Detectives (like corporals, only one step above the lowest rank in the Police Department hierarchy) are not normally given brand-new cars to drive, much less to take home after work, but Jason Washington was not an ordinary detective.

Until recently, he had been able to take more than a little pride in his reputation of being the best detective in the Homicide Bureau, which was tantamount to saying that he was arguably the best detective in the entire Philadelphia Police Department, as it is generally conceded that the best detectives are assigned to Homicide.

Washington had not willingly given up his assignment to Homicide. He had been transferred (he thought of it as "shanghaied") to the justthen-formed Special Operations Division over his somewhat bluntly stated desire not to be transferred.

There had been a number of advantages in being assigned to Homicide. There was of course the personal satisfaction of simply knowing that youwere a Homicide detective. That satisfaction was of course buttressed if you could believe that you were probably the best Homicide detective in the Bureau.

Jason Washington was not plagued with extraordinary humility. While he was perfectly willing to admit there were a number of very good detectives in Homicide, he could not honestly state that he knew of any who were quite as professionally competent as he was.

And the money was good, because of overtime. As a Homicide detective, he had taken home as much money as a chief inspector. Chief inspectors, he knew, often put in as many hours as he did, but under Civil Service regulations, they didn't get paid for it; they were given "compensatory time off" that they never seemed able to find time to take.

And chief inspectors (and other Police Department supervisors) spent a good portion of their time handling administrative matters that had little to do with catching critters, marching them through the judicial process, and seeing them sentenced and packed off to the pokey.

In Homicide, all Jason Washington had had to do was catch critters, either on jobs that had come to him via the Wheel, or on jobs that the Wheel had given to others, but on which he had been asked to "assist."

(The Wheel wasn't really a wheel, but rather a piece of lined paper, on which, at the beginning of each tour, each Homicide detective's name was written. As each homicide came to the attention of the Homicide Bureau, the job was given to the detective whose name was at the head of the list. He would not be given another job until every other detective listed on the Wheel had, in turn, been given one.)

While Jason Washington was at least as good as any other Homicide detective while working the crime scene, and certainly at least as knowledgeable as any other Homicide detective in the use of the hightech techniques now available to match fibers, determine that a particular bullet had been fired from a particular weapon, and so on, his real strengths, he believed, were psychological and intellectual.

He believed, with more than a little reason, that he had no peers in interrogation. He could play, with great skill, any number of roles when interviewing a suspect. If the situation demanded it, Washington, who stood well over six feet and weighed 220 pounds, could strike terror into the heart of most human beings who had previously believed they were not afraid of the Devil himself. Or, with equal ease, he could assume the role of sympathetic uncle who understood how, through no fault of his own, the suspect had found himself in a situation where striking the deceased in the forehead with a fire axe had seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do under the circumstances, and that the decent thing to do now was put the whole unfortunate incident behind him (or her) by making a clean breast of it.

Intellectually, Washington believed that both by natural inclination (perhaps genetic) and by long experience, he had no equal in discovering anomalies. An anomaly, by definition, is a deviation, modification, mutation, permutation, shift, or variation from the norm. If there was one tiny little piece of the jigsaw puzzle that didn't fit, Jason Washington could find it.

He had, in other words, been perfectly happy as the acknowledged best detective in Homicide when Jerome Nelson had been found in his apartment on Society Hill dead of multiple wounds probably inflicted by one of his own matched set of teak-handled Solingen kitchen knives.

The Wheel had assigned the case to Detective Anthony C. "Tony" Harris, who was not only a good friend of Washington's, but, in Washington's judgment, the second-best detective in Homicide. As soon as the case had come in, and as soon as Jerome Nelson's position in society had become known, Jason Washington had felt sure that he would soon be involved with it himself. Tony certainly would want some help, and would naturally turn to Jason Washington, or Captain Henry C. Quaire, who commanded the Homicide Bureau, would order him to work with Tony.

It hadn't happened quite that way. The Honorable Jerry Carlucci, mayor of the City of Brotherly Love, had taken the job away from the Homicide Bureau and given it to the newly formed Special Operations Division. Jason Washington's initial reaction to that had mirrored that of Captain Quaire and Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, who commanded the Detective Division that included the Homicide Bureau: righteous indignation that once more The Dago had put his goddamn nose in where it had no business.

Mayor Carlucci's notorious penchant for issuing orders directly to various divisions (for that matter, to individual officers) of the Police Department, instead of letting the commissioner run it, was, in a sense, understandable. Before winning, in his first bid for elective office, the mayoralty, The Dago had been police commissioner. He had, in fact, held every rank in the Philadelphia Police Department except police woman. He therefore believed that he knew at least as much about running the Police Department as anyone else. And he had read the statutory functions of the mayor, which quite clearly stated that he was responsible for supervising "the various departments of the city."

On a secondary level, his parochial indignation as a Homicide detective aside, Jason Washington had thought that he understood The Dago's game plan, and that it would work. The Dago had turned out to be a better politician than anyone ever thought he would be.

Jason Washington and Jerry Carlucci went way back together. Carlucci had done a year in Homicide as a lieutenant, before he passed the captain's examination and moved to Highway Patrol. It was only fair to acknowledge that Carlucci had been a good lieutenant-he had been an all around good cop, no one ever denied that-one proof of which being that even back then he had been smart enough to exercise only the barest minimum of supervision over Detective Jason Washington.

When, rarely, they bumped into each other, Washington could count on a bear hug and being greeted either by his Christian name or as "Ol' Buddy," or both. Jason Washington, who did not like to be hugged by anyone except his wife and daughter, and disliked being called "Ol' Buddy" by anyone, always smiled and referred to The Dago as "Mr. Mayor."

The way Washington had seen the assignment of the Nelson job to Special Operations seemed to make sense. Carlucci had just set up Special Operations. It was his. What had become a big deal murder in the newspapers, because of the victim, was actually just a routine homicide. The odds were that the job would be closed in a week or two by Homicide. But that would not earn The Dago any favorable space in the newspapers. That's what Homicide was supposed to do, solve homicides.

But if Jerry Carlucci's Special Operations solved the Nelson job, His Honor the Mayor could, and would, claim the credit. And Washington had seen that The Dago had carefully hedged his bet: Special Operations was commanded by Peter Wohl, who not only had been a sergeant in Homicide, but was, in Washington's judgment (and that of a lot of other knowledgeable people), one of the smartest cops in the Department. Before The Dago had formed Special Operations and given it to Peter Wohl, Wohl had been the youngest (ever) staff inspector in the department.