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form his slender build.
    In fact the only thing remotely soft about him was his eyes, tender, brown, and luminous. Although he considered them a detriment to his life’s work, his wife of six months told him he ought to be grateful for them, because without them she might never have seen anything in him to love.
    “I’ve been over your file,” said the lieutenant. “I see you were on the debate team at the U of D. That means you can talk. A couple of years ago that wouldn’t have meant crap, but the department’s changing. Police work’s changing. When I joined up, the entire detective division operated out of a swamp on the seventh floor under the command of a real piece of work named Kozlowski. He didn’t have one knuckle he hadn’t broken at least twice on some poor sap’s jaw down in the basement And he had company. Back then you couldn’t have rounded up enough cops with more than an eighth-grade education to play a game of touch football. They were tough, but they couldn’t have stood up to a ninety-eight-pound reporter with a TV camera. You’ll be doing plenty of that if this thing keeps heating up the way I think it will.”
    “How much does this have to do with me being black?”
    “Damn near everything. The American Ethiopian Congress is pushing for an all-black team to investigate the shoot. They won’t get it, one, because I’m being paid to run this bureau and with a boy in college who can’t play basketball for shit I can’t afford to split my paycheck with them, and, two, as fast as we’ve been stacking the ranks with black officers since the riots we still don’t have any in Special Investigations. This business of detecting detectives is thorny as hell even without a bunch of rookies tripping over their own feet. Your record is clean, you can handle questions from the floor without drawing your service revolver, and according to your turnout sergeant you don’t make a lot of enemies. If you’ve got reservations about being chosen for this duty on the basis of your race, sing out. Nothing? ’Kay.”
    He opened a rumbling drawer mounted on ball bearings, lifted out a thick gray cardboard folder, and held it above Old Ironsides’ mainmast
    “Read it. Kubicek’s report, eyewitness statements, autopsy records, paper trail left by the guns involved, etcetera. It should bring you up to speed on the official end.”
    “Can I take it home?” Battle hefted the file. He had never been in on an investigation and was surprised at how much paper a case could accumulate in just ten days.
    “No. You’re meeting the rest of the team this afternoon. Take your lunch hour and go over it in that corner. I’ll leave you alone with it. If you have to go to the john, take it with you. When you’re there don’t put it down. Piss one-handed. The last time a file from an internal investigation left this floor it wound up in the Metro section of the News. The man who was behind this desk at the time is in Florida now, running a two-man police department and making just about as much at sixty as you make now. I’m forty-nine. I can’t take humidity.”
    “I’m not much for beaches myself, Lieutenant. I can’t swim and I don’t tan.”
    “Be grateful you don’t. In today’s climate it makes you the only officer connected with this mess who doesn’t have to watch his own ass.” Carefully, Zagreb folded the scattered scraps of plastic inside the assembly instructions and transferred them to the vacant drawer. Pushing it shut, he rose.
    “Take your time. The chair’s more comfortable than the sofa, which is where I seat reporters. When you’re through I’ll introduce you to the men you’ll be working with. They’ll tell you what isn’t in the file.”

Chapter Four
    R USSELL L ITTLEJOHN SMELLED THE I NDIAN FROM THE landing.
    The Indian, whom he knew by no name other than Wolf, was partial to Brut, and although he seemed to have rules about not wearing cologne before evening, splashed the