Brown's skin was the color of rich Colombian coffee, and he had brown eyes and kinky black hair, and wide nostrils and thick lips, and this made him as black as anyone could get. Over the years, he had got used to thinking of himself as black - though that wasn't his actual color - but he was damned if he would now start calling himself African-American, which he felt was a phony label invented by insecure people who kept inventing labels in order to reinvent themselves. Inventing labels wasn't the way you found out who you were. The
way you did that was you looked in the mirror every morning, the way Brown did, and you saw the same handsome black dude looking back at you. That was what made you grin, man.
"You get people saying things like 'They say there's gonna be another tax hike,'" Monroe said, gathering steam, "and when you ask them who they mean by they, they'll tell you the investment brokers or the financial insti..."
"You just done it yourself," Monoghan said.
"What'd I do?"
"You said you ask them who they mean by they, they'll tell you the investment..."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Monroe said.
"I'm talking about you complaining about people saying they this and they that, and you just said they this yourself."
"I said nothing of the sort," Monroe said. "Did I say that?" he asked Brown, trying to drag him into it again.
"Hello, hello, hello," the ME said cheerily from the door to the apartment, sparing Brown an answer. Putting down his satchel, wiping his brow with an already damp handkerchief, he said, "It's the Sahara out there, I'm sorry I'm late." He picked up the satchel again, walked over to where the victim lay on the carpet, said, "Oh my," and knelt immediately beside her. Monoghan got off the sofa and came over to where the other men stood.
They all watched silently as the ME began his examination.
In this city, you did not touch the body until someone from the Medical Examiner's Office pronounced the victim dead. By extension, investigating detectives usually interpreted this regulation to mean you didn't touch anything until the ME had delivered his verdict. You could come into an apartment and find a naked old lady who'd been dead for months and had turned to jelly in her bathtub, you waited till the ME said she was dead. They waited now. He examined the dead woman as if she were still alive and paying her annual visit to his office, putting his stethoscope to her chest, feeling for a pulse, counting the number of slash and stab wounds - there were thirty-two in all, including those in the small of her back
- keeping the detectives in suspense as to whether or not she was truly deceased.
"Tough one to call, huh, Doc?" Monoghan asked, and winked at Monroe, surprising Brown.
"Cause of death, he means," Monroe said, and winked back.
Brown guessed they'd already forgotten their little tiff.
The ME glanced up at them sourly, and then returned to his task.
At last he rose and said, "She's all yours."
The detectives went to work.
The clock on the wall of the office read eight-thirty p.m. There was nothing else on any of the walls. Not even a window. There was a plain wooden desk probably salvaged from one of the older precincts when the new metal furniture started coming in. There was a wooden chair with arms in front of the desk, and a straight-backed wooden chair behind it. Michael Goodman sat behind the desk. Dr Michael Goodman. Who rated only a cubbyhole office here in the Headquarters Building downtown. Eileen Burke was singularly unimpressed.
"That's Detective/Second, is it?" he asked.
"Yes," she said.
"How long have you been a detective?"
She almost said Too long.
"It's all there in the record," she said.
She was beginning to think this was a terrible mistake. Coming to see a shrink recommended by another shrink. But she trusted Karin. She guessed.
Goodman looked at the papers on his desk. He was a tall man with curly black hair and blue eyes. Nose a bit too long for his face, mustache under it, perhaps to cradle it, soften its length. Thick spectacles with rims the color of his hair. He studied the papers.
"Put in a lot of time with Special Forces, I see," he said.
"Yes."
"Decoy work."
6
"Yes."
"Mostly Rape Squad," he said.
"Yes," she said.
He'd get to the rape next. He'd get to the part that said she'd been raped in the line of duty. It's all there in the record, she thought.
"So," he said, and looked up, and smiled. "What makes you think you'd like to work with the hostage team?"
"I'm not sure I would. But Karin ... Dr Karin Lefkowitz ..."
"Yes."
"I've been seeing her for a little while now ..."
"Yes."
"At Pizzaz. Upstairs."
Psychological Services Assistance Section. PSAS. Pizzaz for short. Cop talk that took the curse off psychological help, made it sound jazzier, Pizzaz. Right upstairs on the fifth floor of the building. Annie Rawles's Rape Squad office was on the sixth floor. You start with a Rape Squad assignment on the sixth floor and you end up in Pizzaz on the fifth, Eileen thought. What goes up must come down.
"She suggested that I might find hostage work interesting."
Less threatening was what she'd actually said.
"How did she mean? Interesting?"
Zeroing right in. Smarter than she thought.
"I've been under a considerable amount of strain lately," Eileen said.
"Because of the shooting?" Goodman asked.
Here it comes, she thought.
"The shooting, yes, and complications arising from ..."
"You killed this man when?"
Flat out. You killed this man. Which, of course, was what she'd done. Killed this man. Killed this man who'd murdered three prostitutes and was coming at her with a knife. Blew him to perdition. Her first bullet took him in the chest, knocking him backward toward the bed. She fired again almost at once, hitting him in the shoulder this time, spinning him
I around, and then she fired a third time, shooting him in the I back, knocking him over onto the bed. At the time, she I couldn't understand why she kept shooting into his lifeless I body, watching the eruptions of blood along his spine, saying I over and over again, "I gave you a chance, I gave you a ¦ chance," until the gun was empty. Karin Lefkowitz was helping her to understand why.
"I killed him a year ago October," she said.
"Not this past October ..."
"No the one before it. Halloween night," she said.
Trick or treat, she thought.
I gave you a chance.
But had she?
"Why are you seeing Dr Lefkowitz?"
She wondered if he knew her. Did every shrink in this city know every other shrink? If so, had he talked to her about what they'd been discussing these past several months?
"I'm seeing her because I'm gun-shy," she said.
"Uh-huh," he said.
"I don't want to have to kill anyone else," she said.
"Okay," he said.
"And I don't want to do any more decoy work. Which is a bad failing for a Special Forces cop."
"I can imagine."
"By the way," she said, "I don't particularly like psychiatrists."
"Lucky I'm only a psychologist," he said, and smiled.
"Those, too."
"But you do like Karin."
"Yes," she said, and paused. "She's been helpful."
Big admission to make.
"In what way?"
"I have other problems besides the job."
"First tell me what your problems with the job are."