm off, he fell down the steps and broke his leg. Ahern never touched him.
    The lieutenant peered at the destruction on the street below. “Thank Christ this shit is over, right?”
    “Right,” Emmett repeated, uncertain if he was agreeing to something else. That concerned him as much as what he was waiting to hear.
    “Yesterday I told you I couldn’t use you. Today’s a different story. This morning a transit worker found the body of a colored kid at the Warren Street subway station.”
    To call the boy “Negro” would have been too progressive for Ahern. “Colored” was an insult, and the lieutenant preferred insults, no matter who they were aimed at.
    “You’ve got four detectives under you. Why recruit from the Records Room?”
    That was as far as Emmett could push. Around Ahern, he had to tread lightly. The lieutenant hadn’t warmed to him when Director Sloakes moved Emmett into the division. Although commanding officers had little say in the composition of their squads, Sloakes had forced Emmett down Ahern’s throat. The lieutenant resented that, and he resented Emmett. In a rare show of benevolence, Ahern had stifled the department inquest into Emmett’s squad room brawl and cut him a break by relegating him to the Records Room instead of requisitioning Sloakes to have him formally reassigned. Afterward, Emmett realized that Ahern hadn’t acted out of charity. He had his own motives for sparing him stiffer measures. By banishing him to the basement, the lieutenant could keep Emmett under his thumb.
    “Haven’t got another set of eyes to spare,” Ahern explained, casually tapping cigarette ash over the ledge. Standing three stories up didn’t bother him. The lieutenant was accustomed to being on top. However, when the division was spread thin, that put him in the pinch, an infrequent position for Ahern. Emmett also had a sneaking suspicion it was the lieutenant who had convinced the feckless Inspector Plout to grant Mose Odett access to the cabdriver, assuming Odett could persuade the crowd to disband. That way the police wouldn’t need to get involved. The strategy had backfired. If Lieutenant Ahern was taking heat for his maneuver, the body of a murdered black boy would fan the flames.
    “This sort of situation requires a gentle touch,” he told Emmett, savoring his delivery, “and you’ve been known for your…discretion.”
    The first and only homicide Emmett ever worked was the shooting of Vernon Young, a twenty-two-year-old from the Scudder Homes projects, who ironed laundry at night for a dry cleaner. Young had been dumping the store’s trash in the alley behind the cleaner’s when