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but he didn’t use it. He never had to.”
    “My son is dead,” Harmon Weston said stiffly. “I didn’t come here to argue about what he did or didn’t do. I came for the boy. Wake up, Benjy. Let’s go.”
    Junior Weston fought to rouse himself. For a moment, he looked around, dismayed by the strange surroundings, then his eyes focused on his grandfather’s familiar face.
    “It’s true, isn’t it, Grampa? It wasn’t a bad dream, was it?”
    “No,” Harmon Weston answered, reaching out and taking the boy’s pudgy hand. He pulled the boy to him and held him close. As he gazed down at his grandson’s curly hair I glimpsed the terrible hurt behind the old man’s outward show of bitterness and rancor. “It’s no dream at all, Benjy. It’s a nightmare. Come on now.”
    “Do you need a ride?” Big Al offered.
    “The car’s waiting downstairs,” Watty said quickly. “We’ve already got that handled.”
    Harmon Weston let go of Junior and started toward the door. The boy took a tentative step after him before turning back to Big Al.
    “I’ve gotta go now,” Junior said.
    Big Al Lindstrom nodded. “I know. Good-bye, Junior. Thanks for all your help.”
    At that, the boy darted back long enough to give Big Al a quick hug around the neck. Then, clutching his teddy bear, he followed his grandfather into the hallway. Accompanied by Sergeant Watkins, the two of them disappeared from view, leaving Detective Lindstrom staring at the empty doorway behind them and shaking his head.
    “Stubborn old son of a bitch,” he muttered. “He and Ben were at war for years, and now Harmon’s all Junior Weston has left in the world. I wouldn’t want to be in that poor little kid’s shoes for nothing.”

CHAPTER 4
    WITH JUNIOR SAFELY ON HIS WAY TO HIS grandfather’s house, Big Al and I headed back toward the Weston family home in Rainier Valley. Without lights and sirens, it’s a ten-minute drive from downtown. For a good part of that time we were both pretty quiet. Big Al finally broke the silence.
    “What do you think?” he asked. “Was Ben the real target, or is the killer somebody with a grudge against every cop in the known universe, and Ben was just a stand-in?”
    That in a nutshell was the crux of the matter. Should the investigation head off after every crazy who had ever voiced a grudge against the Seattle PD? Regardless, I knew we’d go searching through Ben Weston’s catalog of past and present acquaintances both on and off the job. The problem was, Gentle Ben Weston hadn’t been given that moniker for being some kind of bad-ass cop. The last I heard, he had been working a desk job in Patrol. Of all the possible jobs in the department, a desk position in Patrol seemed least likely to create long-term, homicidal-type grudges.
    “What would somebody have against a guy like Ben?” I asked. “I can understand how a crook might build up this kind of rage against somebody in Homicide or Vice, but why have such a hard-on for a poor, pen-pushing desk jockey from Patrol?”
    “He wasn’t in Patrol,” Big Al returned quietly, “not anymore.”
    “That’s news to me. Since when?”
    Lindstrom shrugged. “Six months? A little longer, maybe. Don’t you remember? He took a voluntary downgrade and transfer into CCI.”
    In Seattle PD jargon, CCI translates into Coordinated Criminal Investigations. In departmental politics, it’s currently synonymous with hot potato. CCI started out as the unit nobody wanted to have, doing the dirty work with gangs that no one across the street in City Hall wanted to admit needed doing. CCI’s desirability waxes and wanes, depending on the fickle barometer of public relations.
    In the past few years, Seattle has received a lot of good press and has turned up on more than one “most livable city” list. Livable cities evidently exist in some kind of fantasy world, and they’re not supposed to have any problems, most especially not gang problems. For years the brass