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Adan followed him out, stopping at the cash register, before climbing into his pickup truck.
Dupond drove a department car, a creaky Ford with bad air conditioning and no power. They took Chef Menteur, turned right on Louisa, making their way through traffic, and found Kreeg still in place. The two uniforms on the next street reported nothing happening. Dupond parked the car, got his vest out of the trunk. Kreeg joined them a minute later.

“Get Weaver and his partner out and into the back
yard of the house behind,” Dupond said. “I’ll go in the front door. I’ve got the warrant. Let Kreeg cover the front in case he gets past us. You go up the driveway. There’s a door on that side, come through after me. Watch out for the kid, the little brother. If he’s in there we don’t want any shooting if we can help it.”

Adan nodded. He was older than Dupond but not a natural leader. His short stature belied an aggressive nature. Now he was pulli
ng his own vest on over the t-shirt, buckling and strapping. He double-checked his weapon, racked a round out, popped the clip and replaced it. He nodded again. The three of them, Kreeg trailing, took off at a slow trot down the block. Adan peeled off up the driveway. Dupond hopped up three short steps to the front door. His pistol was in his right hand. He pounded on the door with his left, stepped to the side. Inside he could hear a TV blaring, then silence. A few seconds later, an elderly black woman cracked the door.

Dupond
flashed his badge. “Tell J. Lee to come out,” he said.

“He ain’t here,” she said. Her eyes were wide and deep brown. She tilted her head back
, then forward, then back again, rolling her eyes into the back. Dupond stepped forward, shoving the door wide open, and stepped inside. The TV was playing a kid’s show, the sound turned off. There was a sofa on the right, the far wall, and a small kitchen joined in the rear. A wide-eyed little boy sat on the sofa eating popcorn. Adan stepped through the side door into the kitchen. Dupond pointed in the back, down the hall. The woman moved to the sofa, picked up the little boy, looked at Dupond, pointed to a door in the hall, the first door on the left, and went out the front.

Adan went in first, screamin
g at the top of his lungs. Dupond followed in time to see J.Lee Clive crammed into the narrow window, his bare feet sticking out of a pair of raggedy blue jeans. Adan leaped, grabbed one leg, and started pulling. Dupond stuck his pistol back in the holster, grabbed the other leg, and held on.  Clive rolled over on to his back, still in the window, half in half out the window. There was a gun in his hand and he was fighting to get it past the widow frame. Dupond reacted immediately, dropped the leg he was holding, grabbing for the arm. Adan dropped his leg, stepped back, and kicked Clive in the balls as hard as he could. The gun fell out on to the scraggly lawn under the window, Clive fell back into the room where he was smothered by Dupond and Adan, who got him cuffed then took a minute to catch their breath.

“Good move,”
Dupond said, trying to get his nerves settled.

“It’s my specialty,” Adan replied. “I don’t like to take chances.”

Clive had nothing to say and fifteen minutes later, he was on his way downtown in the back of a squad with Brooks and Weaver, leaving Dupond and Adan to decompress. The zippered bag held nothing but money and a few grams of coke. Dupond was relieved and disappointed at the same time. He got cranked on the action, always did, nothing he liked better. The pulse ratcheting quickness of a takedown, the clutching fear of weapons fired. It all ignited his nature. He’d once run six blocks through a housing project to tackle a suspect only to find, when he finally got him cuffed on the ground, that he’d dropped his radio. By that time a crowd was gathering and Dupond kept his weapon in his hand as the crowd grew larger, attracted by the sight of a single policeman. The protests had just begun when a squad car pulled up. The crowd scattered. Too much law. There was something about the chase that stirred his blood, whether it was physical or the mental back and forth of detecting, determining motive, gathering evidence then nailing someone to the wall.

Now he and Adan, who lived cranked up
, were going through the cool down phase. Adan was smoking a cigarette, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. He blew out smoke, shrugging out of his vest.

“You know, he’s going to walk. What’s the chances of that gun being the one he used to off the kid? The DA isn’t going to want to go ahead with a murder charge. Nothing to tie him to it but the guy in the store.”

Dupond shrugged. “He’s smart enough to dump the weapon. We got him cold on the coke so that’s good for a year anyway. Maybe attempted murder of a police officer?” He knew when he said it that it wouldn’t happen.

“So, what you’re saying is that a year from now he’ll be out and we’ll be chasing his ass down again.”

“Yep,” Dupond said. He threw his vest in the back seat. “Only he’ll learn a few new tricks in jail and probably be better at doing what he does. Next time we won’t find the victim the next morning or anyone to tie him in. He’s a smart kid.”

Police Headquarters was a slate grey monstrosity, a stolid granite building weathered by years and rain and exhaust.
Green moss tinged the grout, creeping down the side of the building and staining the sidewalk. In the summer, the walls dripped sweat, in winter they held the outside chill. Homicide occupied the third floor, a long tiled hallway opening up on either side to offices jammed with desks. Dupond and Adan occupied the last office, along with six other detectives on rotating shifts. There was a constant parade of people moving in and out, maintenance men, patrolmen, attorneys, witnesses and suspects, the occasional wife or girlfriend. The interrogations rooms sat at the far end of the hall, the first thing anyone saw when they came out the elevator, steel screened windows and solid doors.

Now at his desk, Dupond waded through stacks of paperwork. Crime scene reports, the paperwork from the autopsy, notes from Adan and Brooks and Weaver all had to be tied together, the DA notified. Adan sat across the room, his feet up on the desk while he banged away on a typewriter. An hour after sitting down
, Dupond had what he thought was enough to get Clive at least charged. Convicted probably, maybe, who knew? A good lawyer and a liberal judge could put him back on the street in forty-eight hours where Clive could pick right back up where he started, maybe change his territory or even run off to bigger cities and bigger deals. Dupond just let it slide. His job was to catch the bad guy, to orchestrate the hunt and seal things up as best he could. Worrying about the rest of the system was useless and could drive any reasonable man crazy if he let it.

He was stuffing paper into a folder when Alton Reed stuck his head in the door. Reed was beefy,
a good looking blonde man with heavy shoulders and the whitest teeth of anyone in the department, which went over well when he was holding press conference. He was also the head of Homicide and an aspiring politician. He had come up through patrol, earned a law degree at night, and was tagged as a future candidate for mayor by some of the local Republicans, who were fighting to gain ground in a Democratic state and an even more Democratic city.

“Sooner or later,” Reed was fond of saying, “Even the welfare people and the bleeding heart liberals will get tired of not being able to walk through the French quarter without getting robbed or shot. When that happens they’ll want a strong and experienced law enforcement guy running the city.” He would flash his teeth at his audience when he said it, usually to a group of coffee wired cops, raise his hands in peace signs like Richard Nixon, and finish with “Guess who they’ll want?” He was also fond of beignets liberally sprinkled with powdered sugar and Dup
ond could see a light dusting of white powder on his jacket sleeve.

“Get your partner here and head out to the Lakefront. Jennie has the address.” Reed said. Jennie was his secretary, a former patrol officer, one of the first woman patrol officers in the city. She’d been a good one until she ran across a domestic dispute gone bad, really bad, when she’d gone out the window of a third story housing project window grappling with a drunk husband. The husband had gone out too, hit the ground first and cushioned her fall. He died, Jennie took desk duty rather than injury retirement so she could still carry a gun. She ran the office, doling out assignments, while Reed concentrated on looking good and smiling a lot for the camera.

“What’s up?” Dupond asked, already picking up his jacket.

“That’s for you to tell me. Pat
rol got a call from some girl, wanting us to check on her friend. They showed up, found the girl dead, and the uniform called in saying we need to get out there. Simpson and Nye are tied up with a shooting on Benefit, Slaughter and Peroncel are off kissing the ass of the current mayor. Who, I may add, is down ten points in the polls. That leaves you and Emile, who right now is scuffing up the top of a desk I don’t have the budget to replace. Call me when you’re done. I might even answer. Or better yet, write it up and I’ll read it tomorrow.”

“Come on Alton, we just made a major bust of a drug dealer and wanton killer of innocent folks on the street,” Adan said. “Send somebody else.”

“I would if I had heard you,” Reed said from down the hall. “But I must have already been gone before you started talking.”

   Hard packed earth made up the trail, rolling through pine and scrub brush and scattered oak. Not quite flat, it offered enough dips and extended roots to make a runner pay close attention or risk a twisted ankle. During the summer, the place was thick with bugs and moisture laden air blowing in from Lake Ponchartrain, carrying the smell of brackish water and moldy swamp grass. Mosquitos buzzed in the low bushes along the trail. If a runner stopped long enough to catch a breath, the buzz provided a background symphony to the whisper of wind falling from the trees or the occasional buzz of an outboard motor on the lake. It was a weekday and the place was empty, silent but for a single soul pounding her way through the weaving track.

Cassie Reynold was working on her third mile, pushing past the physical wall, the heavy air and the occasional ankle snapping trap nature threw in her way. A rubber band pinned back her brown hair, now dark with sweat. She was wearing a gym suit that covered a body taught with muscle but unmistakably female, hardened by two years of constant training. The shirt was soaked through with sweat in the back, a dark line that made a T across her shoulders and trailed down the center, a signpost of exertion. In the Louisiana air, the moisture had nowhere to go. Cassie jogged another hundred yards, her pace quickening as she went, pushing the last half mile. It was an exorcism, the last three years of heartache and anguish leaking from her pores, a cleansing exhaustion. By the time she passed the big oak a hundred yards from the trail’s end, she was running flat out, pushing harder, reaching for something. Vindication? The end of guilt? Something.  She felt a burst of cooler air under the big tree, sucking in air in gulps, sprinting for the parking lot. The hard ground turned to soft grass over the last fifty yards. Cassie pulled up at the edge of the hard parking lot, bent at the knees,
and began her cool down walk around the lot.

The run was purgatory and therapy, preparation and pain relief, an escape from her past, yet the only way to move forward. A little more than two years ago, she was looking forward to a career, marriage, family. Today, with even the birds silent in the muggy air, she had nothing to look forward to but wo
rk. And death. Maybe hers. More likely someone else’s, or multiple someone else’s. She didn’t know and cared even less. Killing was the kind of work she was born to do. She knew that now. On a hot night in Virginia, with cold calculating hatred running through her veins, she had ended the only escape from what she was. In the ensuing two years, she embraced the running, the training, honing her physical skills mercilessly in the hilly terrain of the Southwest under the tutelage of the best, sometimes she thought the worst, the U.S. government had to offer. There were men with no more feeling than a beast, women with no more motherly instinct than a reptile. Now she was one of them.

Another walking lap around the parking lot brought her to her car. She sat in the driver’s seat, kic
ked off the running shoes, wiping her face with a towel. The sound of tires on concrete came to her. Most days she could run alone. Occasionally another runner would come to this spot or just someone looking for a walk through the woods. She closed the door, fired up the engine. Waiting for the air conditioning to catch up, she watched a black Lincoln Continental swing into the lot, heading directly for her. The car stopped and a woman got out.

Dr. Jennifer Wesling stepped directly over to Cassie’s car, signaling for her to roll down the window. She did and the wave of hot moist air fought the cold air from the vents. Cassie shivered.

“Go home and get changed,” Wesling said. “Meet me at the office in two hours. It’s time to go to work.”

With that, she turned, got back in her car, and drove off. Cassie put the Mustang in gear and followed.

The victim was face down on a four-post bed, arms and legs secu
red with rope. Another rope twisted around her neck, the two frayed ends arranged neatly in a line down her back. There were two people in the room when Dupond walked in, a young patrolman looking white faced and shaken, and an older man on his hands and knees, peering intently at the wrist of the girl, where a complex knot wrapped twice around. The older man looked up when Dupond came in.