Powers of Arrest

Chapter Three

With an hour to spare before her meeting started, Cheryl Beth locked her car and began her walk across campus. It was the loveliest day she had seen this year, as mother nature felt the intoxicating sense of her power to give rebirth. A rainstorm had come through in the early morning and now the day was sunny and warm. She gloried in the bright green of the Ohio buckeyes, the sweetgums with their star-shaped leaves, the dense beech trees. A woodpecker was working on an oak, a scarlet crown on his head. Her mother had taught her to identify trees when she was a little girl. She had given her that, at least.

The morning fast-walks were important, Cheryl Beth knew. After she had turned forty, she could no longer keep weight off effortlessly. She was still an attractive woman, with light brown hair worn in a long shag cut and large brown eyes in a face that still held the too-young look that had often caused her to be underestimated. She smiled easily and men still noticed her. But she was trying to be healthier. Too many years as a nurse had taught her the senseless, incomprehensible ways our bodies could go wrong; no need to help the process along.

Her surroundings made such worries seem impossible. The surreal beauty of Miami University never failed to move her. It was like a college setting out of a novel, with stately brick buildings, a lush, precisely maintained campus, and the quaint town of Oxford. The sense of safety was overwhelming. What a change from the grittiness of the old hospital in Cincinnati. She started through the dogwood grove that would take her to the Formal Gardens. It was one of her favorite spots.

This was the first time in her career when she wasn’t practicing as an RN on a hospital staff. It felt strange to go to work as a teacher of nursing, not to be in scrubs but dressed up. She had worn scrubs for more than twenty years, working in the hardest jobs at the hospital that handled the toughest cases. She was known as the best pain management nurse in three states and wouldn’t dispute it. But she needed this break. She was a natural teacher, and the clinical part of the job still gave her hospital time.

She liked her students, even though their reputation at “J. Crew U.” was supposedly that of clueless privilege. Many were older, starting new careers. A few were her age, and quite a number were men. The clinical work in the hospital came naturally. She cared less for the nursing classes that were held in Middletown and Hamilton, the onetime industrial towns being so forlorn. So she appreciated the few times she actually got to teach on the main campus. Some days she thought about moving to Oxford and saving the drive from Cincinnati, but it was still early in this new work and she couldn’t shake her love of the city. Her black Audi A4, her one serious indulgence, made the trip easier.

Much of the time she missed the old hospital for all its flaws. She missed the patients, and especially her old coworkers and their mostly endearing eccentricities. The university had plenty of smart, pleasant people, but it was very politically correct. The old Redskins mascot had been changed to the Red Birds. The nursing faculty was highly capable, but she knew she could never make the dark jokes or have the irreverent fun with them that she so enjoyed with the staff at the hospital, things that had kept her sane.

As she came closer to the Formal Gardens, she saw the police cars. She had only seen so many in a single place one other time. The cars were from the campus police, Oxford Police and Butler County Sheriff, all crowded together, many with their lights flashing.

“I can’t let you go closer, Professor Wilson.”

A young man with close-cropped hair, wrap-around sunglasses, and uniform stood on the sidewalk. He was a campus officer she had become acquainted with when he helped her get a jump-start on her car back in the winter. He had all manner of things on his uniform belt besides his gun and handcuffs, and she couldn’t say what half of them did. “Professor Wilson” was still new to her, and she urged her students to call her Cheryl Beth. But this young man was one of those who couldn’t break the habit. Maybe saying “professor” made them feel as if they were getting their money’s worth.

“And you’re probably not going to tell me why.” She smiled and he reluctantly smiled back, shaking his head.

“You know how it is.” He slipped off his sunglasses. Over his shoulder, she saw some officers erecting a blue tarp beyond the circle of benches that stood at the heart of the Formal Gardens.

“Kind of ruining my walk,” she said, and instantly regretted it, not even knowing what tragedy was unfolding at the head of the long string of police cars. As if she herself hadn’t had enough dealings with the police to last a lifetime.

Then she saw his eyes.

“Are you all right, Jared?”

He stared at her and then looked at the ground. Even with the activity, it was quiet enough to hear birds singing. His eyes were red and his complexion had that greenish-gray tint of the nauseated, reminding her of when nursing students attended their first autopsy.

“It’s really bad,” he said. “Things like this don’t happen here.” He paused and kicked absently at the asphalt. “I was the first officer on the scene. Oh, my god…”

“You might want to get on your haunches and try to lower your head,” she said. “It might make you feel better.”

He remained standing. He whispered quickly. “I’ve never seen so much blood.”

“Dead?” she inquired, but her middle was already cold.

“Two girls.” He hesitated. “Somebody used a knife. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Oh, no.”

She saw another man walking toward them from the direction of the tarped-off area. He had sergeant’s stripes on his uniform and an unhappy expression.

“Be good to you, Jared.” She turned to leave.

Then she saw the movement out of her left peripheral vision.

It was a man, running and stumbling through the bushes at the foot of a stand of thick trees.

He was completely naked, and seemed to be wearing war paint. But Cheryl Beth had spent enough time in emergency rooms to know that it was dried blood caked on his hands, arms, and face.

“Stop! You, halt!” This command came from the uniformed group near the tarp. Now the sergeant and Jared focused on the man, who was running parallel to them twenty yards away. He was young and his face held a confused madness.

Both officers drew their weapons and ran toward him.

The naked man screamed, “Hostiles! Hostiles! I have wounded!”

Cheryl Beth watched the spectacle with a momentary, anesthetized detachment, unaware of the messenger bag over her shoulder.

Another cop in a different style uniform dashed straight toward the naked man and tackled him, driving him into the grass. He screamed and thrashed but was quickly surrounded as eight men and women in uniform converged on him. He struggled and moaned.

“Quit fighting!”

“Quit resisting!”

The commands came quickly and atop each other. But the naked man dragged himself on the wet grass underneath the cop who had initially tackled him, regained his footing, and ran. The cop tried to grab his ankle but missed and fell face-first onto the grass, taking two other officers down with him.

She knew this man.

It was Noah Smith, one of her nursing students. Grass and mud now mingled with the caked blood on his naked body. Across the grassy distance, their eyes connected, his were full of terror.

“Cheryl Beth! What are you doing here? Help me!”

A female officer used a black baton to strike him in the side of the ribs, the knees. Pain centers. He moaned but ducked past her. She reached for him but lost her balance, spun around, and fell backwards, her equipment belt rattling loudly.

He ran directly toward Cheryl Beth.

Part of her was alarmed, but another was clinical, amused as the Keystone Kops scene unfolded before her. The campus police, city cops and deputies, a dozen now, caught up and surrounded him.

“No, no! Help me!” He dashed toward one cop, then another. They closed the ring, leaving him no escape. Cheryl Beth was now terrified they would shoot him.

“Tase him,” the sergeant said and it was done. The naked young man snapped backwards and arched his back as surely as if he had been defibrillated. Then he lay still on the spring grass, face up.

They turned him over, handcuffed him, and dragged him toward a squad car, opened the back door, and shoved him inside horizontally, hands on his shoulders, legs, and feet. The door shut loudly.

Shock wobbled through her own body. What was Noah doing here, naked and covered in blood? He was a good student, quiet, friendly. Wasn’t that what people always said about serial killers after they were exposed?

“What happened?”

A co-ed asked Cheryl Beth the question, and she realized a crowd had gathered.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly.

“Do you know this man?”

It was the sergeant. He was a deputy sheriff, not one of the campus police officers. He had red hair and a wide, muscular body.

“He’s one of my students.”

“Here?”

Cheryl Beth nodded, and the sergeant wrote down the information, including her name and phone number in a small notebook.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Last week. He’s doing his clinical work.”

She stared at the squad car that held Noah.

“Someone should at least check his pulse.”

“We’ll take care of all that. Now you need to leave.” The sergeant then raised his voice. “You all need to move on. This is a crime scene.”

Cheryl Beth walked back the way she had come, her legs feeling weak and stringy, her mind wondering what had happened. She would read about it in the newspaper, but that would never tell the whole story. She actually knew a cop. But it had been a long time since she had seen him.

Chapter Four

“Pee-eye-pee-eye-oh!”

“What do you want, Dodds?”

Will Borders swung his body out of the bed with difficulty. The clock said 6:45. He thought about reaching for his cane and standing, then thought better of it. He already had the cell phone in one hand and his legs were feeling both tight and uncertain. He sat and listened to his old partner sing off-key.

“It’s a homicide, buddy.” His voice dropped into its normal roomy baritone.

“I kind of figured, since you’re a homicide detective.”

“Here in Over-the-Rhine, waiting on your white ass.”

“So? A homicide in Over-the-Rhine? I can record something later on the info line for the reporters, post it on the blog.”

“Not this time,” Dodds said. “A white man in a new Lexus with a blade sticking out of his chest. Two television news crews are already here, and we need our PIO on scene.”

Will muttered a profanity.

“Can’t be hard,” Dodds went on. “You’re living in the ghetto already.”

“All right, fifteen minutes.”

“Make it ten.” The line went dead.

Will took his seven a.m. Baclofen early, reached for his black steel cane, and stood. He knew the drill: Tight abdomen, stand with the interior muscles of his legs, and pull his shoulders back and down using his lats. It worked. The days when he could roll out of bed, shower, dress, and be at a crime scene in fifteen minutes were gone. But so were the days, after being discharged from the hospital, when dressing left him exhausted and in tears. Today he used the electric shaver, brushed his teeth, and combed his hair almost like a normal person. In the closet, he sat on a bench and dressed in a suit and tie with only moderate pain and discomfort. At least he could feel something below his waist. At least he was off the pain meds.

He had been dreaming before the phone woke him. He dreamed all the time now. The reason was easy to understand: his legs were twitching, keeping him from falling into a deep sleep. In this dream, he was interviewing for a job in Homicide again, or maybe it was for the first time. It wasn’t the real office, but a sleek, two-level workspace with Danish furniture and nobody he recognized. He was waiting to see Lieutenant Fassbinder. And waiting, and waiting, and then he had missed his interview. He always walked normally in his dreams and awoke filled with anxiety.

Now fully alert, he clipped his badge, holster, and extra cartridge magazines in his belt. In the holster was a Smith & Wesson M &P 40-caliber semiautomatic pistol. He was sweating from the effort by this time. The quads muscles in his right leg were already feeling the strain from the work. He stood again in front of the mirror and straightened his tie. Take away the cane and he almost looked normal: Six-feet-two inches, broad shoulders, and a full head of wavy hair. In better days, Cindy had nicknamed him “TDH” for tall, dark, and handsome. He certainly didn’t feel that way now. Working his way carefully down the stairs, he headed out. The upright Baldwin piano in the living room stood unused, silently judging him.

The dark blue unmarked Ford Crown Victoria with five antennas on the roof and emergency lights under the grille sat unmolested outside his townhouse on Liberty Hill. It was a stub of a street that marked the beginning of the rise of Prospect Hill, which was sometimes called Liberty Hill. Cincinnati could be confusing that way. The little street was a collection of nineteenth century homes, two and three stories, closely spaced and right up on the sidewalk, in various states of repair. Many, like Will’s, had been restored. Now he was glad that his was the only one that required only one step up to enter. A few doors up sat the three-story Pendleton House, with its light-blue mansard roof. It was a National Historic Landmark, having been owned by a senator who led reform of the federal civil service.

Being in only the municipal civil service and yet carrying a badge, Will had an informal deal with the neighborhood homeboys: they kept the car safe and he didn’t bother them. So far it had worked. Downtown glistened to the south. He made himself walk the way he would at the scene: an easy, if slow gait, the cane barely visible, the weakness in his left leg concealed. But he was conscious of every step. Every step was hard as hell. Don’t show it, he told himself for the thousandth time. Don’t show it.

The city of Cincinnati comprised fifty-two neighborhoods in a geography that began with the basin at the river landing and rose onto three-hundred-foot-high hills into which were tucked dozens of valleys, hillsides, and ravines. Each neighborhood had its own history, culture, and feel. But none was like Over-the-Rhine. With its narrow, snaky streets immediately north of downtown and dense rows of four- and five-story tenements and commercial buildings, it had once been the old German enclave. Its five square miles held America’s largest urban historic district, its jewel box of architectural styles mostly unscathed by massive teardowns or urban renewal. It also was the home to Music Hall, Washington Park, and the Findlay Market.

It was half time capsule to the nineteenth century and half slum. Most cops had no sentimental attachment to it. Yet Will liked the place.

A hundred years before, Over-the-Rhine held nearly fifty thousand people. Now, despite the rough-at-the-edges splendor of its buildings, the neighborhood was home to little more than ten percent of that population, and almost all were poor, uneducated, and black. The gentrification of the nineties had paused with the riots, but the place was so magnetic that yet another attempt at a Renaissance was under way on Main Street and elsewhere. The old Stenger’s Café, where he bought coffee for years, was being reborn as a wine shop. There was talk of connecting O.T.R. to downtown with a streetcar, but change came slowly to Cincinnati. Parts of it were amazing in their beauty, others scary even to the cops.

He turned onto Race Street and briefly flashed the vehicle’s emergency lights so a uniform would let him pass. The street was blocked and half a dozen marked and unmarked units were parked in front of a dingy little market that still had a faded Hudepohl beer sign hanging from a rusty overhead rod. It was one of the few places to shop here. Kroger kept threatening to close its small, run-down store over on Vine. It’s not as if this were a place with the demographics or incomes to attract retailers. It attracted plenty of yellow crime-scene tape, which was now being wrapped.

The buildings stood between the street and the low-hanging sun, shrouding the landscape in the half-dark of the hour before real morning. Dodds was standing on the curb with his hands on his hips. He was hard to miss: big as a door, shaved head, with a complexion like strong coffee, and always dressed to the nines. A hundred feet down the block were two television news vans.

Will stepped up on the curb, made his left leg crook up to catch the sidewalk, cheating by using his left hand to push off a car fender, and walked toward him, conscious of every bump and disfigurement of the sidewalk that might trip him.

“What have you got?”

“Thirty-one-year-old male, name Jeremy Snowden, address in Mount Lookout, sitting peacefully behind the wheel of his automobile enjoying this historic neighborhood.”

He followed Dodds, moving as fast as he could but still trailing behind. A silver four-door Lexus was parked directly in front of the little store. Race was a one-way street running toward downtown and the river, so the car was parked on the east side of the street with the driver’s door by the curb. A lithesome young man with dirty blond hair to his shoulders sat exactly as Dodds said. His eyes were open as if he were surprised by the commotion. His shirt was light blue sporting a Ralph Lauren Polo logo over the breast and a silver-handled knife was protruding from his chest at a ninety-degree angle. Will took it all in as the experienced homicide investigator he had once been, before the tumor and the hospital.

“Was the door open?” he asked.

“Closed but unlocked. Anonymous 911 call at 5:52 a.m. No witnesses, of course.”

Will looked around at the blank black faces watching them from windows and gritty doorways.

“How do you know his name?”

“Wallet.”

“So not a robbery?”

“Probably a robbery,” Dodds said. “The vic was making a purchase from Nubian pharmaceutical salesmen late last night and something went wrong, then they were scared off by something else and didn’t get the wallet.”

“Maybe.”

“You’re not on homicide anymore, Mister PIO.” Dodds gently stuck a cigar-sized finger in his chest at exactly the place where Jeremy Snowden had met his fate.

Will knew this too well. He was the public information officer. The PIO. His job was to walk over to the reporters and give them a statement that told them the basics of the crime, but not too much. Not the victim’s name, for next-of-kin would have to be notified. Not specific information about the crime, especially details the detectives wanted to hold back. Nothing that a clever defense lawyer could later use to undermine the case once they had a suspect. He’d be on the newscast with “Detective Will Borders” under his image as he relayed as little as possible.

At that moment, he saw a young woman ambling up the other side of the street. She saw him.

“Hello, Detective Will.”

“Can’t talk now, Tori,” he called. “You’ll have to go back and wait.”

Tori was Victoria Missett, a reporter for WCPO.

“Get that girl outta here,” Dodds commanded and a uniformed officer walked toward her, even though she was already retreating.

“Not that I wouldn’t do her,” he said. “Young enough. I’d teach her how to fuck. Speaking of which, have you called that nurse? Cheryl.”

“Cheryl Beth. And no.”

“Why not? You’re a free man. Divorced. God, wish I were free of my ball-and-chain. Twenty-two years of ball-and-chain.”

Will badly wanted to change the subject. He said, “I’ll tell Karla that and let her kick your black ass up and down the street.”

“Cheryl Beth’s a cutie. I’d do her.

“You want to do everyone.”

“Why don’t you call her?”

“Because I’m a cripple.”

“You have a serious confidence problem, partner. Nobody’s going to notice that cane. I bet you could use it as a kick-ass police baton.”

Will didn’t answer. Instead, he leaned in the open car door, shifting his body to rely even more on the cane. “Went right into his heart, right between the intercostal spaces.” The shirt showed little more than a trickle of blood. He had bled out inside his body. If the assailant had twisted and pulled out the blade, it would have released a torrent. Will went on, “That’s either major luck, or a lot more care than a random robber would take.”

“So here’s the statement you’re going to give the media. Quit doing my job.”

Will stood and faced Dodds. “That’s not a knife,” he said. “That’s a letter opener. Looks expensive. Maybe sterling silver. I think it’s Tiffany.”

Dodds almost pushed him aside to peer inside the car again. “God damn,” he said.

“Obviously a drug dealer of letters.”

“Whatever. He stole it. Makes a nice weapon, as you can see.”

“What’s that in the back seat.”

“You don’t give up.” Dodds shot him an annoyed glance, then bent into the car again. “Guitar case. So what? He looks like a hippie.

“There haven’t been any hippies for thirty years, Dodds.”

“This is Cincinnati, Borders.”

“Whatever. It’s not a guitar case. Too big. Cello.”

Dodds faced him. “Now how the hell… Oh, yeah, you were a music-fucking-minor in college, weren’t you? That was helpful in the career choice you made.”

“It helps me now.” Will wanted to sit down. His legs were aching and tired. All the muscles he was using to make the walking and standing look normal were stabbing at him. He pushed this aside. “It doesn’t take college to know a cello case.”

“You.” Dodds pointed to a uniform. “What’s your name?”

The young man gave it.

“Tim, I want you to go to the other side. Use these.” He handed the uni some latex gloves. “Open that back passenger door and pull out that case. And do it carefully.”

“Yes, sir,” the young cop squeaked. It was probably his first homicide.

When the cello case was out, Dodds had the uni place it on the trunk of the Lexus.

“You know what they call the color of this car? ‘Starfire Pearl.’ I want one.”

“Not on an honest cop’s salary,” Will said.

“There’s always overtime.” Dodds carefully undid the latches. The case was fiberglass, purple, and well worn. What was inside wasn’t.

“So Mister Music, it’s a cello. You’re right. Now, go get those fucking reporters out of here.”

Will stared at the instrument and didn’t speak for several seconds. “That’s a Domenico Montagnana.”

“So? Sounds like a baseball player from the Dominican Republic.”

“It’s one of the finest cellos in existence,” Will said, a tingle running across his chest. “Yo-Yo Ma plays one. I think he calls it Petunia.”

He stared at the fine wood, the intricate workmanship on the scroll at the top, the neck, and fingerboard. Dodds exhaled heavily. He knew what Will was going to say next.

“Maybe it was dumb luck this didn’t get stolen, like with his wallet. But this is no freshman at CCM.” The College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati.

Dodds stared at the ground.

“Music Hall is two blocks away,” Will added.

Dodds waved a finger in his face. “Now don’t try to make this some hoity-toity symphony thing, Mister President. You know as well as I do that most homicides are simple.”

Will smiled mischievously and walked back to his car.

Yes, most were simple. That’s why cops didn’t read murder mysteries or watch police television dramas: they made the business sound too interesting. In real life, the homicide beat was tedious, repetitive, and unexciting. Most victims knew their killers. Drugs were a big motive: A deal gone wrong, a mule stealing from a dealer, a small-time dealer ripping off a bigger supplier. Domestic violence was another common denominator. Husbands killed wives and their new boyfriends, and often finished the job with a bullet in their own mouths. Sometimes wives and girlfriends killed their men.

If a person turned up in a suspicious death, their lover was always the prime suspect, and that bias on the part of the detectives rarely turned out to be wrong. When couples didn’t fight about sex and jealousy, they fought about money. Sometimes a slap became a kick became a bullet. Cops themselves were no different. They offed their exes and then ate their guns. Cops also slept with a lot of other cops’ spouses or girlfriends or boyfriends, and then things went lethally bad.

Most victims and suspects came from the same socioeconomic class, and, in a city like Cincinnati, from the same race. Most were black, living in the poor and forgotten neighborhoods overrun by drugs and offering no jobs. The cops knew the suspects and victims already. In most cases, the homicide had been only a matter of time.

Hold-ups went wrong. Some kid with no impulse control wanted to play gangsta. He thought pulling the trigger was no different than what happens in a video game. Concepts like mortality, forever…forget it. It wasn’t wired in their brains these days. Try to get ahead of it and the ACLU and the ministers and all the do-gooders who never spent a night in the ghetto would be all over you. But the same things happened in the white-trash neighborhoods like Lower Price Hill. The really lurid stuff occurred out in the suburbs, but don’t try telling that to the average Cincinnatian.

Cops burned out of homicide. Not because of blood or gore or being outwitted by criminal masterminds. No, because of its monotony: The same easy suspects, the same filthy apartments, and same kinds of people doing the killing. The pressure from the brass to clear cases. And the paperwork. And that forever part, dead, gone completely… if they let themselves think about it too long.

The younger cops didn’t know much about real investigations because DNA solved everything, or so nearly everyone was convinced. The really gifted homicide investigators were mostly retired or close to it. Then, the endless time with the D.A. and in court, and a sentence that never seemed like justice. Traffic division was much the same but the stakes weren’t as high.

It’s not that serial killers weren’t out there or that some homicides weren’t true mysteries. It’s not even that criminal masterminds didn’t exist. A person could get away with it, if he was really careful, disciplined, and, especially, didn’t know the victim. But that wasn’t the day-in, day-out of working homicide.

The truth is, most murder is boring. Except when it’s not.

Chapter Five

The murders caused the campus to go on alert. Classes were canceled for the day, and that included Cheryl Beth’s meeting. Students were told to stay in their dorms, faculty to remain in their offices. Cheryl Beth’s office was at the Hamilton campus, so she walked into town, past the cordon of police at the university’s entrance, and ordered coffee at a bagel shop on High Street. An Enquirer was sitting on the table, and she absently thumbed through it. “Couple arrested after flagging down cop,” a headline on an inside page read.

It went on, “A couple who flagged down police to report that they had been robbed at gunpoint early Saturday evening got more than a sympathetic ear from a Cincinnati police officer. According to Detective Will Borders, Karole and Stephen Sweigert, both 27 and from Cleves, were arrested because the couple drove from Cleves to purchase drugs on McKeone Avenue with their three children in tow.” Cheryl Beth drummed her fingers on the newsprint and sipped the coffee, scalding the inside of her mouth. She popped the lid off to let it cool.

When her cell phone rang, it showed a number she didn’t recognize. She keyed it to voice mail and drank the coffee, re-reading the news article. In a moment, the message icon appeared and she listened to a male voice, exuding authority. The coffee lost its taste.

The voice identified itself as Detective Hank Brooks of the Oxford Police Department. He took the time to spell his last name. Would she please come to the station as soon as possible? He gave her the address and his number. “Please come to the station, ma’am,” he reiterated. As a nurse, she had been calling women ma’am for her entire career, and came from a small town where “sirring” and “ma’amming” were as expected as church attendance. But now when she heard it, she felt old. The pretty young woman behind the counter had called her that when she had poured the coffee. Ma’am. It was a vain thought, she knew. Hearing it from Detective Hank Brooks-B-r-o-o-k-s-rekindled the dread in her stomach.

She could carry it off well. A bystander would see a woman in a black pant suit, pleasant face, idly watching the street through the window, tapping her fingers on the newspaper, slowly sipping her coffee. Cheryl Beth locked all her crises deep inside. Her training had taught her to mask emotions when necessary, to do the job. That was the way to be effective, the way to help people. But inside, she could feel her stomach muscles trembling.

Two girls dead in the Formal Gardens, hidden by a blue tarp. One of her students arrested. A crime so lurid it made her friend, the campus cop, look as if he were going to vomit. She thought more about Noah Smith. He seemed dependable and smart. He was getting good grades. A nice guy. Good-looking with an easy smile-too young and too skinny for her tastes-but he seemed popular with the women in class. He made them laugh. But she didn’t know him. Did you really know anyone? She couldn’t say she really knew her own mother. The blackness of her drink stared back at her. She pushed it aside and stood to go.

The Oxford Police Department was a short walk, sitting beside the quaint city hall at High and Poplar streets with its pitched roof, small tower, and white columns in front. The flowerbeds were blooming violet and white. The station itself was simpler, a squat addition with two windows and a door facing the street. She walked through the door and asked for Detective Brooks. She started to sit, studying the department’s shoulder patch with its American flag and eagle, “Police, City of Oxford, State of Ohio, Est. 1810.”

“Ms. Wilson?”

A man stuck his head out of a doorway and beckoned her inside. He was short and solid, somewhere around forty, with wavy brown hair and a bushy moustache. His handgun stuck out from his sport coat when he shook her hand. Hank Brooks mostly looked her in the eye, but also he gave her an appraising once-over. Up close, she realized he was only a little taller than her five-feet-five-inches. He moved with nervous energy barely contained.

“Come back, please. Thanks for coming in so soon.”

She said something polite. Then, “Is Noah here? Is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” Brooks said, walking ahead of her down a hallway. “They’ve taken him to the Butler County jail.”

He led her into a room with a table and modern wheeled office chairs, upholstered in black. Bulletin boards and white boards lined the walls. She didn’t take the time to study their contents. He invited her to sit and left the door open.

“Did you know Noah Smith well?” Brooks asked. “How long did you know him?”

She told him all she knew. Noah was a third-year student, in her NSG 362 class, Nursing Care for Adults with Health Alterations. She typically team-taught with a woman with more academic experience. They made a good pair, Cheryl Beth bringing the real-world experience, leading the clinical part of the course that took place in the hospital. Noah was in his second semester with her.

“Was he moody? Did he have a temper?”

“Never that I saw.”

“Ever seem to be on drugs?”

Cheryl Beth shook her head. As a pain-management nurse, she was very good at spotting that kind of behavior, and Noah had never displayed it.

“What about with women? Was he hostile?”

“Not at all,” she said. “He got along well with the women students.”

“I guess that’s one reason to become a male nurse.” Brooks leaned back, stretched, and cradled the back of his head into his outstretched hands.

“We call them all nurses,” Cheryl Beth said. “It’s like not calling out gender differences between police officers.” That was the stress in her stomach talking. She tamped it down and smiled. “But, sure, men are still outnumbered by women in the program, and Noah is a good-looking guy.”

“Think that’s why he did it? To meet women?”

She couldn’t stop herself from making a face. “How about a personals ad in CityBeat? These students who have reached this level have worked very hard and they want to make nursing their career.”

He nodded, leaned forward, and opened a beaten-up brown portfolio. A yellow legal pad was filled with handwriting in blue ink. He flipped the page and began making new notes. Outside the door, she saw police officers walk past but the station seemed oddly quiet.

“What about you?”

She felt the sudden defensiveness of a driver going the speed limit who sees a patrol car behind her. “What about me?”

“You’re new to Miami.”

So he had checked on her. She wondered why.

“I was at Cincinnati Memorial Hospital. When it closed, I decided to try something new.”

“You’re not from Ohio, not with that accent.”

“Where I come from, it’s not considered an accent.” All those years in Cincinnati and she couldn’t get Kentucky out of her voice.

“So you’re what, an adjunct?”

She nodded. The money wasn’t great, but she had some saved and had welcomed the change of teaching. She could get a new nursing position again any time.

“No tenure,” he sighed. “That’s why they call those jobs, ad-junk.” He didn’t smile. “That was where they had those murders. Cincinnati Memorial, right?”

“That’s right.”

He made more notes.

“Why did Noah Smith call out to you, Ms. Wilson? Do you prefer Ms., Mrs., Miss?”

She was fine with “Cheryl Beth,” but something about Detective Hank Brooks didn’t sit right with her.

“Miss is fine,” she said. “And I have no idea. I was standing there…”

“Why was that?”

“I was going for a morning walk to the Formal Gardens.” She worked to keep the irritation and anxiety out of her voice. “He saw me and recognized me. He asked for my help. He seemed afraid.”

“I might be afraid if I had murdered two girls and was caught napping at the crime scene with blood all over me, Cheryl.” He stared at her and stroked the edge of his moustache with his right index finger. His shoulders were a straight line of tension.

“Is that what happened? You found him there asleep?”

Brooks sat back straight and hesitated. She knew he had told her more than he had intended. But that only made her want to know more.

“The Formal Gardens seem like a pretty public place.” She looked at him evenly and let the silence fall between them.

Finally, “You don’t know the campus very well, do you, Cheryl?”

“My name is Cheryl Beth.”

She didn’t like him well enough to tell the story of how in the first grade, the teacher had been confronted with three girls named Cheryl, so she called them by their first and middle names: Cheryl Ann, Cheryl Sue, and Cheryl Beth, and how the name had stuck and she liked it. If she were back at the hospital, back in her position as pain nurse, she would have added: Are you trying to piss me off?

“Sure, okay, Cheryl Beth,” he said. “There are times of the day when parts of the campus can be very isolated. All the trees and shrubbery and open spaces. Even so more at night and in the early morning.”

“So the girls were killed overnight?”

“I can’t discuss the details,” he said, but she got the point: The killings had not occurred soon before she arrived.

“And Noah fell asleep in the bushes, naked?” she said. She raised her hands to calm him. “I know, you can’t tell me anything.”

“I can’t get over him calling to you and asking for your help.” He leaned forward on his elbows and stared at her. She looked back at him, wearing her pleasant face.

“That’s what happened. Actually, he seemed disoriented. I don’t really get your point, Detective Brooks.”

“This is a small-town department, but we’re not idiots, Cheryl Beth.”

“I didn’t say you were, Hank.”

He flipped back a yellow page of handwriting and studied it.

“I don’t think you told me where you’re from with that accent? Originally.”

“I didn’t tell you. Corbin, Kentucky.”

“Corbin, Kentucky,” he said, neutrally. “Never been there.”

“I haven’t lived there in twenty-five years.” She realized she was nervously playing with her hair. She forced her hands back to the top of the table.

“Noah Smith is from Corbin, Kentucky.”

“What?”

“That’s right, Cheryl Beth. And you’re telling me you don’t know him? Must be a pretty small town.”

Noah had never told her that. His accent was as Midwestern as most of her students.

Brooks persisted. “Want to tell me more, now?”

She took a deep breath but maintained her composure. “There’s nothing to tell, Hank. I don’t live in Corbin. I haven’t lived there in a very long time. I didn’t know he was from there. Lots of people named Smith in every town, probably even Oxford.”

She ran through her mental Rolodex. In fifth grade, she had a crush on Billy Smith. His family moved away. She knew Donna Smith all through school; Donna had brothers but none was named Noah. Joe Smith owned the filling station on Main Street before it was shut down. It was an impossible task.

“You still have family in Corbin?

She hesitated. “Yes, a brother.”

“Noah Smith doesn’t,” he said. “He claims he has no living relatives. Did you know that?”

She told him that she didn’t.

“He was a loner, I guess.” He leaned back and the chair gave a creak that seemed at odds with its newness. He started shaking his right leg.

“Kept to himself in class?”

“No, he was quite outgoing. He seemed normal.” She heard herself talking too fast. She slowed down and added: “I know that’s what people always say.” She smiled, the insincerity of it hurting her facial muscles.

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“He was never disruptive,” she said. “He never missed a class. He was good with his clinical work. Don’t tell me he has a record or something.”

“That doesn’t tell anything,” he said. “Lots of killers have never had a parking ticket.”

He wiggled in his seat, reached into a file, and slid two plastic bags onto the table. Each contained a small card. A driver’s license.

“Do you know these girls?”

The shock radiated down her legs. One license showed Holly Metzger. The other was Lauren Benish. She tried to keep her breathing even.

“Are they the ones who were killed?”

He nodded and stroked his moustache. If it were a little longer, he could play Simon Legree.

“My God.” Her hand went involuntarily to her mouth. “They were in my class.”

“With Noah Smith.”

“Yes.”

He pulled back the licenses and slid them back into the folder.

“I can’t believe it,” she said.

He swung the portfolio closed and slid his pen in his shirt pocket. He stared hard at her. “What I can’t understand is why he was calling for you out there. And you happened to be there.”

She stared back at him until he spoke again.

“The thing is, Cheryl Beth, he’s asking to see you.”

Chapter Six

The quick movement caught Will’s eye as he was crossing the wide expanse of Central Parkway headed into downtown. On the far corner, a man was down on the sidewalk. Another man, twice his size, was kicking him. Will instinctively hit the siren, a quick blurt, called for backup, and parked his unmarked car at the edge of the curb, partly blocking a traffic lane. The bumper was five feet from the fight. He swung himself out, pain and spasms clinching his strong right leg. He raised himself to his full height and used the car door and roof as support.

“Police, step back.”

The assailant was huge, with baggy black jeans and a dirty Reds cap. His pockets, embroidered with what looked like sequins, drooped nearly down to the backs of his knees. He looked over at Will and mouthed a profanity, again swinging his leg hard into the other man’s side. He was in his mid-twenties, wearing heavy black boots, with thick toes and heels, and silver buckles and chains ornamenting the tops. His rap sheet was long.

“I thought you was dead, Borders.”

“You’re going to be if you don’t step back, Junior,” Will said.

“Motherfucka’ owes me money. He gotta pay!”

He said this as if it were a rational justification. Another day at the office. “Ain’t that right, cocksucka’? You give me my money!” He raised the boot to stomp the man’s head.

Before the surgery, Will would already have been out of the car, at the sidewalk, and had Junior, Clarence Kavon James Jr., prone on the pavement. But he couldn’t do that now. And he didn’t have time to pull out his cane and walk with difficulty the short distance to the crime. As if that would allow him to control the suspect. A small crowd was gathering, encouraging the beating.

Will unsnapped the holster on his belt and in seconds had his pistol aimed across the car roof.

“I said stop, asshole.” His voice, at least, was still commanding. The gun was leveled at the man’s chest.

A wide brown angry face stared at him with the usual empty sociopath eyes. It was dusted with darker freckles on either side of a wide nose. Will and Dodds had put his father in prison seven years ago for murder. The rotten apple didn’t fall too far from the rotten tree. With his leg cocked in the air, he looked like a malevolent drum major. He slowly lowered his boot halfway to the concrete.

“What, Borders? You gonna shoot another unarmed black man?”

“Yes, Junior. Did I say police? There, I’ve identified myself. You people, move away now so I can shoot this unarmed black man!” The dozen onlookers backed a few paces away.

“I’m a man of color!”

“You’re assaulting a man of color, Junior. Get on the ground, now!”

“This is a G thang, Borders, none y’all’s bidness.”

“It’s a police thing now, Junior. Lower your foot or lose it.”

Junior glowered at him. Will didn’t know what the hell he would do if the suspect didn’t comply.

The look of defiance seemed to last an hour. Then he spat in Will’s direction and lowered himself to the pavement with studied dignity.

“Hands! Spread out your arms and show me your hands.”

The man did as ordered. The victim, wearing layers of old clothes and agony on his face, lay in a fetal position on the sidewalk, moaning.

“Stay there.” He continued to lean on the roof, keeping the gun on the man. He whispered to himself. “Now, if only the cavalry will arrive.” Traffic went by on Central Parkway. The road had been the Miami and Erie barge canal in the nineteenth century. Underneath it was Cincinnati’s never-finished, never-opened subway. Now it was only a spacious dividing line between Over-the-Rhine and the central business district. Will was sweating, the wet spring air starting to fill the sky.

He saw the white paint of the cruiser out of his peripheral vision and a uniformed officer sprang out and handcuffed the kicker. Another unit arrived and two more unis walked to Junior, lifting him to his feet.

“Police fucking brutality! You gonna let The Man do this to a brother!? We need another riot!”

The onlookers walked away quickly in every direction.

Junior was far from done. “Every man has his boiling point! His boiling point, bro! You, too, Borders! Every man has his boiling point!” The yelling was muffled when he was placed in the prisoner compartment of a cruiser and the door was shut.

Will holstered his firearm and sat heavily in his car, using the radio to request a fire department medic unit. The dispatcher acknowledged his request as his cell rang. He swiveled into the seat, using both hands to lift his weak left leg inside, and answered.

“Good morning, Specialist Borders.” It was Amy Garrett, the chief’s secretary, using the department and union’s technical term for his rank. She usually gave this greeting in a voice where you could almost see her smile, high cheekbones, and tasteful-but-short skirt. Amy could almost make you look forward to a visit to the chief’s office. All the cops wanted to sleep with her. She was happily married. Imagine that, Will thought, happily married. Today she sounded different. “Busy morning, huh?”

He assumed she meant the homicide that Dodds was working. He had already used his iPad to type out the preliminary report for the police department Web site, not naming the victim, saying that Cincinnati homicide detectives were investigating. The iPad was easier to use for such tasks than the clunky police laptop mounted between the seats. Now he said, “You don’t know the half of it,” as he felt his heart rate start to go down and he could still hear Junior shouting at him from inside the prisoner compartment of the squad car.

“There’s been an incident in Kenton County.”

He waited.

“You need to go down there.”

His trouble meter was registering high. Kenton was Covington, right across the river from downtown, but another state, another county, another jurisdiction, and, thank God, another public information officer.

“What’s up, Amy? What aren’t you telling me?”

Her voice lowered to nearly a whisper. “It’s Kristen Gruber. She’s been found dead. Probable homicide.”

“What do you mean?” He blurted it in exactly the same way he had heard countless family and friends of dead people do, back when he was a homicide detective delivering bad news.

“Will, she’s been killed. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes.” He let himself exhale. “Was she on the job?”

“No. We don’t have a lot of details yet. She was found on a boat.”

“Who knows? Anybody in the media?”

“Nobody yet. But you’d better get down there. This will be national news.”

“What am I supposed to do? What’s the plan? Is a homicide team coming?”

“It’s only you,” she said. “Go down and find out what they have. Then the commanders will hold a press conference. This is direct from the chief, Will. He wants you to begin an investigation.”

Will hesitated. “Amy, I’m the PIO.”

“You’re a veteran homicide detective, Will. You’ll be the liaison officer between this department and the Kentucky cops. As far as the chief is concerned, you’re the lead detective on this for us.”

The lead.

She added, “Now be nice to them down there.”

“On my way.”

“So are you going to…” A tall young uni stood at the car door. Then he saw it was Borders. The one who walked with a cane.

“He was kicking the other guy,” Will said. “Clarence Kevon James Junior. Street name of Junior. He’s on probation. I’ll add to your incident report later.”

“Great,” the kid said sarcastically. “You have powers of arrest, detective.”

“Paperwork comes with the job, son. I’ve got to go.” Before the uni could protest further, Will slammed the car door, backed up, and raced toward the Ohio River.

Kristen Gruber. Officer Kristen Gruber. He could see her face as he raced past Piatt Park, the Netherland Plaza Hotel, and the dense cluster of buildings that lined both sides of Fourth Street. The intense blue eyes, easy smile, and the blond hair worn in a pixie cut. But she was no pixie. She was one of the most gung-ho cops he had known. He even remembered her badge number.

In a roundabout way, Kristen was responsible for him having this job. She had been the public information officer. With her girl-next-door good looks, athletic build, and perfect television presence, she was ideal for the department’s makeover after the riots. She had set up the Web site and the Twitter account that Will now had to feed like a machine. Transparency, the chief said. She could have remained the PIO forever if it hadn’t been for the show.

LadyCops: Cincinnati was a reality TV show featuring three female officers, but Kristen was the star. She always had the first segment. Of course, the show was heavily sanitized, the calls routine and low-priority, the department always appearing business-like and professional. It was great publicity. Virtually every suspect was black, but nobody involved mentioned this fact. They had to sign releases for their faces to be shown, and many did so happily-such was the power of television.

As a result, the PIO job came open at precisely the time Will was able-bodied enough to return to work, at least to a desk job. Years before, he had been one of her instructors at the academy and she recommended him as the new PIO.

Will had a cop’s dislike of the media. He didn’t trust reporters. They got in the way and their stories could send a case sideways. The exception had been an old hand with the Cincinnati Post who smoked cigars, knew when to withhold detail, and had earned the respect of both Will and Dodds. The man had been on the police beat for twenty years and knew more about the department than most of the officers. Otherwise, about the last thing Will wanted was to be the department’s face to the media.

But the chief liked the idea-Will thought cynically because it would get the Cincinnati Police points to have a disabled cop in front of the cameras. He hadn’t been shot and wounded. But the cameras didn’t know that. Still, being PIO got him back on duty. He learned that most of the reporters were very lazy: they would take what he posted on the Web site or recorded on the information line and simply put it on the air or in the newspaper. The Post had closed and the Enquirer rotated through a string of rookies, none of whom had time to learn their jobs-this when the last newspaper in town wasn’t laying people off. The television stations only wanted “visuals,” as they called them.

It would have made for an easy job if the department wasn’t still living with the fallout from the riot: a class-action lawsuit, Justice Department intervention, and federal court oversight of reforms. Will was no different from most of the cops, who felt the politicians, the media, hell, even the police commanders had sold out the working officers, had no idea of conditions out on the streets. But when the issue reared up again, Will read the statements given him by his masters and drew his paycheck.

Now he crossed the Roebling Suspension Bridge, hearing the metal grates under his tires, feeling them rubbing against his brain. The riverfront had undergone a dramatic transformation in his lifetime and now it was all devoted to pleasure. The old rail yards were gone, as were most of the gritty multistory brick warehouses. Even the flying-saucer-shaped Riverfront Stadium had been supplanted by two showy and expensive replacements, one each for the Reds and Bengals. Even as the city lost population, it gained new development close to the water. The National Underground Freedom Center was new, and a fancy mixed-use project called The Banks was going up.

Will barely appreciated any of this at the moment. He was thinking too much about himself. There was always a danger that someone video-recorded his encounter with Junior and on television it would be made out as a new sign of racial insensitivity. That would land him in an internal investigation or worse, charges of racial profiling and excessive use of force. What really happened didn’t matter. The cop was guilty until proven innocent.

That led to brooding on his limitations, too. His weak left leg’s muscles were now in fierce spasms from the effort of standing. He pushed his left foot into the floor of the car, barely stopping the limb’s protests. What had happened on Central Parkway was an intense reminder of what he could not do.

Yes, he was lucky to be alive-he told himself that every day. And the surgeons had removed the rare tumor inside his spinal cord in time so, with much work, he could walk again. Only a few months ago, he had been in a wheelchair. Now he could stand and walk. The tumor hadn’t been cancerous. All lucky things, miracles even. But they couldn’t return him to what he was: a fully functional man, a real cop. They couldn’t take away his feelings that he had been allowed to return to duty out of a sort of professional pity rather for than the skills he still possessed, even if he couldn’t run and jump. That he had been allowed back in no small measure because his father’s name was on the wall: the memorial to police officers killed in the line of duty.

He pushed the thoughts aside, passed through the 150-year-old masonry of the bridge’s southern tower, and then he was in Covington. Except for the expanse of river and different tax rates, it was really a contiguous part of downtown Cincinnati. Before the new building done on the southern bank, Covington’s street grid exactly matched up with Cincinnati’s. He passed the new high-rise hotels and the wild black-and-white curve of the Ascent condos facing the Cincinnati skyline, then the hulk of the Internal Revenue Service, before he was on the familiar streets lined with their vintage buildings. In ten minutes, he reached the police station in the southern end of the little city.

He had a dead cop. And he was the lead.

Chapter Seven

The drive to the Butler County jail took a long half hour, past the thick cornfields and sleepy rural crossroads that gradually gave way to the shabby outskirts of Hamilton. Like so many smaller blue-collar cities in the Midwest, it had been suffering for decades and looked it. Cheryl Beth didn’t care for the town, but that might have been because the Miami University extension, where most of the nursing classes were held, was located in soulless new buildings separated from downtown and fronting on a huge a parking lot.

The main part of Hamilton had good bones even in bad times, the old buildings built for a hopeful future that came and went. Even the huge empty factories with their dead smokestacks held a mysterious grandeur. When she had been younger, most of these plants had been operating. No longer. The big recession in the early ‘80s had started the process and manufacturing jobs lost to Mexico and then China had pretty much finished them off. As a result, many who lived there were taking classes for jobs in health-care or commuting long distances to work in Cincinnati or Dayton.

Hank Brooks drove in silence. Cheryl Beth looked out the car window. It wasn’t until they crossed the white arched bridge across the Great Miami River and started down High Street that the apprehension again gripped her middle. She distracted herself wondering how many Ohio towns had High streets.

The jail was sterile and sprawling, sitting beside the railroad tracks. It was one of the few things in the little city that appeared new and successful. He led her through the reception area, which was empty save for one young woman sitting watchfully on a bench.

“You ought to see this place on the weekends,” Brooks said as he signed them in. “Packed with families to see inmates. Thing that breaks my heart is the kids. You have kids, Cheryl Beth?”

“No.”

“I’ve got two, girl and a boy. They make life worthwhile.”

She ignored him and showed her driver’s license to a deputy. He searched her purse. Brooks handed his gun over and it was locked in a steel cabinet. Then she heard a loud buzz, and Brooks led her through a glass door, which led to more and heavier doors, more guards, and a gathering sense of isolation.

They moved through white corridors with neatly spaced banks of fluorescent lights overhead and shiny white floors with wide dark stripes on the outer edges that encouraged you to walk in the middle. She wondered again what she was doing here. The long walk led them to a room, which a deputy unlocked. It had a metal table with metal chairs. Noah wasn’t there.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” he asked, beckoning her to sit.

“No.”

“Then why do it?”

“You want me to, don’t you? I’m a pleaser.”

“A sarcastic one.”

“And this involves my students.”

Now it was his turn to say nothing, merely open his portfolio and turn to a fresh sheet of lined yellow paper. She looked at him, wondering what angle he was playing. He looked like a man of hidden agendas, but one was pretty obvious: He thought Noah was guilty, and she was sure he’d be on her during the long drive back to Oxford. Why hadn’t she brought her own car?

The room echoed with a loud metallic sound and two deputies led Noah Smith in, pulled out a chair across from them, and sat him down. One deputy left, closing the door. Noah was in loose-fitting prison stripes, shackles on his arms and legs, a chain around his middle and an ashen expression on his face.

Brooks introduced himself, spelled his last name. He read Noah his rights.

Noah ignored him.

“Thank you for coming, Cheryl Beth.” He reached a manacled hand across the table toward her and a female deputy instantly intervened. “Prisoner! Hands in your lap.”

Noah cringed and dropped his hands. He looked shrunken in the inmate garb. She searched his face: Noah Smith from Corbin. Somebody’s son, brother, cousin? Nothing. He didn’t look like anyone she had known there. And it was a place she had tried very hard to forget.

“I don’t need to tell you that you’re in a lot of trouble, Mr. Smith,” Brooks said. “You can make things easier on yourself if you tell me what happened out there.”

“I didn’t…”

“Noah,” Cheryl Beth said. “You’d better not say anything until you talk to a lawyer.” She didn’t look Brooks’ way, felt his cosmic annoyance flooding her.

“I didn’t do anything.” His voice shook.

“Tell me about the two girls, Holly and Lauren?” Brooks asked it in a confidant’s voice. “I can help you, Noah, if you’ll help me. Lawyers are going to get in the way of that. Now’s the time to work with me, before things get more complicated. Tell me about the girls.”

Noah swallowed hard enough that his Adam’s apple, his laryngeal prominence her interior voice said, bobbed up and down. He said, “We were drinking in town and went back on campus to party some more.”

“Noah!” Cheryl Beth stared at him. “Wait for your lawyer before you say anything.”

He shook his head. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Brooks said, “You all were together?”

“Sure. We were together at the bar.” He gave the name of the place, a popular hangout for students.

Cheryl Beth wanted to slap him silly. He was a fool to be talking or to trust Hank Brooks.

Brooks asked, “Why?”

He looked bewildered.

“My point is, did you all have plans? Did one of them go there with you on a date? Did you pick them both up? What?”

Noah said they had met up at the bar. “We were drinking and having fun. First Holly and me, and then we saw Lauren and she joined us.”

“Drank too much?”

“Maybe”

“And you expect me to believe these two good-looking girls, both of ’em, left with you.”

“They did.”

“Must be nice,” Brooks said. He made some notes. Noah’s eyes beseeched her, but all Cheryl Beth could do was give a small, soothing smile she had perfected over the years. At the moment, she was doubtful of its comfort. She mouthed the words: “shut up.” He looked away.

“You’re kind of old to be hanging around campus bars, Noah,” Brooks said. “My information says you’re twenty-five. These girls were both twenty.”

“I was in the Army,” he said. “After my discharge, I went back to school.”

“An honorable discharge?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll check on that.” Brooks put down his pen and stared at the young man. Then his voice resumed its friendly tone. “What time did you leave the bar?”

“I don’t know. Maybe around midnight.”

“You’re sure of that.”

Cheryl Beth turned to Brooks. “He already told you he wasn’t sure.” She turned back to Noah. “You should shut up.”

“I’m innocent.” He said it, looking incredibly boy-like and vulnerable.

“Then how do you know it was after midnight?” Instantly she wished she hadn’t asked it.

“I got a call around midnight, let it go to voice mail. I saw the time then. We left awhile afterwards. The place was getting pretty crowded.”

“Who called you?” Brooks twirled his pen in his fingers.

Noah hesitated. “A friend.”

“Female friend?”

Noah nodded.

Brooks stood and paced toward the wall, his shoes squeaking on the waxed floor.

“You’re a popular guy,” Brooks said. “So you and the two girls walked to the Formal Gardens? Did you do drugs?”

“Noah,” Cheryl Beth said.

“It’s okay,” he said. “We did some E.”

“Ecstasy,” Brooks said. “You always bring that when you’re out with women?”

“Lauren had it,” he said. “We took one each, watched the stars, and talked.”

Brooks sighed. Then: “Did you hook up?”

“Sure. That’s kind of the idea.”

“With both of them?”

Noah nodded.

“Man, you are a lucky guy,” Brooks said, circling around behind Noah. Cheryl Beth noted again how short he was, how he radiated short-man insecurities. It reminded her of certain doctors she had known.

Brooks said, “What made you kill them?”

“I didn’t!”

The deputy stepped closer and Noah slumped in his chair.

Brooks leaned in behind Noah’s left side.

“You own a knife?”

“Probably. Yes, I do. I have a couple from the service.” Noah leaned back and turned his head, but Brooks had switched sides. He spoke into Noah’s other ear, barely a whisper.

“What about handcuffs?”

“No, of course not.”

“Those girls had abrasions on their wrists. Somebody handcuffed them, Noah. I think that somebody is you.”

He shook his head, saying “No” over and over.

“We’re going to find the knife that killed those girls, Noah. We’re going to find the handcuffs. And when we do, we’re going to find your fingerprints on it. So why don’t you tell me what really happened.”

“I’m trying to tell you the truth. Somebody hit me from behind.”

“Somebody?”

He nodded and Brooks sat back down. Some anonymous sounds came from back in the jail, and Brooks leaned in, baring his teeth.

“You like to hurt women, right?”

“I never…!”

“You’re really sick to have done this, Noah. Carve up those girls that way.”

Noah shivered and sobbed.

Brooks’ tone shifted again. In a quieter voice, he asked, “Did the girls see this somebody? Did they warn you? Did they scream?”

“No. They were passed out. I was about to wake them up so we could go.”

“Passed out?” Brooks cocked an eyebrow and stroked his mustache. “I didn’t think ecstasy made you pass out. I thought it made you feel all full of peace and self-acceptance and shit like that.”

“We’d had a lot to drink.”

“But not too much for you to have sex with them.”

“We had sex.”

“Your DNA’s going to be in those bodies, Noah. Why did you kill them?”

“I didn’t kill them!” His face was red and he was crying.

“Because somebody hit you.”

“That’s right. When I came to, I felt like hell. Holly and Lauren were gone. It was raining, but I passed out again. The next thing I know was when you guys… Wait. Holly and Lauren were gone because I wasn’t in the Formal Gardens when I woke up. I was off in some bushes. Like somebody dragged me over there.”

“That ‘somebody’ again,” Brooks said.

“Noah,” Cheryl Beth said, “When you three were together, were you alone in the gardens? Did you notice anyone else?”

He hung his head, shaking it slowly. “I don’t remember.”

His story seemed implausible. But Cheryl Beth also knew that many of the behaviors Noah exhibited, from the loss of focus, impaired attention, and even paranoia were after-effects of Ecstasy, otherwise known as MDMA.

She turned to Brooks: “Did you notice any marks on the grass as if he’d been dragged?”

Brooks glared at her.

“Has anyone examined the back of his head?” she asked.

“This is bullshit,” Brooks said,

“May I?” She stood. “I’m an R.N.”

The deputy seemed unsure.

“Go ahead,” Brooks said. “What the hell.”

She walked behind Noah and felt above his neck into his hair. There was no bleeding but a noticeable lump. “There is a hematoma there,” she said. “A big bruise. A blow from the back could have made it. He needs to be checked for a concussion.”

“That’s what I’m telling you.” Noah said.

“It could also have come from the arrest,” Brooks said. “Or maybe you fell. Killers are stupid that way.” He stood and walked to the door.

“I’ll see you in the lobby, Cheryl Beth. You,” he pointed at Noah. “You and I are going to have more talks.”

After the door shut, Cheryl Beth faced Noah. His face was wet with tears. He didn’t dare raise his hands to wipe them away.

“Why did you ask for me?”

“I don’t have anybody,” he said. “You seem kind.”

She watched him carefully. Was he manipulating her? She couldn’t be sure. He seemed sincere. “Who can I call for you? Parents? Brothers or sisters?”

He shook his head. “I don’t have anybody.”

She thought about bringing up Corbin, but didn’t. The place held too many ghosts and heartbreaks. That he was from there unsettled her further. She made herself look him in the eye. “I don’t know how to help you. I could ask around about lawyers.

“I don’t have any money. I’m over my head with student loans. You’ve got to believe me. I didn’t kill them.” After a long pause, he spoke again. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes.” Cheryl Beth felt the lie burning her throat.

Chapter Eight

The press conference began at five minutes after four at Cincinnati police headquarters on Ezzard Charles Drive. The city was under a tornado watch. When Will had reached the station two hours earlier to brief the brass, the air was thick with humidity and enormous thunderheads were advancing over the Western Hills. Kristen Gruber’s parents had retired to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and the chief had called them personally, hoping to reach them before they heard about the murder from the media. Now the briefing room was bright with television lights whatever the sky outside had to say. All the local stations were there, plus a crew from Indianapolis and a freelance team. Half the room seemed to be sneezing and sniffling. Sinus Valley.

The chief stood at the center of the podium flanked by the lieutenant colonels that commanded different bureaus in the department. All wore black mourning bands on their badges. All were in full uniform, including the dark dress jacket. This was a good thing in Will’s mind, not only because the white uniform shirts of CPD overly reflected light and drove the television people crazy, but also because they made the cops look like ice-cream men. That, at least, had been Cindy’s joke. Will’s ex-wife had disapproved of his career choice with increasing intensity as their marriage went on.

White shirts and television lights. Will had learned about such arcana when he was sent to a special school for law-enforcement media officers. He had been drilled in how to handle the parry and thrust of difficult press conferences. Still, he felt ill at ease before the cameras, and today especially he was happy to stand off to the side of the brass, the only one in a suit. He gripped the edge of a chair with his right hand, subtly he hoped. His body was exhausted from the day and standing now was taking all his effort. Chest up, shoulders back, lats pulled down, diaphragm tight, all the things he had been taught. Still, his left leg was reliably thumping every eighteen seconds. You could set a stopwatch by it. He desperately wanted to hyper-extend the leg and let all the pent-up energy out, but he had learned the hard way that doing this would cause him to be in danger of falling down from the resulting spasm. So he put weight on it hoping the leg would calm itself.

He badly wanted to sit down.

The chief had served his whole career in the department. Like most officers, Will’s opinion of him was complicated. What was not in question was that he was very much a Cincinnati product: coming from old German stock west of the “Sauerkraut Curtain,” a graduate of Elder High School, and a cop who came up through the ranks. He stuck to his roots by bowling in a league at Heid’s Lanes. His trim figure looked good in a uniform, his sandy hair combed precisely into a style out of the early 1960s, his face still youthful for fifty-eight. Now he faced the cameras and gave a stoic account.

“Officer Kristen Gruber was found dead on a boat tied up on the Licking River this morning. We’re working with our colleagues at the Covington Police Department and the Kenton County Sheriff and treating this as a homicide. I can tell you she died of multiple stab wounds. I’m not going to go into details…”

Will knew the details. He stared into the lights and recalled the photos he had seen in Covington. Kristen had been handcuffed, hands behind her, and placed on a bench in the cabin of the boat. The assailant had used a knife to rape her. The genital mutilation was the worst Will had ever seen. At some point in the attack, the femoral artery in her right leg had been slashed and she had been left to bleed out. It appeared that bleach had been poured around her genital area, perhaps to corrupt DNA testing. Her face was untouched. Had she screamed out there? Would anyone have heard it? The blood volume was so high that it was still pooled when the first cops came aboard.

“…We intend to expend every resource in the department to find the vicious killer of a Cincinnati Police officer…,” the chief went on.

The boat was tied up on a deserted tract of the Covington riverbank. A kayaker had found it early this morning. The time of death was sometime between Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning; the medical examiner would narrow it further. The kayaker had been home with his wife during that time. Tracing ownership of the boat was easy: it belonged to Kristen. Other than the blood, the crime scene appeared surprisingly tidy. No bloody footprints or fingerprints were immediately found. Crime-scene techs from both CPD and Covington were still there when Will drove back downtown. The adjacent riverbank showed no recent tracks. Whoever killed her had probably come from the river.

Will heard a thunderclap from outside as the chief kept talking.

“…We will spare nothing to capture the killer or killers. We definitely want them badly…”

No knife was found on the boat. Divers had spent the day searching the river bottom, although Will was not optimistic. The lead diver told him what he’d heard before when evidence was being sought in the Ohio River: You can’t even see your hand in front of you down in that water. A search a mile above and below the crime scene along the riverbank hadn’t turned up anything but garbage, especially beer bottles.

The chief continued: “…I’ll take some questions now, but I’ll warn you that we won’t discuss details or anything that might jeopardize the case. I’ll close with an appeal to anyone who might have been on the Licking River on Saturday night or Sunday morning and might have seen anything suspicious, or seen this boat, to call us at this number on the screen behind me.” He read out the phone number, too.

Will was astonished that the first question was what would happen to the new season of Lady Cops: Cincinnati?

After the chief called an end to questions, the reporters obediently filed out one door, the commanders another. Cincinnati was that kind of town. People still played by certain rules. Will finally sat in the blessed chair, careful as always to make sure he was really centered because he couldn’t feel every part of his butt. The light returned to its normal unhealthy fluorescent glow, the four walls containing nothing but silence. His right leg jumped up violently. He forced it down with his hands and shook it, like someone with nervous leg syndrome instead of a spinal cord that had been chewed up by tumors and surgical instruments. He dry-swallowed his five p.m. Baclofen pill, tried to generate some saliva, swallowed again. Within a minute, the right leg settled down.

He felt the hand on his shoulder.

“How you feeling, Will?”

“Good, chief. I’m okay.”

The chief pulled up another chair and sat, an alert posture with his back straight and his hips near the edge of the seat. Will was finally full-back in his chair, grateful for the furniture under him, the weight off his legs, and a stable surface beneath him.

“How are our friends in the Commonwealth treating you?”

“Good. How can you not love a department who has a lieutenant colonel named Spike Jones?” Receiving not even a hint of a smile, he hurried on. “They have six detectives on this, between Covington and the Kenton sheriff. But they understand we’re going to want a big role. The dive team’s been in the river all day. I’ve sent crime-scene over to work with them. We should know more about the boat by tomorrow.”

“Good, good.” He nodded, looking Will in the eye. “You’ll tell me what you need from us? Resources, manpower. I talked to the mayor and city manager, and overtime won’t be a problem.”

Will nodded. He kept his own doubts and fears to himself. He wasn’t in good enough shape to be the lead detective, certainly not on such an important case. But he didn’t dare say no, didn’t dare show weakness. The city was struggling with budget cuts and Will knew he was lucky to have a job. He intended to keep it.

“Gruber was a good cop,” the chief said.

“Yes, sir.”

Will hesitated. “We’re going to need to talk to her boyfriend, if she has one. Ex-husband. The usual. I can coordinate all that. I’ll get a timeline of her past few days, see how often she went out on the boat and with who. But I also want access to her emails, work and home, phone records. She was on national television. She might have had stalkers. The other officers on the show, you might want to give them an extra heads-up. This might be a one-off killing, but you never know.”

The chief nodded. “You follow it wherever it leads, but get this son of a bitch.”

“Yes, sir.” He said the words, but wondered if the commanders really wanted to know wherever the truth might lead. What if Gruber wasn’t a good cop? What if it was a typical sleazy domestic violence or romantic triangle gone wrong? His paranoia kicked in: Why was he sent alone to Covington this morning-why not a real homicide team? Maybe command wanted to keep things discreet; cop gossip traveled fast. Maybe he was being set up.

The chief leaned in an inch. “There’s one more thing. And I know you have a lot on your plate.”

Will waited.

“The D.B. this morning. The one in Over-the-Rhine.”

“The cellist.”

“Exactly. You still have season tickets to the symphony?”

“I do.” Will figured he was the only officer on the force who did.

“That’ll help. The symphony board is climbing down my throat on this one.” He sighed. “As if one headliner isn’t enough right now. Maybe you’d be willing to go over tomorrow, meet with the president, and make sure they know we’re doing all we can? These are some powerful people. You’ll know precisely the right touch in this kind of situation. It’s one skill your friend, Dodds doesn’t have. You know what I mean.”

Will knew.

Chapter Nine

Cheryl Beth was back in Cincinnati by five, curled up on her sofa at the little bungalow she owned in Clifton, which sat at the end of Sauer Avenue on a bluff. In the winter, you could look south out the kitchen window and see Over-the-Rhine and downtown. In spring and summer, it was as if those vistas had never existed. A tree canopy ran from her small backyard into Bellevue Hill Park and all she could see was green. She was on her second glass of wine and she had the band Over the Rhine on the sound system. The songs were as pensive and mournful as her mood. Her mind still back at the jail with Noah Smith. He looked impossibly frightened, alone, and innocent. But was he? Hank Brooks was convinced he was a killer.

It didn’t track for her. How could Noah alone have killed two fit young women?

Then her concern over him switched to guilt: her own. It wasn’t only about Noah. Holly Metzger and Lauren Benish were dead. Two bright young women who would have made fine nurses. Dead.

A too-familiar dread washed over her. The spike of ice grew in her abdomen. She saw the blue tarp again, could only imagine what lay behind it. When the murder happened at the old hospital, she had been followed and spied on by the killer, and this lovely old house, her sanctuary, had become a domicile of fear. She had pulled the curtains tight all those weeks, triple-checked the locks, especially after she had seen the footprints in her flowerbeds. Another policeman had saved her then, a man very different from Hank Brooks. She missed him.

Sitting still and stewing was not an option. She tended to fill any vacuum that appeared. It made her a good nurse. Sometimes it made her supervisors crazy. More than once an evaluation had used the words “bull in a China shop.”

She shut off the music and dug through her class files to find the information cards she asked each student to fill out at the beginning of the semester. They included emergency contacts. She sipped the glass of Chardonnay too fast, carefully studying Holly and Lauren’s cards, putting them on the side table, picking each up in turn. She walked to the kitchen, poured another glass, came back to stretch out on the sofa, and picked up the telephone.

Holly’s mother answered on the eighth ring. Cheryl Beth identified herself and told the woman how sorry she was. Nursing had taught her to be a master of the difficult conversation: the terminal diagnosis, the failed surgery, and the too-many things that went wrong in hospitals. When the doctors had said their lines and left, it was up to the nurses to stay with the patient and the family, pick up the pieces of mortality. Still, this was inexplicably difficult. She told the mother what a good student her daughter was, what a fine person, quick to help her classmates, and to make a joke. By the end, they were both crying.

Lauren’s parents lived in Kettering, a suburb of Dayton. When the phone was picked up, the voice on the other end sounded young and businesslike.

“My name is Cheryl Beth Wilson and I’m calling for Mr. or Mrs. Benish.”

“They’re not available and you news people are horrible for harassing us at a time like this.”

“No, I’m not with the news. I know this is a terrible moment for you all.” She heard her voice lapse into y’all. “I was one of Lauren’s nursing instructors at Miami, and I felt I should call. I wanted to let you know how sorry I am, and ask if there’s anything I can do. Anything.”

After a pause, the woman’s tone softened. “I’m sorry. The TV people have been calling nonstop. I won’t let mom and dad pick up. I’m scared to death they’ll just send a camera crew to our front lawn. Cheryl Beth, my name is April and I’m Lauren’s big sister.” She choked a moment. “Was.”

“April, I am so sorry. Lauren was such a joy to have in class. I wish I would have had a chance to get to know her better.”

“Thank you,” the woman said. “At least they caught the monster who would do such a thing. Thank God.”

“Yes.”

They made small talk for ten minutes. April inevitably asked about the origins of Cheryl Beth’s accent. Then, “I’ve been so afraid something like this might happen. I told myself not to over-react, not to be the overbearing big sister…”

“What do you mean?”

“Lauren thought she was being stalked.”

Cheryl Beth sat upright.

“It started about a month ago. She told me this creep came onto her in a bar and she tried to give him a nice brush-off and he wouldn’t go. She finally ended up leaving, getting in her car, and driving off with the guy standing on the curb watching her. Then she started seeing him on campus. He’d follow her at a distance, but she knew he wasn’t walking there by accident, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t a coincidence. This happened twice.”

“Was he a student?”

“I don’t know. Lauren said he definitely didn’t fit in with the college crowd in the bar. He was older, she said, but he was in good shape. Oh, he was completely bald. She said he looked like Mister Clean, you know?”

That didn’t describe Noah Smith.

April said, “In the bar, he’d been all friendly and funny, but when he wanted to take it further and she said no, he got all weird. Then the stalking.”

Cheryl Beth asked if Lauren had notified the police.

“No,” April said. “She was forever blaming herself for things. She was afraid she’s been too provocative and flirty in the bar. Then she thought maybe she was imagining that he was really following her. But she was afraid. I can tell you that. I was about to come down there and make her go to the campus police when this happened.”

“Did you tell all this to Detective Brooks?”

“I don’t know who that is,” April said. “My parents got a call from the university and had to go down and…” A sniffle broke her control, “…identify Lauren’s body. They didn’t know about this. Lauren wouldn’t tell them. They’re very protective and she wanted to be independent. It makes me want to throw up.”

When the phone rang a little after seven, Cheryl Beth thought it might be April calling her back. She answered on the first ring and could hear the anxiety in her own voice.

No one spoke. She could hear a background of voices and telephones ringing, then a hand muffling the receiver. The peculiar dread of a mysterious call sanded her nerve endings.

Finally: “Cheryl Beth?” A man’s voice. A nice baritone, vaguely familiar.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“I’m not sure you remember me. My name is Will Borders. I was a patient at Cincinnati General when you were the pain nurse…”

She felt a catch in her throat and hesitated. Then, “Of course I remember you, Will. Tell me how you’re doing?”

“I’m doing well. I’m back at work, on the force.”

“I’ve seen your name in the paper and hoped you were all right.” She could hear more voices and phones in the background. “Where are you?”

“I’m in homicide right now. Detective Dodds sends his best.”

A deeper voice called, “Hello, Cheryl Beth!” and laughed.

“Tell him ‘hi’ back.”

She heard a rustling and Dodds came on. “Are you still as beautiful as the last time I saw you?”

“Hello, Detective Dodds.” She laughed. “The last time you saw me I was beaten up and bloody.”

“You were the most beautiful beaten up and bloody I’ve ever seen. Anyway, I’ll give you back to Mister President.”

“Sorry,” Will said. “He gets very enthusiastic.”

“I can see that. Why does he call you Mister President?”

“Long story.” He paused. “Anyway, I’m walking. I use a cane. But I’m walking.”

“That is so great. I prayed for that, Will.” She blurted that last part out suddenly and then worried if she had gone too far.

After a long pause, Will said, “I hope I’m not calling at a bad time. I’ve wanted to call and check in. There’s no excuse for not doing it sooner.”

She smiled and said nothing.

He said, “I wonder if you’d have a drink with me sometime? It’s okay if you say no. I understand. I know this out of left field…”

“Will,” she interrupted, “I’d love to.”

Chapter Ten

“God damn you.”

Will glared at Dodds as the entire homicide unit erupted in applause and laughter.

“I didn’t even know who you were dialing at first.”

“You may call me J.C. the matchmaker,” Dodds said, a smug grin on his face. “You were too much of a chickenshit, so I had to do it for you.”

“Asshole. And stop that ‘Mister President’ shit. Now where do I take her?”

“Palm Court,” came one suggestion behind his back.

“Too formal,” Will said. “What will that make her think?”

“I dunno,” Dodds said. “Like you have class? How about the Precinct? Historic old police station, cop motif, all that.”

“Across the river,” Lieutenant Fassbinder said. “Nice view of the city.”

It felt good to be back in homicide again, in the fifth-floor offices leased from the county in the art deco tower at 800 Broadway that once housed the Cincinnati Times-Star newspaper. The old energy, the familiar faces, now everyone fueled with the adrenaline to catch whoever killed Kristen Gruber. Her name was written in red capital letters on the big white board that tracked the progress of the year’s homicide cases: unsolved. Immediately above it, also in red, was Jeremy Snowden, the cellist. That call early that morning seemed like a lifetime ago. In fact, the board had half a dozen names in red. All unsolved cases. The unit was already stretched.

Still, everyone was eager for a piece of this case. It was a murdered cop and, thanks to the television show, also a dead celebrity. Will went through the same briefing he had given the commanders before their press conference. Much was being held back, including that Gruber’s purse or wallet, cell phone, badge, and gun were not on the boat. Her keys were missing. The divers brought out sonar to search the river bottom for the firearm. Her clothes were aboard, neatly folded, but her panties were missing.

“Maybe a trophy taker,” Slamowitz theorized, picking his teeth as usual.

“Maybe she didn’t wear panties.” This from Kovach, who was one year from retirement and smiling for the first time Will could remember.

Fassbinder told LeAnn Skeen, the only woman in the unit, to be on the first morning flight to Myrtle Beach to interview the parents. Will knew he was reasoning, from experience, that a female detective would be better at coaxing information out of a grieving mother and father.

“Take your bikini,” Dodds said.

“I’d use one of yours, J.C., but your man-boobs are too big,” she said.

“Meet me at the Hustler store, baby.” He smiled lasciviously.

“Stop it, children,” Fassbinder said, “or I’m going to have a sexual harassment claim on my hands, probably filed by Dodds.”

“Always keeping the black man down,” Dodds said in mock severity.

For these minutes the unit had the snug feel of the old days. Amazingly, his old desk across from Dodds was empty, too, as if waiting for him. Dodds still had the homey needlepoint sign on the cluttered desktop that said, “Our Day Begins When Your Days End.” But everything had changed. Will had spent ten years in this office and now he felt like a stranger. He was off homicide and his real desk was over at headquarters. And even though he had received a round of applause when he walked in tonight, his first appearance there since getting out of the hospital, he knew they no longer really considered him one of them. He was the PIO, the guy on television, the one who walked with a cane. He sensed that at least some of his former colleagues wondered why the hell he was the lead on this case. He wondered the same thing. But he had cleared too many murders for this to be anything but an awareness leavened deep in the collective consciousness of a group used to working together.

With Covington detectives checking Gruber’s phone records, Fassbinder sent Kovach and Slamowitz to interview the other two officers featured on LadyCops. “Find out if they know whether she had a boyfriend,” Will said and regretted it. They knew that.

Schmidt was dispatched to the Seven Hills Marina, where Gruber moored the boat. Would her car be in the parking lot? Someone would need to look into cases she had worked. Will volunteered. But first, he set off for the home of a dead cop.

Kristen Gruber lived in a high-rise condo at the end of a long cul-de-sac that ran off McMillan Street. It was on a palisade overlooking the Ohio River at the edge of Walnut Hills, a short drive east from downtown. Walk a few blocks and you’d be in the heart of a ghetto. But this street was quiet, empty and framed by trees, the remnants of the thunderstorm still dripping off the leaves. The storms had moved east, leaving the air smelling of rain. Will sat in his unmarked car, driver’s window open to the damp night air, waiting for the Covington detective. Cheryl Beth Wilson was way too much on his mind. He had been so nervous he hadn’t even asked what she was doing now that the hospital had closed. Did she think he was rude? And what if something did develop between them? His body was different now. Could he perform as a man? He gently pushed her face out of his mind, flipped on a flashlight, and began reading Kristen’s personnel jacket.

She was thirty-four years old, five-feet-seven, one-hundred-thirty pounds, single. She had joined the force ten years ago after graduating from the University of Cincinnati. After four years on patrol, she had joined Central Vice, then became PIO. The jacket held a slick folder used to promote LadyCops. Inside that was a color eight-and-half-by-eleven photo of Kristen, wearing a black T-shirt, black flack vest emblazoned with “POLICE,” and a smile with perfect teeth and seamless confidence. The other two officers on the show were uniforms, one white with brown hair, the other black and average-looking. Neither had the fine looks of Kristen.

Gruber’s record looked almost too clean: No excessive force complaints, no shootings, not even an accidental firearm discharge. She had plenty of commendations. Will flipped through the supervisor reviews: “proactive,” “highly effective,” “diffused dangerous situation,” “dedicated,” “tough,” “unrelenting.” Will knew some of these sergeants and lieutenants, and a few were still back in the Stone Age about female officers. They would be much more likely to grade her hard. Yet she uniformly won them over. That and the all-American-girl face: an Ivory Soap complexion for Ivory’s hometown. He remembered her from the academy: even then she seemed like a comer.

He was not. His body was giving out on him after working the longest straight shift since he had gotten out of the hospital. He usually took a break in the middle of the day and laid down. Not today, and even the gift of adrenaline was starting to run out. His back was catching fire with pain. His right leg felt wrapped around itself with muscle spasms. He had been off pain meds for months now. Nothing to do about that except take Advil back at home. He popped his two Neurontin on time, washing them down with bottled water, and wished he could go upstairs by himself. But jurisdictional niceties must be observed.

“Can’t quit,” he mumbled, waiting for the pills to kick in and lessen the spasms.

He saw the headlights behind him and a dark Ford Crown Vic slowed. He waved and started the car, pulling up to the building’s main entrance. The Covington detective met him at the door. Her name was Diane Henderson, and she was also a thirty-something strawberry blonde, but she was shorter and lacked the youthful dazzle and fit build of Kristen. Henderson was still in the black jeans and white top she had worn when he had first met her and the other Covington cops that morning.

“You have a search warrant?” she said.

Will nodded. With a murdered police officer, the Hamilton County judges had been lined up to sign.

They approached the concierge, a middle-aged black man in a blazer and tie, who exuded a studied dignity. He examined Will’s badge and identification a long time. Will’s shield still lacked the black band of mourning. He’d have to fix that later. Then he read the search warrant. They asked if he had a master key.

“I’ll let you in,” he said. “Terrible thing, what happened to that girl.”

“Yes, sir,” Will said, and asked if the concierge worked there regularly. He did, every night except Monday and Tuesday. All visitors had to check in at his desk. Unfortunately, a log of names wasn’t kept. The concierge called the tenant and then the visitor was allowed to go up.

“Did Ms. Gruber have a boyfriend?” Will asked.

“Hmmmmm. Couldn’t really say, detective.”

“Which means?” Henderson said.

He stared at his shoes. “Which means, ma’am, that she kept male company, but I don’t know which were her boyfriends. I’m not paid to pay attention to things like that. She was a good tenant.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Will said. “So you’re saying she had more than one boyfriend?”

“She was a normal young woman,” the concierge said.

Will asked, “Did she have a lot of men or a few men? Regulars?”

“She was young and attractive. She was burnin’ rubber, if you know what I mean. And I don’t mean anything more than that. She was a good tenant, like I said. I can remember some men who came a few times. Some once or twice.”

They started toward the elevators, Henderson and the concierge sprinting ahead of him, or so it seemed. Will walked as fast as he could and they slowed down. “So they stayed the night? These men?”

“Some did.”

“Five in one year?” Will asked.

“Sounds about right.” He stared at Will. “Detective, I don’t get paid to keep track of tenants’ personal lives. In fact, I get paid to do the opposite, as long as they follow the rules.”

They stepped in the elevator and started to the fifteenth floor.

Henderson spoke. “What about women?”

“She had women visitors, if that’s what you mean.”

“Any stay the night.”

He paused. “I noticed one. Not my business to know more. Kids today are different.”

The elevator doors slid open with the sound of a whoosh and an electronic bell, and they stepped out into a carpeted hallway.

“We may be back in the next few days to show you photos,” Will said.

“I’ll try to help, but to be honest all you people look alike to me.”

Nobody laughed.

“So her visitors were all white?”

“That would be so.”

He led them to a door and used the master key. It didn’t open easily. He had to jiggle it and pull the door up slightly before it opened.

“It automatically locks, so please close up when you’re done.” The concierge disappeared quickly.

“‘All you people look alike to me.’” Henderson let out a low laugh.

The condo was spacious, with hardwood floors and new contemporary furniture.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a neat-freak who was a vic,” she said, and it was true. They turned on lights, and the place looked immaculate. Everything was in its place. The kitchen seemed unused. The refrigerator held three bottles of Chardonnay and half-a-dozen individual containers of plain yogurt. The cabinets had a few dishes, pots, and pans, but this was not a woman who cooked.

“So is your leg injured, Borders?”

“It’s way more complicated than that,” Will said. And she left it alone, motioning. “I’ll start in the bedroom.”

He slipped on latex gloves and wandered around the living room, which had two walls of windows facing south and east. Traffic on Columbia Parkway shot by silently far below, and the view of the big bend in the Ohio River must have been spectacular in daylight. As it was, he could see the lights of Newport across the wide darkness of water. A large framed photo of the Riverfest fireworks dominated one wall. Another held a sizeable flat plasma television facing a cream sofa and chairs. There were no books. One shelf held a photo of her parents, another of her in uniform on graduation day from the academy. No boyfriends. He opened drawers and cabinets to a chest below the TV: carefully catalogued DVDs of LadyCops episodes, a few movies, a new DVD player. No knives or threatening letters.

A smaller bedroom held a desk, chair, and computer. Two pens sat neatly spaced next to the PC. Six inches away, a cordless phone sat charging in its dock. Beside the desk, a shelf contained half a dozen black boxes, the kind you bought at a home organization store. He sat down and began opening them. The first held office supplies. The next two were filled with letters, all neatly filed with tabs indicating months. He slid one out at random and began to read. It was addressed to her, care of CPD headquarters. A thirteen-year-old girl from San Diego watched Kristen on every episode of LadyCops and wanted to become a police officer “like you.” At the top, a neat hand had written in red, “replied 2/23.” Will was amazed a teenager would write a real letter, but then Kristen’s email address wasn’t easily available. He slid it back in its place and opened another. The Cleveland NAACP was complaining that the show only had African-American suspects.

“Fan mail.” He looked over his shoulder at Henderson standing in the doorway.

“Jeez, Borders, how many?”

“Hundreds. At least.”

“Do you know how many man hours that is? My captain will go berserk.”

“We haven’t even started on her email,” Will said.

“You guys can do that. You have more resources.”

“Yeah, yeah. My lieutenant would disagree with you.”

“This is more fun.” She dangled a pair of black panties. “Officer Gruber favored black lace.” Will followed her into the master bedroom and sat heavily in an upholstered chair facing a king-sized bed. Henderson held up more contents from Kristen’s underwear drawer.

She saw Will’s expression. “That’s called a merry widow, or a corset,” she said, replacing the garment. “She’s also got garters and stockings. Black and white, depending on the mood, I guess. In the closet, she’s got three little black dresses. Must be nice to have had the body to carry that off.”

“Any firearm?”

Henderson shook her head. “Not a damn one. No badge or ID. No cell phone. She’s got birth control pills in the bathroom. No other prescriptions. Nothing else out of the ordinary.”

Will pushed himself up and walked over to the bed that faced the wide window. On a side table, another telephone handset sat in the main charger, but it showed no messages. That seemed strange, but he made note of it in his mind.

A tall, modern wardrobe sat against an interior wall. Inside were uniforms, neatly hung on stainless steel hangers. All had been taken out of their dry-cleaning bags. Suddenly his left leg, which he had hyperextended back at the knee, shot forward, kicking the heavy piece of furniture.

“Sorry,” he said, regaining his footing. “It does that.”

Henderson bent down. “Good move. Check this out.”

Will had accidentally unhinged a hidden drawer beneath the wardrobe. Henderson pulled it out. The contents were arrayed with the same obsessive neatness as elsewhere in the condo, but they were two pairs of handcuffs, a blindfold, a ball gag, leather shackles, some other restraints he’d never seen before, and a couple of very large black dildos.

“No offense to a fallen sister officer,” Henderson said, “but our girl seems to have liked it rough.”

An uneasy feeling flooded Will’s body, something he had been dreading ever since he had been assigned to the case. The Ivory Soap girl was not who she seemed.

He sighed. “We’ll bag it all, I guess.”

“That’ll make me popular in the evidence room tonight.” She pulled out clear plastic evidence envelopes and a set of latex gloves.

Metal on metal.

An alert shot silently through Will’s head.

Someone was trying the front door.

They both walked quietly in that direction. The floors were solid and didn’t creak. But with the lights on, there was a chance whoever was outside might see their shadows under the door. The sound continued. Will heard Henderson unsnap her holster.

Someone was inserting a key in the door.

“How do you want to play it?” Henderson whispered.

“Let him come in.”

Henderson took up a position in the kitchen to the right of the front door. She now had her semi-automatic out, held down at her side. Will unholstered his own weapon and retreated into the hallway. He switched his cane to his left hand, held the gun in his right, but the adrenaline coursing through his system made him feel steady on his feet. He turned off the light in the hall, so he would have the advantage of darkness. There was nothing to be done about the lights already on in the living room.

Maybe Kristen had a roommate. The concierge hadn’t said anything about that. Still, they would have to be careful when the door opened. They would anyway. The key in the door was most likely the one missing from Kristen’s boat, and the hand holding it belonged to her killer.

The key was all the way in, but once again the lock resisted. Click-click, click-click. He didn’t know the trick the concierge had used to open the door. Click-click, click-click.

Then, silence. Henderson looked back at him.

“Go.” He mouthed it silently. She walked five feet to the door and looked through the fisheye.

She shook her head. By that time he was standing there, too.

“Open it.” He had his gun up now, aimed toward the door.

The sound was unmistakable: the key was sliding back out. It took a good ten seconds of pulling to get the warped door to unlatch. By the time she opened it, the threshold was empty. They moved quickly into an empty hall.

“This is bullshit,” she said. “I’ll take the fire stairs. You take the elevator to the lobby.”

Will strode as fast as he dared, his right quads screaming their silent protest. In less than two minutes he was back in the quiet lobby. He holstered the gun and approached the concierge.

“Somebody come through here in the past ten minutes?”

The man shook his head. “Only you and the woman.”

A sound indicated a door opening and Diane Henderson trotted up. Will told her what he knew.

“What about visitors tonight, earlier,” she said. “Maybe he hid in the fire stairs or on a different floor.”

“Only residents tonight, ma’am.”

Will knew they were both wondering if the killer was a resident.

He said, “Do you have a garage?”

“Yes, sir. It’s indicated on the elevator. P-1 and P-2. It’s secured by a door to the street. Residents have a card key that opens it.”

“So our guy could have Kristen’s card key,” Henderson said.

Will tried again. “Is the garage entrance on camera?”

“It is,” the concierge said. “But that camera’s been down for two months. The homeowners’ board hasn’t kicked loose the money to get it fixed.”

Chapter Eleven

Will noticed the car parked in front of his townhouse when he turned onto Liberty Hill. Otherwise the street was deserted. He parked, heaved himself out, and came up behind the other vehicle. One male occupant. For a second, he thought about unsnapping the trigger guard on his holster before recognition let his heart rate go down.

He tapped on the car window and the driver jumped.

“John?”

The door opened and his stepson got out.

“Hey, Will.”

“Sorry if I startled you.”

“I wasn’t startled.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, sure…”

“Well, come on in.”

The young man followed him as he unlocked the door and turned on some lights. They made small talk about the townhouse, which Will had bought from a Procter & Gamble employee who had completely redone it: 1870 on the outside, bright and new on the inside. All the furniture was familiar to John because it had been at home before Will moved out and Cindy decided she wanted to redecorate, and then remarry. John wore jeans and a black T-shirt with an elaborate drawing involving skulls. He seemed nervous and tired. His eyes were red.

“Have you been crying?”

“No,” John said, a little too emphatically. “These allergies drive me nuts.” He asked if Will was practicing his piano and Will had to admit he wasn’t.

“Beer?”

“For me, too?” John seemed surprised. “Sure, Will.”

“There’s Christian Moerlein in the ’fridge. Open a couple of bottles and let’s go upstairs.” It still made Will feel strange that John called him by his first name. He had married Cindy when John was a baby and he was the only father the boy had known growing up. But once he was in high school, Will was no longer “daddy” but Will. He wondered what John called his real father in Boston.

They tramped up the stairs, through the bedroom, turning on lights as they went, and Will led him out on the small deck.

“Wow,” John said.

It was a “wow” view. This side of Liberty Hill was high enough that they could see over the rooftops of the townhouses across the street and into downtown. Directly in front was a vacant lot, enhancing the vista. The air had turned cool and the skyscrapers floated in the liquid black sky above the trees. The city brooded around them on its hills and inside its ravines beneath the green abundance of the changing season. The Queen City of the West, but the West had moved on. It was still a beauty. The night was quiet except for the steady distant rumble of Interstate 71.

Will set his cane against the railing and eased into one of the two chairs. The weight of the day was full on him now and he had been looking forward to the chance to actually sleep tonight. It would be a rarity. At the moment, he didn’t know if he could even get up again.

“How do you handle it down here?”

Will sipped his beer. “I like it.”

“The riots were right over there. And all the blacks…”

“Oh, John, there’s all sorts of people in this neighborhood. You weren’t raised that way, and as I recall you didn’t like it out in the suburbs.” He took a deeper pull of the Christian Moerlein. “So are you going back to Portland after the summer?”

John said he didn’t know if he would return. He had liked the city but thought college was boring. Will might not have been his real father but he couldn’t stop worrying about this baby who had become a man in the quick-time that was the dark gift of getting older. He had been such a sweet little boy. Then adolescence, and they had lost him. He was aimless and angry, an indifferent student except for music and art classes. This, even though Will and Cindy had skimped to put him in a good high school before Cindy started to make real money at the bank. Will blamed himself. Cindy was gone more and more with work. Some of her positions required travel, and then there were her serial affairs. Will should have done more, but he, too, worked long hours on homicide. John had often been left to raise himself.

“There are good schools here, too,” Will said.

“I hate Cincinnati.”

“Miami’s right up the road. Live on campus. You’d never know Cincinnati existed.”

“Still pimping for your alma mater. You went there with all those preppy snots and became a cop. How the hell did that happen, man?”

Will laughed and John did, too, stretching out his legs and relaxing a bit. Will thought about offering some fatherly advice about college and careers. He wanted to ask about his friends and find out what his plans were, but he thought better of it. He was grateful for the company, and had been the designated bad guy in John’s life for so long that he didn’t want to spoil the moment.

“I’ve partied up there,” John said. “But the kids are so stuck up.”

Will knew that could be true at one of Ohio’s “Public Ivies.” Time to change the subject.

“Those are nice shoes.”

“You think so?” John said. “I bought ’em in Portland. They’re called Drainmakers.” He pointed to the lime green soles.

“How are you?” John asked.

“I’m okay. It’s been a long day.”

“But the cancer’s gone, right?”

Will wearied of explaining the betrayal his body had carried out a few months after he turned forty-one. The doctors had discovered a tumor inside his spinal cord. It was a very rare condition. Luckily it had not been cancerous. They called it “malignant by location”: it would have left him paralyzed. Fortunately, they seem to have gotten it all. He ran through it for John patiently. There was no reason to expect Cindy would have told John the details.

“So it won’t come back, right?”

“Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee of that. Every day’s a gift.”

“You’ve turned into one mellow dude, Will. Letting me have a beer, not even ragging my ass about the pot.”

He was trying to get a rise, but Will remembered being that age, when small things loomed so huge, when a young man’s pride was everything.

“Come on, John,” he said gently. “That was a long time ago. Your mother and I were concerned for your well-being, doing the whole parent thing. You’ll be there someday.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I guess you heard about Kristen Gruber.”

“Yeah.”

“You remember meeting her?” Will had taken John to the party thrown by the show’s producers to mark the completion of filming for the first season of LadyCops: Cincinnati. It was the last time Will had attempted to draw John out of his shyness. Kristen had worn one of those little black dresses that night.

“I remember.”

“I’m the lead detective on the case.”

“Back in homicide? Good for you,” John said.

They fell into silence and Will’s mind was back on the case. Henderson had taken her evidence back to Kentucky and Will had stopped by a Skyline Chili to grab a late dinner and update the online police blotter. The Enquirer’s Web site had a long story about Kristen, but also another one about a double-homicide on the Miami University campus. A suspect was in custody and a knife had been used in the attack. He made a mental note to call the police in Oxford in the morning.

“It’s really bad,” John said in a low voice. “Her being killed.”

“Yes.” Will never talked about the ugly details of his work with his family.

“So you like doing the whole TV thing? ‘Police spokesman.’ You’re a celebrity.”

“Not really. It’s the job they let me do. It’s not like I can chase the bad guys any more. So I’m grateful for it.” Will shook his right leg and wondered why John was there. He hadn’t seen him in months. Coming by to check on him was a mature thing. That was good. Will set aside his suspicious cop thoughts, looked into the lights of the Kroger Building, and let his mind swim across memories of Cheryl Beth.

“So are you seeing anybody?” he asked.

John started to speak but only shook his head. Then: “I’ve tried to do scamming, but the girls don’t really go for me. They, like, want to be friends. Not friends with benefits, you know? Like ‘friends’ means get lost. Don’t want to dance with no pants. They save that for the dangerous ones, the alpha dudes. Then they complain because they turn out to be pricks.”

“I’ve been there,” Will said, wondering what “scamming” meant. “At your age. It’ll change.”

“I don’t know.” John chugged the beer and put his feet up on the railing. Metal clattered onto the floor. It was a folding knife.

John scrambled to retrieve it and slipped it back in his pants pocket.

“Why are you carrying a knife?”

“Because.”

Will waited.

“Things are dangerous in this city,” John said.

“Make sure it’s not used on you. And make sure you tell a police officer you have it if he ever starts to search you.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, with sarcastic emphasis.

“Relax, John. I’m not your enemy.”

John sat upright and fiddled with his pants. “Check this out, Will. Now that you’re cool and all…”

John unzipped his pants and pulled out his penis. Even in the ambient light, Will could see something like a small carabiner attached to its head. No, it was more like a crescent or curved barbell.

“What is that?”

“They call it a Prince Albert piercing,” John said. “This is what the chicks dig.”

“That looks like it hurts. Can you pee?” Will stopped looking.

“Not a problem,” John said.

“You can put it away now,” Will said, and John did. Will wished he had something stronger than the beer. He started to ask if his mother knew he had done that with the money she gave him, but stopped himself.

They drank in silence until John spoke again.

“How did you handle seeing all those dead bodies over the years?”

“You get used to it,” Will said. “Or you get another job. You try to think about doing your job, finding the bad guy.”

“I gotta go.” John stood up. “I’ll put the bottle downstairs. Want another one?”

“No, I’ll fall asleep. Can’t drink like I once could.”

In a minute, he watched John walk to his car and drive away.

As the quiet returned to the street, Will wondered why John had visited him, had chosen tonight, and had waited for him outside. Why had he put a piece of metal through his penis and felt the need to show it? Will was a man whose training and experience had made him a skeptic, even with his own family, perhaps especially with his own family. But John was no longer a boy and had long ago slipped the influence of his parents. Maybe John merely wanted to see how his stepfather was holding up.

“How are you?” John had asked. That commonplace greeting was always given in the expectation of a simple return: “fine.” The person asking it didn’t really want to know how you were. Will had done the same thing a hundred thousand times in his life before his surgery. Now he dutifully said, “fine,” even if inside he thought, “how much time do you have to hear my answer?”

How was he? His latest MRI scan had shown the area inside his spinal cord where the tumor had chosen to do its damage to be “stable,” the doctor said. That was good news. It meant no new tumor. But the neutrality of the word carried incredible weight. How was he? He couldn’t really feel touch on his belly or trunk below the tumor zone. The same numbness appeared in unpredictable patches on down his legs and feet. Thank god he could feel his right foot to drive a car.

He was usually constipated. His right leg was as strong as before. His left leg could barely make a step; he used the swing of his hip to compensate as he walked. That, and the inside muscles of both legs, which he had developed thanks to time with a kinesio-therapist, endlessly raising and lowing himself, knees pointed inward, with his back held straight against a concrete post. He walked with a cane and some days were better than others. After the activity of today, there would be hell to pay tomorrow. That’s how it went. Every. Step. Is. Hard.

How he was: it very much involved the spasms that ruled both legs now. Impulses to and from the brain and legs were scrambled by the damage inside the spinal cord. The result in the right leg centered on his quads. Quadriceps femoris-he had even learned the Latin name. As a normal man, it would have been the strongest muscle in his body. Now, the confusion between brain and muscles, and the fact that the right leg did most of the work walking, left it constantly clenching. The left quads were not so ambitious, simply jumping and thumping as it became tired. He took the maximum dose of Baclofen and Neurontin to make it bearable. Right at the moment, his right quads felt as if they wanted to tear themselves free from the bone, rip the confines of his skin, and fly out into the night like a wild creature.

How did you explain this to anyone?

This was how he was. He hadn’t been shot or otherwise injured in the line of duty. He hadn’t ended up in neurosurgery because of a crackup on a Harley he had foolishly bought to fend off middle age. Will Borders had bad DNA. Instead of a helix, it was the shape of a bull’s eye. Now he qualified for a handicapped placard. People asked him if his leg was getting better. What could you say? He had seen the MRI scans showing the inside of his spinal cord after the surgery: where once the cord had run thick and true, he now literally had threads.

And for all this, John was right: He was mellower, strangely so. It was more than the anti-spasticity drugs. His wife had left him, his body had, well, stabbed him in the back. But, most of the time, he was strangely at peace. He couldn’t understand it. Had he been the victim of an on-the-job injury, he probably would have spent many hours discussing this with a police shrink. As it was, he had the Christian Moerlein, nearly drained, the city skyline, slightly diminished as banks of lights in the towers were turned off. It would have been enough if he didn’t have a murder to solve.

He looked out on his city, wondered who had been on that boat with Kristen Gruber. He wished he knew who had tried the door to her condo. The doorman had been downstairs. They interviewed the neighbors on the floor: Two old ladies. One other condo was empty, on the market. He felt not a little pressure from the chief’s benevolent encouragement earlier that day. If he were really suspicious, Dodds-like suspicious, for Dodds had spent time in police-union politics, he would have worried he was being set up to fail. But that qualm didn’t find purchase in his mind or his maniac quads.

Maybe part of it was the “wow” view. He couldn’t keep his eyes from roaming to the left, into the little jewels of lights on Mount Adams, to Theresa, to her needless death. They had become accidental lovers, yet he wasn’t there to protect her when she needed him most. The weights on his heart that were never gone pulled painfully. Somehow, he let himself think again of Cheryl Beth, without anxiety and regret, and as he did, he fell asleep.

As his legs started quivering, he found himself with his father. They were both in uniform, their shirts incandescently white against the darkness of the narrow alley. Dirty brick walls of tenements hemmed them in. The only light besides their uniform shirts was a yellow streetlight half a block away: it backlit a shadow that approached slowly. Will reached for his service weapon but his holster was empty. He shouted to warn his father, “get down!” “take cover!” but his mouth seemed sewn shut. The words would not come out, instead being half-born primal sounds trapped inside him. The shots came as long fingers of flame from the shadow’s hand. Then the shadow was gone and his father was gone and only John was left standing in the alley, watching him.

When Will’s eyes came open and he was still sitting on the balcony, chilled from the post-midnight air, staring at the skyline, it still took him a full minute to know for certain he was awake.