Enemy within

11

The choir members at Zion Baptist were dressed in blood-red robes with white collars, and they were singing "I'm Glad Salvation Is Free." Karp sat in a rear pew, not sharing the gladness at all, about as moved by the music and fervor as one of the square pillars that held up the vault of the roof. Karp had a tin ear and no faith in anything but the law and, on good days, love. For most of his life he had placed religious leaders in the same class as people who sold damp lots in Florida over the phone. This opinion had been modified somewhat by his daughter, whom he loved dearly, and who was devout and no fool, so there might be something in it after all, although not for him personally. His daughter said that there was a God gene-some people had it and others did not. His wife, according to his daughter, did not, although she went to church regularly. Or had.

Karp had not had much to do with his wife since she got rich. Marlene had always had, he supposed, a few loose toys in the attic, and at times in their twenty-year relationship she'd done things that had made him angry, such as risking her life and risking the lives of the kids; shooting people; skirting the law; breaking the law; grabbing the law, throwing it to the ground, and stomping all over it while laughing… but these had all been Marlenesque excesses, arising from the woman's peculiar sense of justice. He could understand it, even where he did not approve. This business with the money though…

He checked his watch discreetly. McBright had probably wanted to make a point by dragging him through this, but, if so, Karp had gotten it in the first half hour. He looked around at the flock. Everyone was beautifully dressed, the men in suits, the women in bright dresses that seemed to include more than the usual amount of cloth, the children brightly decorated like Easter eggs. Capes and shawls were fashionable here, and nearly every woman was wearing a hat. The only people not so attired were a small group of European and Japanese tourists crammed into one section of the balcony, observing the primitive but fascinating religious rites of the Americans. Time passed; now a soloist, backed by organ and choir, was well into "Take My Hand, Precious Lord." Karp sighed and shifted in his seat and looked at his watch again. It was still the old, beat-up gold Hamilton he had worn since law school. The Rolex Oyster with diamonds she had bought him-the kind of thing only a dope dealer or his father would wear-remained in the drawer. Lucy didn't wear hers either, and Karp rather suspected she had hocked it to fund some charitable enterprise.

The choir stopped singing, and the pastor rose to stand behind the podium. Many clergymen in New York bear the title of reverend, of course, but when people said "the Reverend" in a certain tone, they meant this particular one. He was massive, cocoa-colored, broad of brow, heavy of jaw, bristly of mustache, and wavy of hair, and he had a great, deep, growling voice. His theme this morning was youth, African-American youth in particular. These youth were in trouble: babies having babies, drugs, gangs, gangster music, no jobs, no religion. Why had this situation come about? The Reverend didn't say outright. He cast broad hints, though. There were forces that did not want African-American people to advance, and these forces were in cowardly fashion targeting black children. But, he declared ringingly, we can fight racism. (Cries of approval.) We can fight prejudice. (Again.) But when the forces of so-called law and order, the representatives of privilege, start murdering our young men with impunity, that's different. (Angry shouts of agreement.) And he went on to describe one version of the death of Desmondo Ramsey, in which Ramsey had innocently approached a wealthy white woman, and she had shot him down just like those Alabama sheriffs used to, and the authorities were just going to give her a pass on it. Is that right? (No, no!) He touched on Benson, railroaded for a crime he didn't commit because they had a rich Jew killed and they needed a black boy to throw to the wolves. (Angry cries.) Then there were these homeless getting killed in their sleep-all black men or Hispanic men. The police said there was no racial angle. No racial angle? Stand on your head, anyone who believes that. (Laughter, calls of "Tell it!" and "Right on!")

Then, somewhat to Karp's surprise, the Reverend took up the tale of Cisco Lomax. Cisco, he said, was a local child. His mother was right here today. Cisco was not an angel. He had a record. White men had poisoned him with their dope. He had stolen and been punished for it. But he had a woman and children he was caring for, unlike so many others. He was getting his life turned around. And he was shot down like a dog on the highway, by a white cop who didn't even get a slap on the wrist. Is that justice? They said he tried to run down the cop with his car, and they had to shoot him. They had to shoot him ten times, ten times! In the back!

Here Karp, who had been allowing the sermon to glide past him until now, snapped to attention. As the Reverend ran through the changes on this bit of fact, in the skillful, ironic manner for which he was known, with the congregation following him heartily with the traditional responses, Karp had little trouble figuring out who had leaked it, for it had to be a leak. As far as he knew, only a limited number of people knew the location and number of Lomax's wounds. The autopsy details had, significantly, not been presented to the grand jury. Interesting, and almost as interesting, come to think of it, was that depiction of the Ramsey-Marshak confrontation, and the detail about the watch. An even smaller number of people knew about the watch. Karp found that since he had become a leaker himself, he was much more interested in fellow leakers, and in whether they were malign scumbags like Fuller or good guys doing bad things out of necessity, like him. He hoped.

The Reverend finished his sermon with a roaring peroration, during which no one in the cavernous place could have entertained any doubts that African-Americans were in a bad way; that the white power structure liked it like that; that they were virtually lynching black kids again; that we were not going to sit down for stuff like that; and that with the help of Jesus, the eternal judge, we would see justice done in the end.

There was more music after that. Karp expressed the body language of boredom and got a number of not-terribly-Christian looks from his neighbors. When the service concluded, he lounged by a pillar and let the crowds flow past him. Someone touched his elbow. He turned and found he was looking into the face of Lucius McBright. They shook hands. McBright had a powerful grip, powerful enough that he did not have to show it off. Karp recalled that the man had been, of all things, a boxer in his youth, and a Golden Gloves contender, or maybe an actual champion, he couldn't recall which.

"You have a car?" McBright asked.

"No, I came by cab."

"Up to Harlem? Lucky man. Come on, we can go in my car, we'll get us some breakfast."

Karp followed him out of the church, McBright stopping to chat with the Reverend at the doorway. He introduced Karp, who got a formal nod and no offer to shake hands. McBright was about Karp's age and had put on some pounds since his light-heavyweight days, but he was still an impressive-looking man, five inches shorter than Karp but broader across the shoulders. He wore round, rimless glasses and a short, natural haircut and had on a beautifully tailored, navy, pin-striped, double-breasted suit. His color was coffee with two creams, and his eyes were a surprising shade of hazel.

McBright drove a silver Chrysler Concord Lxi. They got in and drove up St. Nicholas. A sunny day, blue sky, little fleecy clouds showing above the apartment houses, God's golden Sunday light over battered Harlem.

"Like the sermon?"

"I thought it was inspiring," said Karp. "The Reverend is a great public speaker."

"I'll tell him you said so. It'll make his day."

"And besides the inspiration, I was also impressed by the information. He revealed a number of things that are not generally known."

"The Reverend has a lot of friends," said McBright in a tone that closed the discussion, and he shifted the conversation to Collins, whom they both agreed was a fine young man, and then to basketball, and they talked about the teams in the Final Four for the rest of the drive.

At 145th Street they parked and walked a short distance to a large restaurant. Called Suellen's, it was clearly the place to go after church for Harlem's gratin. Karp spotted a congressman, a university chancellor, and a major narcotics dealer, although not at the same table. McBright was obviously well known in the place, and they were seated immediately, but it took them a while to get to their seats, as McBright stopped along the way to chat with the occupants of several tables. Karp was the invisible man here, which was rather the point, he thought. He didn't feel as uncomfortable as McBright probably thought he was feeling, having spent many hours of his youthful athletic career in milieus in which he was the only, or nearly the only, whitey.

They sat; a venerable waiter brought coffee and a basket of sweet rolls. McBright pointed to these. "Don't start on them. They sold those on the street, fools forget all about crack cocaine." He took one. Karp did, too, and they were indeed marvelous, as was the coffee.

McBright sat back, chewing, and made a gesture with his hand. "Your meeting, boss."

Karp had the feeling of setting out on one of those rope bridges in action movies. This meeting seemed like the worst idea he had ever had, and it had a lot of competition in that league. But thinking this made him laugh, and he admitted it to McBright. "Yeah, well, this seemed like a great idea when I thought it up, but now…? The thing is, Jack Keegan doesn't know I'm doing this, and if he did, he would fire me, without hesitation. He would regard it as a betrayal."

"Isn't it? Maybe you think I'm going to win, and you're currying favor."

"Obviously, you don't really think that, and Collins doesn't think that, or neither of you would have participated in this meeting. But if we're going to probe each other's sincerity, we might as well just eat sweet rolls and talk basketball." A little eye-wrestling here, ending with a wry grin from McBright. Karp continued, "I read that speech you gave at the Urban League. I thought it was a good speech. I thought you were right on principle and wrong on the DA. We don't have a racial bias that I've been able to see. It's not part of the culture."

"Yes, well, we disagree on that. Was that your point?"

"No, my point is that injecting the race question into a DA campaign is the wrong thing to do. Even if it helps you win, it's still the wrong thing to do because you will win upon a basis that will make it difficult or impossible to run the office. The power of a DA is just different from the power of a mayor or a governor. You introduce ethnic politics into it, you're going to call for an equal but opposite response from Jack, and there are plenty of people happy to encourage him to do that. And then you have something real ugly. I don't want to see that."

McBright was looking at him incredulously, a bemused smile on his lips. "You're advising me on my campaign?"

"I'm giving you my take on what's going to happen."

McBright laughed. "I can't believe this. Nobody is that naive."

"Actually, I am. I'm a total loss when it comes to politics. I'm always doing the wrong thing. When I was a kid just starting out in the DA, we had Phil Garrahy in there, and when I knew him, he was old and sick, and he was undecided on whether he wanted to run again. Keegan was homicide chief then, and he thought he had a lock on the job, if Garrahy declined, and I took it upon myself to convince Mr. Garrahy that he should run, and he did, and won, and he died seven months later, and the governor appointed a complete asshole into the job. That was my first foray into electoral politics, and this is my second. Just so you know I have a track record."

A chuckle this time. McBright seemed genuinely amused. "Okay, I take your point. I'll consider it."

The waiter hovered. McBright asked, "You want to order?" and Karp said, "I'm fine with coffee and rolls. I'm not a breakfast guy."

"I am." McBright ordered steak and eggs with grits, then the waiter glided off. "So, was that it?"

"No. I also wanted to say that we have three major cases with racial overtones, Benson, Lomax, and Marshak. In my opinion, all three of them are flawed."

"I rest my case."

"No, because I am on them, and I will fix them. Now, I am not going to insult your intelligence by claiming that if the three gentlemen of color in question had been solid citizens, they would be in just as much trouble, or dead. They were not solid, they all had some kind of sheet on them, plus Ramsey was homeless, and cops are lazy. Show them something that quacks and waddles and they'll say it's a duck, never mind if it's the right duck. If you want to get into an argument about why black kids get introduced into the criminal justice system at about nine times the rate that white kids do, then fine, but leave the DA out of it. That's not the first, or even the fifth, place you should look, and the proof of it is me sitting right here."

"And you're a big racist."

"That's right, I'm a big racist. Everyone else in the office is way to the left of me."

"Since they got rid of Hrcany, anyway."

"Roland wasn't much of a racist, if by racist you mean someone who does bad things to people because they're the wrong color. I never saw him do that, and I worked with him for nearly twenty years. I'll give you that he had a mouth on him, and when he had something nasty to say, which was often, he touched on all the characteristics of the target, including the unmentionable ones. I talked to him about it a million times, but it didn't penetrate. But you could also say that the Reverend Jackson was a racist because he once said that when he heard footsteps behind him at night and he turned around and he saw it was a white guy, he felt a rush of relief."

"And was ashamed of it, don't forget that part. Well, we could chat about race relations and who's the biggest bigot all day, but why don't we just turn to the last page? Why should I believe you? I mean you are from the enemy camp."

Karp sighed in frustration. "Oh, for crying out loud, McBright! I know, and you must know that I know, that young Collins has been leaking you everything that's been going on in the DA since day one, and you've been leaking tidbits to the Reverend for amplification. You have to know I'm telling the truth, unless Collins is making stuff up, and I kind of doubt that. As far as loyalty goes, I'm not a camp guy. Ask Collins. I'm loyal to Jack in the sense that I'm not about to betray any confidences or weaknesses of his to you or anyone else, but my primary, no my only, loyalty is to the office and what it's supposed to stand for, my idea of it. Let's say I'm loyal to the better angels of Jack Keegan's nature, and not to other kinds."

McBright shook his head. "You're a piece of work, Karp. Don't put any of that shit on your job application."

"I don't need the work, man," said Karp sourly. "I have a rich wife."

Who at that moment was emerging from a nasty dream, in which haughty, black-clad store clerks wearing maroon lip-gloss insisted on removing her daughter's clothing in the main aisle of Calvin Klein, explaining that she was not creditworthy and refusing to look at any of Marlene's own credit cards. It's all right, Mom, said the dream daughter, you can't pay for this with money.

Marlene sat bolt upright in bed, her stomach churning, and shook her head violently. Which was a mistake. Something in her head had come loose and was bouncing around in there, causing terminal damage, or so it felt.

That's it, she thought, absolutely no more drinking. Hard liquor, a known poison, what could I have been thinking? No more. Wine only from now on. She got out of bed, did the bathroom, shuffled into the kitchen in her gorgeous robe, now a little rumpled and stained, for she spent a good deal more time in it than she had in any previous robe. The great mass of the Sunday Times lay strewn on the big kitchen table. Observing it, she concluded, after a small pause, that it was Sunday and she had missed church. Since the house was empty, she further concluded that her daughter had dressed and fed the boys and led them off to St. Pat's, thus demonstrating yet again her moral superiority over her mom. They must have walked.

Her husband was not at home either. The dog was at home, and now he came wagging in, looking particularly lugubrious, to rest his massive head on her knee, the better to stain her pashmina anew with his copious slobber. She patted him absently and then, yielding to a pang of yet another addiction, she rose, loaded up the Gaggia, made herself a double shot of espresso, and burnt a couple of pieces of toast umber. The coffee and the charcoal would absorb the poisons, she calculated, and she swallowed four Advil in case that didn't work. She sat again and waited for the dizziness to cease. The dog made his three circles and collapsed at her feet, sighing.

"I am not having blackouts," she said to the dog conversationally. "Honestly, Sweets, I recall everything that occurred last night. We went to the opera. I bought a season because I always promised myself that if I got rich I would, and I did, and I took Butch because I bought him four season tickets at Yankee Stadium, and it's only fair. I remember he was acting peculiar, like distant. I wore the crystal coat and the Molinari sequined silk with the sleeves. It was Turandot, the opera, I remember that all right. With Casolla, Larin, and Frittoli. Butch fell asleep, which I guess is par, and this woman came up to me in the intermission… Binky? Bootie? And I said I didn't remember her from this speech I gave once at the Coalition Against Violence, which I didn't, but I said I did, and she invited us to a party over on the East Side, Seventy-something off Park, and we went and…" She stopped. The dog sighed again.

"No, wait a second, Sweets," she said and started again. "We went to this party, a big town house, and there was a bar, of course, and I think I was drinking champagne, which was fine because, really, you can't get very drunk on champers. It's only wine. But then later… we went someplace else, a saloon, and I was drinking brandy Alexanders, which, they're practically a dessert, not really drinking, and… no, I didn't get thrown out for throwing a drink…" An image popped into her mind, looking up, the tops of buildings whirling around, and the whitish night sky you get on a cloudy night in the city, as if she was looking up at it from the ground. The coat!

She leaped up and ran into the bedroom, threw open the closet. There was the coat, hanging there, and she saw a big streak of city gutter grease down the back of it and hundreds of tiny crystals torn off the hem. How awful, she thought, but only vaguely. The emotion did not bite deep. For some reason she was not attached to this costly possession. In truth, she was hardly attached to anything much anymore. She shrugged and closed the closet and went back to her coffee. What she really wanted, actually, was some Irish coffee with lots of whipped cream, and so she made a pot of drip with the espresso grind and whipped up a bowl of cream, pausing to admire the cleanliness and order of her refrigerator. A little man now had the food order and took care of all that, and a number of other little men and women now took care of other things: cleaning, the children, the dog, transporting physical objects to and fro. Ms. Lipopo at the bank apparently knew, or knew people who knew, an apparently limitless supply of people who made life in the city a delight of ease and comfort for those with enough money. Which had, of course, formerly included Marlene, but not now. There were even people who shopped for you, should you be blessed with funds and not with taste, but Marlene didn't have any of those because she liked shopping now, loved it, in fact: it was what she did, although she would have to get back to the office sometime. Yes, after she'd had a rest, everyone said she deserved one. She made the Irish coffee in one of the big ceramic mugs because, with those little whiskey-sour glasses that restaurants served the drink in, you hardly had time to taste it before it was gone. She filled the mug halfway with powerful coffee, poured in a lot of John Jameson, and dolloped out the whipped cream. A little shaved chocolate on the top. Perfect.

As was the next one. She sat in front of the TV and drank it, sipping slowly, inhaling the lovely fumes of Irish and coffee and cream. She surfed through the cable fare until she found Life Styles of the Rich and Famous and watched that for a while and entertained the idea that she herself was now rich and famous. She could have one of those houses, too. It would take so much time to fill one of them with art and furniture, and when you were done, you could do it all over again, as the woman who was being profiled obviously liked doing. Using up time had recently become extremely important to her. Odd, because she could recall never having enough time. Marlene watched avidly and on the first commercial break made herself another Irish coffee, omitting the whipped cream this time. Terrible for the arteries, that whipped cream! Then she watched a quiz show, then the shopping channel, keeping the Irish coffee flowing, although, to be honest, there was really no point in making more coffee-why jangle the nerves? So she just sloshed the Jameson into the mug. Life was good, she thought, good and getting better. She called the dog over, who licked up various spills and washed her face with his tongue. "Yes, you still love me, don't you?" she crooned. "Don't you? Yes, you do. Unlike some people."

Meanwhile, deep below where this Nouveau Marlene lived, down one of those damp stone staircases that exist in even the best-ordered minds, through dripping, dark, torchlit passageways, past spiked and barred gates, in a little low cell full of rustling vermin, True Marlene sat and wept. She knew she deserved this punishment, she was not complaining. People had died, people had suffered because of her stupidity, sloppiness, pride, and arrogance. Her vicious, sick lust for violence. Oh, she had evaded it for a long time, but it had finally caught up with her, more than a hot bath and a little drinking and a nice fuck could cure, far more. Those corpses in the Daumier, Wayne blowing bubbles through his nipple, that final fountain of blood and brains, arcing up, splattering off the ceiling, falling like a rain from hell on her head. Where it belonged. Get over it, say the people who haven't been there, even Butch hadn't been there. Get over it, easy for him to say. Lucy had been there, a little, but Lucy had God talking to her, Lucy was not available. God didn't talk to Marlene anymore, and she was damned if she was going to beg. She would be damned. Post-traumatic shock was the approved phrase nowadays, a curiously sterile, medicalized bit of nonsense. She's had a shock. Stupid! Not a shock; a shock was when you touch a hot wire-some sparks, some pain, and that was it-not like this, this erosion of the human, this imprisonment. She wept because she missed Butch, and her babies, and the brave boys and girls who guarded the stinking rich, and the life of the little pleasures of frugality, and action, too, the rush of it, and the intense, barbaric pleasure of seeing the bad guys in the dust. At some level, she still hoped for release, that the prince would come and rescue her from the dungeon. Or the princess. But herself, right now, she could do nothing.

"Why do you do that?" Grale asked.

"What?"

"That little pause when you go out a door. When I'm behind you, like just now, I have to watch myself so I don't step on you."

The doorway in question was the entrance to a convenience store on Tenth off Forty-third. It was owned by a pair of Dominican brothers named Santomas, and you could buy there the usual things convenience stores sold in that neighborhood-overpriced groceries, doubtful fruit, beer, sweet wines, lottery tickets-and you could also get at this particular one a wide variety of illicit pharmaceuticals, other than heroin and crack. The Santomas boys, decent fellows, drew the line at those, although they would cheerfully sell you Dilaudid, Percodan, Benzedrine, Darvon, Dexedrine, and Fiorinal, besides ecstasy and LSD. They considered themselves discount ethical pharmacists, like Dart, but without the bothersome paperwork. Lucy and Grale were not there to buy, but to inquire about Canman, a regular customer there for setups, a cocktail of uppers and downers he favored. But the boys knew nothing, having not seen the Canman in several weeks, but they expressed their concern.

They were well away from that door when Lucy answered, "A habit. Something Tran taught me." A nervous laugh. "You know, checking for snipers in the street, people following. I was an impressionable child."

"This Vietcong guy you're always telling me about?"

"Ex-Vietcong. He was a Southerner. He spent twenty years fighting the French and us, and when the war was over, the Communists threw him in jail and tortured him. For a long time he was really my best friend. I mean among grown-ups."

"Gosh, should I be jealous?"

She blushed. "Are you a grown-up?" she asked lightly, but he seemed to take the question seriously. "I'm not sure," he said. "I think there's something childlike about a certain kind of religious personality, a lightness of spirit that you get in very secure and happy children. Sometimes you see it in the faces of old priests and nuns. Unlined faces, a sort of light comes out of them. You've seen that." She had. "Anyway, I think I'm that type, although with me it might be shallowness. Unlike you."

"What type am I?"

"The suffering type. We only come in the two flavors, Good Friday and Easter." He grinned at her. "You poor girl. You seem to be suffering more than usual lately."

"Oh, I'm all right," she began, and then laughed, a sound tinted more than a little with hysteria. "My life is coming unglued, is all. I'm getting kicked out of school, and I don't seem to be able to care about it. My mother… we came home from church today, me and my little brothers, and Mom was laid out on the couch, a classic scene, a bottle of booze in her fist, vomit. I got her stirred and she wanted to go shopping, she wanted to buy us stuff. I had to talk her out of calling her car and staggering out, and she screamed at me, which I don't mind, because she's always screaming at me about something, I mean lately. I sort of muscled her into bed and hung around until my dad got home."

"Yeah, drunks are the worst. My mom was one, too."

"She's not a drunk," Lucy snapped, and then sighed. "At least I don't think so. I mean she never was before, but they say the family is the last to cop. My father seems to be pretending that nothing's wrong, but you can see it's really tearing him up. And even besides that, he's worried about something, at work. He's in some kind of trouble, I don't know what. And I'm not helping, I know that. But I just don't feel very charitable. I want to run away from everything, school, the family, church… just disappear into the languages…"

And more in this vein, Lucy was building up to revealing some of her real secrets, stuff she hadn't ever told anyone. She was trying to trust him now, and it was an act of will, not unconsciousness, as it had been before, before she'd talked to the priest. They were walking slowly south on Tenth, heading toward Penn Station and the homeless congeries in its environs, in the hope that they would meet someone who had seen Canman recently, when Lucy suddenly realized that she had lost her audience. She felt a pang of intense embarrassment. I'm boring him, was her thought, oh, God, how stupid, laying all this shit on him… but he said, "There he is."

David pointed across the street, and she looked and saw the Canman, unmistakable, the billow of dirty-tanish rattails, the pale blob of the face against the black plastic bag he carried on one shoulder, the long army overcoat, the loping stride. He was heading north on Tenth on the other side of the avenue. They both froze, like hunters just spotting deer across a naked autumn wood, but he was deerlike, too, casting his eyes back and forth, occasionally snapping a glance over his free shoulder, and he spotted them through the sparse Sunday traffic. He turned and headed back the other way, trotting, his cans making clanging music. Grale dashed into the street, crying, "Hey, John! Canman! Wait up!" Lucy started to follow, but had to step back in deference to a honking cab. She heard the squeal of tires behind her and a full chorus of horns. A black sedan zoomed out from a parking space across from the Santomas bodega, cut heedless across six lanes, and shrieked to a stop in front of the fleeing Canman. Both front doors sprang open at once, and two men leaped out. Canman instantly reversed course, streaking north again, his overcoat flapping, pursued by the two men, the one in the lead white, the other black. Canman dodged around a truck, and as he did, he dumped the bag of cans. The white man stepped on one of them, skidded, fell. His partner sidestepped around him and chased Canman, who was now running full tilt up Tenth, in the roadway. The traffic slowed as drivers stopped to gape, and this gave Lucy a chance to cut across the road, and so she was able to see Grale standing in Canman's path, his arms out as if offering a hug. Maybe he really did want to hug the fleeing man, but what he got was a stiff-arm to the chest that knocked him back against a parked car. He rebounded just in time to trip up the black man pursuing, and they both went down in a sprawl. Lucy ran over to Grale, who was bleeding from a scraped chin, but before she could get to him, something slammed into her back, and she went facedown into the asphalt.

It knocked the wind out of her, and for a full minute she could think of nothing but drawing breath. When she was able to stagger to her feet, she saw that the black man had a handful of David's hair and one arm up behind his back in a hammerlock. He pounded David's face a couple of times against the hood of a car and then snapped handcuffs on his wrists. So they were cops. She stuffed a tissue against her bleeding nose and plucked at the man's sleeve.

"What are you doing?" she demanded. "He didn't do anything."

The man whirled around, his face set in a snarl, but when he saw her, he did a double take and said, "Police business, miss. Move along now!"

"But he didn't do anything!"

"Interfering with an officer, miss. I said move along!" He finished cuffing Grale and marched him back to the black sedan, with Lucy worrying at his heels. The cop tossed Grale into the backseat of the car, which Lucy now saw was an unmarked police vehicle. She tried to stick her head into the doorway of the car, but the cop grabbed her roughly and threw her back. He slammed the car door, and they were just standing there arguing when the other man came trotting up. His face was red, and his pale hair stuck sweat-soaked to his forehead. Lucy found it hard to look at his face, so ferocious was the expression of frustrated rage. Although taken feature by feature it was a handsome face, now it was peculiarly distorted, the eyes retreating into slits, the brow bulging over them, the teeth bared, the jaw muscles knotted. He almost seemed to have a muzzle.

"I fucking lost him," he said to the black cop. "I lost him!" He struck the trunk of the car with his fist, full strength, dimpling the metal but doing no apparent injury to his hand. He paced rapidly back and forth, fists clenching and releasing, while his partner waited calmly, like a lion trainer giving some beast the time to come around.

"Fucking guy is like smoke," said the white cop, and then he shook his head, "or maybe I'm losing it." He laughed, took a few deep breaths, and looked into the car.

"What's this?"

"Guy who tripped me. Looked like he knew the suspect."

"Well, of course, he knows him," said Lucy angrily. "We're church workers, we're both volunteers out of Holy Redeemer. We were trying to find Canman, and we did find him, and then you showed up and chased him away."

"Who're you?" asked the white cop. His face, while still blotched, had once again become the face of a human.

"My name is Lucy Karp. And that's David Grale in there. He's a Franciscan, for God's sake." Lucy saw the black cop whisper something into his partner's ear.

"You know where this Canman character hangs out?" the white cop asked her. "Where he's hiding?"

"Of course not. If we knew where he was, we wouldn't have been walking all over the city looking for him."

The white cop nodded. "Okay, sure, but you could see where we might've made an honest mistake. We've been staked out by that bodega for two days. The guy finally shows up, and you queer the collar. You got to expect we're going to react a little." He turned to his partner and made a gesture, and the black cop pulled Grale out of the car and took off the cuffs. He had a bib of blood down the front of his shirt, and his face was bruised and red-splattered.

"Are you okay, David?" she asked.

He smiled his dreamy smile and said, "I'm fine. Denied my martyrdom yet again."

Lucy turned angrily to confront the white cop and saw that he was staring at her.

"You're the kid who found his last victim, aren't you?" he asked.

"I found a victim, but I doubt very much that it was his."

"You do, huh? On what basis, can I ask?"

"I know him. He's weird, but he's not a killer."

"Really? You've got a lot of experience with killers?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. More than you have, probably."

She could see the anger start up again in the cop's face, and then vanish, like a small cloud that blocks the sun for an instant. He grinned wryly. "No kidding? But, unfortunately, we can't just take your word for it. The thing is, if your guy is innocent, his best move is to come forward, talk to us, and if he's solid on the facts and the evidence, then he can walk away, and God bless. The way it is now, we got fifty cops running around looking for a serial killer, and he's in the cross hairs. He could get hurt, which would be a shame. Assuming he's not the slasher. Also, you see him again, either of you, you better get on the phone and call the cops." He pointed a finger. "I mean it. Meanwhile, I'm sorry you got in the way of a pursuit, and you ought to get your accidental injuries looked at. You want us to call an ambulance?"

"No, but I want your names and shield numbers," said Lucy.

Again that little black cloud across his face. Then he grinned broadly and said, "Don't push your luck, girlie."

Without another word, both of them got into their car and drove off.