The Blue Religion

Rule Number One by Bev Vincent

She stands out like a cactus blossom in the desert, seated in the roll-call room beyond the eight men in sky-blue shirts and navy-blue pants huddled in the back row like juvenile delinquents in remedial math class. The minute Brett lays eyes on her, he knows she will be his for the evening.

Her attire is simple, understated: a white blouse and blue slacks with white pinstripes. Sensible, flat-soled shoes. Long black hair caresses the shoulders of her blouse, which is open demurely at the neck. In her right hand she grips a pen, which hovers over an open steno pad resting on the desk affixed to her chair. A burlap satchel sits at her feet. She doesn’t look up when he enters.

The room is wide but shallow, containing three meandering rows of simple student desks, the sergeant’s podium, and a TV suspended from the ceiling. Printouts listing suspect information decorate the podium. Behind it, next to the door, American and Texas flags flank an empty table. A poster features the sergeant from Hill Street Blues saying, let’s be careful out there.

It’s nearly three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, so the television is broadcasting a Texas A &M football game. The Astros play later on, which means Brett’s radio will be filled with chatter every time someone scores.

Two bulletin boards sealed in glass cases cover the wall at the far end of the room. One features mug shots, wanted notices, and BOLO fliers. The other contains approved job postings for officers looking to supplement their income. Most are for night watchmen or nightclub-security positions. Brett has no interest in these – he already works the department maximum forty additional hours.

The comfortable weight of the gear on his utility belt – service revolver, radio, handcuffs, nightstick, and Taser – adds to his swagger. Two colleagues look up from their conversation when he takes the last empty seat in the back row. Phelps raises his eyebrows and tilts his head an inch toward the woman. Brett scrunches his mouth into an appraising pucker and nods. Not bad is the silent message they exchange. He doesn’t waste any time checking her out, though. He’ll have the next eight hours to do that. Guaranteed.

When the sergeant emerges from his office, he mutes the volume on the television but leaves the picture up. He reads a policy-change sheet and advises officers whose body armor is more than five years old that they have three more weeks to turn it in to be replaced. He has an orientation video available for anyone taking the sergeant’s test. After reading the names of officers who need to sign subpoenas before they go on duty, he assigns cars by unit number.

“Hoskins,” he says, “you have a ride-along.”

Which comes as no surprise to Brett. Nine times out of ten, he gets the riders. The only question is why she’s here. Most civilian passengers are either media or members of a mayoral task force. Her attire doesn’t provide any clues, but he appreciates the way her blouse clings to her body. If he had to bet, he’d say media. It doesn’t make much difference. Either way, he has to mind his p’s and q’s, keep the bawdy banter to a minimum, and not bust anyone’s chops unless they deserve it. It also means, however, that he has an excuse to handpick the cushier calls.

The sergeant makes no introductions, merely points Brett in the woman’s direction. She’s already gathering her possessions and heading toward the podium. Her eyes are the color of roasted chestnuts. The long black hair framing her narrow face has been teased into gentle waves. He glances at her left hand – no ring. Her complexion is dark, making Brett wonder if she has Hispanic blood and whether that will be an issue during the shift. Many of the perpetrators he encounters over the next eight hours will be Hispanic.

“Follow me,” he says. “It’s a bit of a hike.”

He leads her along the corridor, down a narrow staircase, outside the central station, across a gravel parking lot, into the garage, and up to the third level, where his ride, 1 Adam 25 E, is parked. The car is where he left it the day before, which probably means no one used it since then. The department is short staffed, so he’s not surprised.

“Hoskins,” he says by way of introduction when they reach the car.

Panting slightly from the stairs and the fast pace he set, she sticks out a hand. “Meredith Knight.”

Her skin is smooth and soft, and he maintains his grip on her hand about two seconds too long. After he releases her, he pulls out a well-worn ignition key, opens the door, and clears the lock on her side. The car is seven years old and has more than a hundred thousand miles on it. He listens for the roof speaker to crackle when he starts the engine. “Some officers like to check all the lights, the siren and stuff. I know everything pretty much works. At least it doesn’t change day to day, especially since the car’s not driven around the clock. Means I don’t have to change the seat, the mirrors, the radio station.”

She starts taking notes immediately, which is a little strange. Reminds him of a high school keener, writing down everything the teacher says.

“How come I never get a ride-along?” Phelps says in a singsong voice on his way to his car. Brett shrugs and grins.

The radio is set loud enough to hear the music without having it drown out the dispatcher or other radio chatter. He boots up the computer, which runs an obsolete operating system; loads the com software; and logs on with dispatch. The crowded quarters, the front seat jammed with computer equipment and other paraphernalia, makes it feel as if they’re unusually close. Her perfume, mild and floral, reaches his nostrils. “Reporter?”

“Writer,” she answers. “I’m doing research for a novel.”

That’s a new one. “Interesting.” With two jobs and an ex-wife, Brett has no time for novels. Of the three, the ex-wife is the most demanding. Still, he relaxes a little knowing that his activities over the next eight hours likely won’t end up in tomorrow’s newspaper or in a report on the mayor’s desk.

“They pretty much just give you paperwork to read over and then say come ride, right?” He knows the routine, but he’s looking for a way to break the ice.

“If I get shot, beaten, or otherwise maimed, it’s my own damned fault,” she says. “At least that’s what the forms I signed say.”

“I’ll do my best to keep that from happening. I’ve never lost a ride-along yet.” He likes her spunkiness, so he answers in detail her questions about the minutia of his routine. He shows her how to use the outdated computer with attached microphone that is his lifeline to central dispatch. “If I’m getting my ass whooped, don’t worry about calling 1 Adam 25 E. Just pick this mike up and say, ‘Hoskins needs help.’” He points at a second microphone. “That one is for yelling at people on the PA. This is the one for saving my ass.”

“Got it.”

The computer pings every time a dispatch message comes through. If he ignores them long enough, a robotic female voice chides him. “Three new messages waiting.” He picks some of the easier call slips to handle first to clear the backlog. Reports of suspicious people that rarely pan out or complaints about illegally parked vehicles that he will ticket and ultimately have towed if they stay there long enough.

Unsure of what she’s looking for, he describes the neighborhoods on his beat and tells anecdotes about interesting calls he’s taken in the past. Without mentioning his divorce or admitting that all he can currently afford is a dingy apartment in a rough neighborhood, he points out houses he’s looked into buying, though they’re all beyond his means. She compliments his ability to drive, operate the computer, and talk with her all at the same time. When she isn’t writing in her steno pad, she’s recording him on a digital voice recorder, a device smaller than a cell phone that beeps and chirps from time to time.

When he returns without getting a response at an apartment where a silent 911 was reported, he tells her, “The front door was locked. No noise coming from inside. Nothing more I can do – you just can’t go around kicking people’s doors in.” He types “C UNF” into the computer and clicks “send.” “That’s ‘clear/unfounded.’ We get a lot of those around here. It’s a Hispanic neighborhood, and part of Mexico has a 911 area code. Sometimes they forget to dial the ‘001’ first, so they hang up.” He waits to see how she will react, but she’s too busy taking notes.

As work goes, it’s drudgery, but Brett puts the best face on it. He feels compelled to both entertain and impress. He gets most of the ride-alongs because of his reputation for being easygoing, but he wants to be more than that for Meredith. If I play my cards right, maybe I’ll get to show her my billy club at the end of the shift, he thinks with a barely suppressed grin.

She expresses interest in the mundane. The operation of the computer and what all the codes and responses mean. How he selects which call slip to answer. He allows a hint of pride to creep into his voice when telling her how he reads between the lines, discerning when a call should be assigned a higher priority than it seems to merit at first glance.

He elicits a laugh when he says, “Please don’t steal the police car,” before he goes to ticket a Hispanic teenager who ran a stop sign. The driver’s-license number triggers a warrant flag, so he confiscates the ignition key and returns to the cruiser to await confirmation from TCIC/NCIC.

“Seven minutes is the timer on a stop,” he says, typing a code into the computer. “I’m telling the dispatcher to restart the clock. Otherwise she’ll start sending messages or calling me over the radio to make sure I’m okay.” He twists in his seat to watch the occupants of the other car and make eye contact with Meredith at the same time. He has to be prepared in case the driver decides to run away. “Saturday usually starts out quiet like this and then picks up when the sun goes down. What’s your book about?”

She shrugs. “I don’t like discussing story ideas until they’re finished.”

“Have you published anything?”

“Some short stories. This is my first novel.”

He wants to ask more, but he knows so little about writing and books in general that he’s afraid to look stupid. Awkward silence fills the air between them, interrupted only by the garbled chatter on the radio, including frequent updates on the Astros game. Though it’s early October, it’s warm sitting in the car without the AC running.

When he notices her checking her watch after fifteen minutes, he decides to cut the driver loose with just the ticket rather than waiting for dispatch to respond. Priority-one queries, where the information determines whether or not someone will be arrested, are supposed to take less than ten minutes, but sometimes a request gets lost between the dispatcher and the person who keys it in. Thirty seconds after the other car drives off, the report comes back positive for two delinquent traffic tickets, so he flashes the lights, blasts the siren for a few seconds, and pulls the car over again, this time placing the driver under arrest. He turns the keys over to the passenger after ascertaining that he has no outstanding warrants.

Once he has the prisoner handcuffed and belted into the backseat, he says, “At least now you’ll get to see the jail.”

It takes nearly twenty minutes to drive to the Southeast Jail, where prisoners arrested on minor complaints are held. After they arrive, they have to wait another ten minutes for the garage door to open on the sally port, which is little more than a glorified parking garage with a few podiums. Here, the prisoner’s handcuffs are removed, he is frisked again, and a jail employee asks in a bored tone if he has any medical conditions or any forms of mental illness and if he’s ever attempted suicide. The guy is cooperative and untroubled by the process, which leads Brett to believe he’s been through this before.

Brett ushers Meredith into the small office behind the podiums, where he hands over his paperwork. The other officers waiting in line look her over approvingly and give him subtle thumbs-up signs or winks.

By the time they leave the sally port, it’s nearly six o’clock. Normally he’d have dinner with one of his buddies, but he called to cancel when Meredith was in the powder room at the jail. He doesn’t want to share her with anyone.

“Hungry?” he asks. “There’s a place up here I’ve been meaning to try out.”

“Sure. My treat.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s the least I can do. You must be getting tired of all my questions.”

“It’s good to have the company, to be honest.”

“On TV they always show the cops riding with partners.”

“If we weren’t so understaffed, maybe. You saw how many people were at roll call today? That was a big turnout for a Saturday. Usually we have two or three less than that. A couple of nights ago, there was a house fire, and another unit and I had to do traffic control. You should have seen the call slips piling up. I had nineteen when I got back to the car. Some of them had been holding for eight or nine hours from day shift.”

He wheels into the restaurant parking lot and escorts her into the dim interior. It’s a place where he knows he can get good food and quick service, two important factors to someone who could be called out at any moment. He likes the way she looks in the flicker of the candle on the table, and he takes the opportunity to discreetly appraise her while she studies the menu.

“This must be boring as hell for you,” he says. “Nothing like what you see on TV.”

“That’s exactly what I’m looking for. Reality, not drama.”

She focuses her attention on him, as if every word he says is gospel. Normally it’s the uniform that makes him feel noticed. Today, it’s being seen in the company of this beautiful woman. He wonders if it’s too soon to ask her to join him at a nightclub after he gets off shift. He usually goes out on Saturdays because he has Sundays off. Maybe he should work that into the conversation first.

“You’ll get a kick out of this,” he says after they give their orders. “A woman was chasing a sexual-assault suspect the other day in her car. She calls 911 and tells the call taker where they’re headed. Then she goes, ‘I’ve got a pistol and I’m going to shoot him… I’m getting ready to shoot him.’ It goes out on the radio, and the responding officer calls back in this deadpan voice, ‘Um, ask her to hold off on that.’” It’s a funny story, much older than he lets on and always good for a laugh. A burst of adrenaline rushes through his veins when she reacts as if it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard.

He tries to ask her questions, but she always turns the conversation back around to the job. Departmental hierarchy and the size of his beat, boring stuff like that, but if that’s what turns her crank, he’s only too happy to explain. He outlines the subtle but important difference between drawing his weapon – which he does occasionally – and actually pointing it at someone, which happens far less frequently. He admits that he has never fired his gun in the line of duty.

“I’m all for the Taser, as long as we can use it the way I feel it should be used. I shouldn’t have to fight anybody anymore, because when you do, you sprain or strain something. People complain when some perp dies after being zapped because he refused to follow orders, but they don’t want to pay officers injured on duty to sit at home because things got out of hand, you know?” It’s one of his pet rants, and he stops himself before he really gets rolling. She has a few questions about the way the Taser works, which he answers simply and directly before changing the subject.

After dinner, he responds to a noise complaint – a band playing outside a restaurant – investigates a missing sewer grating, and calls a wrecker to tow an abandoned vehicle, identified by a chalk mark he made on the left rear tire during the previous shift. The work is so mundane, he’s embarrassed. She’s probably not going to think much of the reality of the job when all she sees him doing is writing tickets and getting cars impounded. If she expected Cops, she must be terribly disappointed.

He scours the screen for something a little more adventurous, a little sexier. Normally when he has a ride-along, he picks calls that are unlikely to turn ugly. Now he wants something that might give him a chance to impress her.

“What’s that one?” She taps a coral-red fingernail on a new entry.

“Silent alarm on Westheimer.”

“Like a break-in or something?”

He can tell she’s intrigued by the way her breathing changes. Her right foot taps on the floor mat next to her burlap satchel.

Against his better judgment, he claims the call, knowing he could end up spending the rest of the night filling out paperwork instead of catching the perps in the act. He has a brief fantasy about Tasering a guy while Meredith watches in fawning adoration, after which she agrees to meet him at Numbers for a couple of drinks before sidling up next to him and suggesting in a steamy whisper that it’s time to go somewhere else. Somewhere private.

“No lights or siren?” she asks. She sounds disappointed.

“Don’t want to warn them we’re coming,” he says.

“Is another unit responding?”

“I’ll call for backup if I need it. After I check out the situation.”

“Do you get scared, answering calls like this?”

He considers lying but thinks the truth might impress her more. A chance to show his sensitive side. “I get scared every time I pull someone over for a traffic stop. You never know who’s behind the wheel, what their day’s been like. If they’ve just had a fight with their wife and are looking for someone to take it out on. Or if they’ve just robbed or killed someone and the only thing standing between them and freedom is me. I’ve got two rules for every shift.”

He pauses, waiting for her to ask what they are. When she does, he continues. “First, to go home in the same condition I was in when I came to work.”

“And the other?”

“Get a bite to eat sometime during the shift. That one doesn’t always work out.”

She laughs gently, tossing her long dark hair back. It’s a good moment. He’s about to broach the subject of nightclubs and drinks when he realizes they’re a block from the scene. He keys in the code to let dispatch know he’s on the scene and then focuses his attention on the surroundings. The address corresponds to a jewelry store squeezed between an antiques shop and a joint with a neon condom hanging out front.

The place is dark and looks empty. After wheeling around the corner to check the alley, he stops and uses the handle near his head to direct the spotlight at the back door. He’s about to get out to make sure it’s locked when a set of headlights materializes in his rearview mirror. His chest tightens when he considers the implications of a vehicle suddenly pinning him in.

Meredith bends over in her seat. Brett wonders if she saw something that alarmed her and is trying to get out of the way. Then he realizes that she’s fumbling in her canvas satchel, though he can’t imagine why.

He’s about to reach for the dispatch mike when she straightens up and points a Taser exactly like his own at him. The red panic button on the corner of his keyboard is only inches from his hand. If he could hit it, an alert would go out to dispatch and all units in the vicinity, and his car’s engine and computer would be disabled. The space between them is far less than the weapon’s twenty-five-foot range. Its skin-piercing twin prongs would cover the distance faster than he could move an inch. The tension in her trigger finger is obvious – she won’t hesitate to stun him. He shifts his gaze from her hand to her chestnut eyes, trying to comprehend what the hell is happening. How in a few seconds he went from thinking about asking her out on a date to staring down the business end of fifty thousand volts.

Two people arrive beside the car. They yank the door open, pull him out, and pin him to the ground in the filthy alley, next to a row of garbage cans and a stack of empty crates. He feels a tug at his belt. A moment later his own handcuffs ratchet around his wrists.

“Relax,” Meredith says as she emerges from the cruiser. “Rule number one. Don’t struggle, and you’ll go home in the same condition as when you came to work.”

A male voice speaks for the first time. “You all set?”

“Don’t worry. I know all the codes to enter, and I’ve set up a few voice files on the digital recorder to answer routine pages from dispatch. I’ll let you know if something comes up I can’t handle.”

The second male voice says, “Stay down if you know what’s good for you. Don’t try anything.”

Brett is too frustrated and angry to answer. He shakes his head to acknowledge the order while trying to figure out how to extricate himself from this mess. He feels his service revolver, radio, baton, and Taser being stripped from his side. Without his weapons, all he has are some training and a badge, neither of which will stop a bullet or a paralyzing jolt of electricity. His body armor is in the trunk. He wonders if he’ll get to turn it in at the depot for a new set like his sergeant ordered a few hours earlier.

Two sets of footsteps walk away from him. He turns his head far enough to see the dark figures disappear through the back door of the jewelry store. Another set of footsteps approaches from his left. He twists around to watch Meredith pull a crate from the stack and drop onto it. She has the Taser in a firm grip, though it isn’t pointed in his direction at the moment.

“I don’t understand,” he says. “People know who you are. The community-relations officer who set up your ride ran a background check on you.”

“He ran a background check on Meredith Knight. Getting into a police car for a ride-along isn’t exactly like breaking into Fort Knox. Or,” she says, with a nod toward the nearby building, “a jewelry store. We did the whole thing by e-mail, phone, and fax. He never met me. All I had to do was fill out some forms with fake information, fax them off to him, and that was it. No one even searched me at the police department.”

“How could you know they wouldn’t?”

“It’s not my first ride-along. Just my first at your station. My first as Meredith Knight.”

Brett closes his eyes. “Seems like a lot of effort for a burglary.”

“Well worth it, though,” she says. “The main problem was the alarm. We didn’t know how to disable it, so the next-best thing was to distract whoever responded. If I couldn’t persuade you to take the call, my associates would have ambushed whoever showed up – but that would limit their time inside. This way, we have a few extra minutes to get the safe open. Excuse me.”

She steps past him and leans into the cruiser to enter something on the keyboard. He knows what she’s typing. He explained it all to her in detail. Unless the dispatcher needs to get in touch with him about something unrelated or starts to wonder why it’s taking so long to investigate, the next people likely to arrive on the scene will be the owners, to clear the alarm. They won’t be of much help unless they notice something, and that’s only if they’re in town and get here before the thieves take off. For all he knows, they’re at Minute Maid Park, watching the Astros game.

He still can’t believe the lengths to which they’ve gone for a robbery. Later tonight, after they let him go, he’ll sit down with the police artist and describe her so well that strangers will recognize her on the street. They’ll have video of her too, from police headquarters and the jail. Her picture will be all over the six o’clock news tomorrow, regardless of how this turns out for him.

“You look lost in thought,” she says, startling him. She’s on the crate again, cradling the Taser in her lap.

His approach when interrogating people at a scene is to always let the suspects think they’re winning. In this situation, at this moment, they are. All he wants to do is get through the night alive and with a minimum of humiliation. Losing his service revolver has been the biggest blow so far.

“I’m in a bad spot here.”

“Not if you stay cool,” she says. “Fifteen, twenty minutes, this will be all over. We’ll be on our way, and you’ll never see us again.”

“This must be some haul.”

“You have no idea. We’ve been planning it for two months.”

He tries to decide how much to say. He doesn’t want to give them any helpful information, but he also doesn’t want the volatile situation to get any worse.

“If you’re worried about the owners showing up,” she says, “don’t be. They’re tied up at the moment.”

Brett thinks she expects him to grin at the joke, but he doesn’t. He curses himself for being so entranced by her that he overlooked the possibility that she might have some ulterior motive. Writing a novel. As if.

Her cell phone chirps. She flips it open and glances at the display. Brett deduces that she’s speaking with her collaborators inside the building.

“Not long now,” she says in a chatty tone after she disconnects, as if they’re waiting for a pizza to arrive. “You probably don’t want to go out with me after this, right?”

“Huh?”

“You’ve been working up the courage to ask me out all afternoon.”

“You’re nuts.”

“A woman knows,” she says. “Under different circumstances, I might have said yes.”

“Fuck you,” he says. He’s in no mood for her banter anymore. Still, no matter how angry he is with her for setting him up, he’s more pissed off at himself for allowing it to happen.

“Yeah, and the horse I rode in on, I know. There, there.” She checks her watch. “Oops, almost missed the deadline.” She returns to the cruiser and resets the timer.

Brett releases a lungful of air and wiggles his hips to find a more comfortable position. Even without his weapons, his belt has enough pouches and compartments to make it awkward, especially lying on the ground in the paved alley.

“This is the point in the story where you’re supposed to ask me to explain everything,” she says once she’s back on the crate again. “Where I reveal all our secrets before the cavalry arrives to save the day.”

“I don’t read much,” he admits. “And you seem to have taken care of the cavalry.”

“You’re not happy with me.”

He can’t remember being madder in his life. Even his ex-wife never managed to get under his skin like this woman has in the past few hours. “No shit,” he says.

“Your very own femme fatale.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I can see the news tomorrow. Maybe they’ll come up with a nickname for me, like the Ice Princess, in honor of all the diamonds we’re stealing. That would be a good one. Feel free to use it.”

“How many diamonds are we talking about? Out of curiosity.”

“Let’s just say I’ll never have to work retail again. Are those dollar signs I see in your eyes? Looking for a cut?”

He turns his head away. More than anything, he hates the way she seems intent on taunting him. On humiliating him. It can’t be personal, because she couldn’t have known in advance that he’d be assigned to her for the afternoon. Unless it’s because of the way he acted toward her during the shift…

“I went out of my way to be nice to you,” he says. Even to his own ears, his voice sounds bitter and petulant.

“Yes, you did,” she says. “You were very sweet.”

Her phone rings again. She looks around the alley. After a car passes, she says, “All clear.” A moment later, her accomplices emerge from the rear of the store. They stay in the shadows, so he never gets a good look at them other than to note that one is about five-six, a hundred fifty pounds, and the other is closer to six feet, two hundred pounds. Caucasian, he thinks, but can’t be sure. He files these details away for later, but he knows he couldn’t pick them out of a lineup or from mug shots.

The black pouch the taller man tosses to Meredith seems absurdly small. It has golden tie cords at the neck. From the way she presses her face against it, he figures it’s made of velvet or satin. She tugs the neck open and sticks her hand inside, allowing the contents to filter through her fingers. Then she reseals the bag and tosses it back to the tall man.

After resetting the dispatch timer one last time, Meredith kneels on the ground beside Brett. “If we had a little longer, I’d show you,” she says. “So you’d understand.”

He doesn’t want to look at her, but he knows this is probably the last time he’ll see her, and he wants to remember her this way, framed in the amber light of a nearby streetlight, her features distorted by shadows.

“And you would,” she continues. “One glance, and they’d steal your heart away.”

He shakes his head, but he wonders if what she says is true. Look how easily she stole his heart.

She plucks the keys to his handcuffs from his front pants pocket. The brief contact is shockingly intimate and unexpectedly arousing. She grins. He knows that she sensed his reaction, but she says nothing.

“I’ll leave these over here,” she says, placing the keys on the ground in front of the trash bins. “Your gun and everything else are on the front seat. We have no need for them where we’re going, and I know how much paperwork you’d have to fill out if you lost your gun.” She winks at him. “You see, I’ve done my research. Maybe I will write a novel someday.”

The two men take the front seat of their car. After Meredith opens the rear door, she watches him for a moment. He strains his neck to look up at her, to meet her gaze.

“Tonight you’ll go home in the same condition as when you arrived at work. Maybe even a little better. It’s up to you.”

With that, she slides into the car and closes the door. A moment later, they’re gone, blending into the Saturday night traffic on Westheimer.

Better? he wonders. What did she mean by that? He struggles to his feet, lurches toward the trash cans on numb legs, kneels, and picks up the handcuff key. Fumbling blindly behind his back, he finally manages to insert the key into the lock, and his hands are free. The next step is obvious but degrading. In succinct, professional language, he describes his location and the vehicle and its occupants to his dispatcher. He even has the license number to give them.

A few minutes later, the first cruiser arrives on the scene. The Investigative Division isn’t far behind. They seal off the alley with crime-scene tape and make their way inside the jewelry store. Brett tells his story to one detective and again a few minutes later to another. His vehicle is part of the crime scene, so he can’t touch it. He rocks his weight from foot to foot and pulls out his cell phone but can’t think who to call. Which friend to share his humiliation with.

He puts the phone away and thrusts his hands into his pockets. Something sharp digs into the back of his right hand. It doesn’t feel like his handcuff key. He gets up and strolls to the end of the alley, which is cordoned off with a yellow ribbon of crime-scene tape.

After ascertaining that no one is paying attention to him, he pulls the item from his pocket. It gleams in the yellow streetlight, a little piece of carbon as cold as fire and as hard as the heart of the woman who placed it there.