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recovered a .40-caliber slug. No casings at the scene.”
    I nodded, but didn’t ask any follow-up questions. I don’t like entering a crime scene with too many preconceived notions. If I become fixated on one particular theory, I’m afraid I’ll develop tunnel vision and I might miss the nuances of the true murder scenario.
    After Duffy snaked through downtown, the traffic thinned and he zipped through the southside—South Central to the west of the freeway and its more depressed neighbor, Watts, to the east—thenpast the oil refineries of Wilmington that belched clouds of acrid smoke, white against the black sky, the horizon resembling a photographic negative.
    I leaned back on the seat, closed my eyes, and recalled that afternoon when my paratroop unit was searching a terrorist’s house in the West Bank. While I waited in the living room, I leafed through a Koran with Arabic on one side of the page and English on the other. I still remembered one of the passages, although it hadn’t meant much to me at the time:
Does there not pass over every man a space of time when his life is blank?
That’s how the past eleven months had been, I thought. An utter blank. Serving subpoenas, tracking down witnesses, and shepherding people to depositions for my brother’s law firm was a bore. I occasionally studied the LSAT prep book, but with little enthusiasm. I felt lost, drifting in a miasma of self-flagellation and anger. I was angry at Duffy. Angry at the department. Angry at myself.
    Now I realized how much I had missed this part of the job: riding to the crime scene, adrenaline pumping, not knowing what I would find when I arrived, what clues would be apparent, what evidence would be discernible, what traces the killer left behind. I missed the unpredictability of the call-outs, how they came at any time, any day, any hour, and how they would immediately send me hurtling into the unknown. I missed encountering the parts of the crime-scene puzzle; they were always different and I never put them together the same way.
    Most of all, I missed the life, the life of a homicide detective in which the stakes of a case are always high and everything else seems unimportant by comparison. This all-consuming nature of the job had always been a balm for the bullshit in my life; the challenge of the chase demanded so much from me, I simply did not have the luxury of dwelling on anything else.
    Duffy pulled off the freeway in San Pedro and parked behind the Harbor Division station. We nodded to a group of cops smoking in the parking lot and traversed a long, scuffed linoleum hallway that smelled of vomit and urine and unwashed bodies, past detention benches with burglars, rapists, wife beaters, gangbangers, psychos, crackheads, and muggers cuffed to the metal rings; past drunks blowing into breathalyzer machines; past vice officers wearing jeans and Hawaiian shirts pushing screaming hookers into interview rooms. We entered the watchcommander’s office and greeted the p.m. shift lieutenant, who sifted through his desk drawer and handed Duffy an envelope with the key to Relovich’s house. We left the station, drove toward the water, and then climbed a steep hill.
    Relovich lived near the end of a cul-de-sac, in a ramshackle pale blue clapboard bungalow with peeling paint and a sagging roof. When I was a kid, this had been a working-class neighborhood, populated mostly by Croatian fishermen. But now, homes with a view of the water were at a premium in Los Angeles and property values had soared. Most of the fisherman had sold to investors, who viewed the modest homes as teardowns, replacing them with mammoth two- and three-story monstrosities, spanning lot line to lot line. Relovich’s house, which was encircled by yellow crime-scene tape, was flanked by two gray and white clapboard Cape Cod-style McMansions that could sell for more than a million dollars.
    I pulled out a pair of latex gloves, a few small Baggies, and a flashlight from a