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Center City, Jessica watched the neighborhoods change. No other city she could think of had a personality so split between blight and splendor. No other city clung to the past with more pride, nor demanded the future with more fervor.
    She saw a pair of brave joggers working their way up Frankford, and the floodgates opened wide.A torrent of memories and emotions washed over her.
    She had begun running with her brother when he was seventeen; she, just a gangly thirteen, loosely constructed of pointy elbows, sharp shoulder blades, and bony kneecaps. For the first year or so she hadn’t a prayer of matching either his pace or his stride. Michael Giovanni stood just under six feet and weighed a trim and muscular 180.
    In the summer heat, the spring rain, the winter snow they would jog through the streets of South Philly; Michael, always a few steps ahead; Jessica, always struggling to keep up, always in silent awe of his grace. She had beaten him to the steps of St. Paul’s once, on her fourteenth birthday, a contest to which Michael had never wavered in his claim of defeat. She knew he had let her win.
    Jessica and Michael had lost their mother to breast cancer when Jessica was only five, and from that day forward Michael had been there for every scraped knee, every young girl’s heartbreak, every time she had been victimized by some neighborhood bully.
    She had been fifteen when Michael had joined the Marine Corps, following in their father’s footsteps. She recalled how proud they had all been when he came home in his dress uniform for the first time. Every one of Jessica’s girlfriends had been desperately in love with Michael Giovanni, his caramel eyes and easy smile, the confident way he could put old people and children at ease. Everyone knew he would join the police force after his tour of duty, also following in their father’s footsteps.
    She had been fifteen when Michael, serving in the First Battalion, Eleventh Marines, was killed in Kuwait.
Her father, a thrice-decorated veteran of the police force, a man who still carried his late wife’s internment card in his breast pocket, had closed his heart completely that day, a terrain he now tread only in the company of his granddaughter. Although small of stature, Peter Giovanni had stood ten feet tall in the company of his son.
Jessica had been headed to prelaw, then law school, but on the night they received word of Michael’s death she knew that she would join the police force.
And now, as she began what was essentially an entirely new career in one of the most respected homicide units of any police department in the country, it looked like law school was a dream relegated to the realm of fantasy.
Maybe one day.
Maybe.
    By the time Jessica pulled into the parking lot at the Roundhouse, she realized that she didn’t recall any of it. Not a single thing. All the cramming in procedure, evidence, the years on the street, everything evacuated her brain.
    Did the building get bigger? she wondered.
At the door she caught her reflection in the glass. She was wearing a fairly expensive skirt suit, her best sensible girl-cop shoes. A big difference from the torn jeans and sweatshirts she had favored as an undergrad at Temple, in those giddy years before Vincent, before Sophie, before the academy, before all... this . Not a care in the world, she thought. Now her world was built on worry, framed with concern, with a leaky roof shingled with trepidation.
Although she had entered this building many times, and although she could probably find her way to the bank of elevators blindfolded, it all seemed foreign to her, as if she were seeing it for the first time. The sights, the sounds, the smells all blended into the demented carnival that was this small corner of the Philadelphia justice system.
It was her brother Michael’s beautiful face that Jessica saw as she grabbed the handle on the door, an image that would come back to her many times over the next few weeks as the