“Nothing worse than a good citizen,” Lenhardt said, and every man in the room nodded. You’d think it would be the other way around, but in Lenhardt’s experience middle-class victims were just hell. People who paid their taxes, toed the line-they believed they should be exempt from crime, that it was a constitutional guarantee.

“I think the family’s grief is perfectly understandable,” the colonel said. “They’ve lost a child.”

Lenhardt wished the gathering were large enough so he could catch Infante’s eye, make a face, but he shouldn’t risk it. Instead he said, “We’ve already traced the gun and established that Perri Kahn had access to it.”

This was Lenhardt’s way of saying, We know how to do our job, dickhead.

“I know,” the chief said, “because as of this morning, her parents have hired Eddie Dixon. He called me at home to give me a raft of shit about you guys talking to the parents while their daughter was in surgery. So-good work. Any time Dixon is pissed, I figure that’s a point for our side.”

Dixon had a fearsome reputation as a defense attorney. A thin, light-skinned black man, he dressed in a style that Lenhardt called Park Avenue pimp-beautiful hand-tailored suits in not-quite-right colors. He was particularly partial to a shade of dove gray, for example, which he wore with a rose-colored shirt and matching handkerchief poking out of the breast pocket. His success in the city, where juries were prone to acquit, was understandable. It was harder to explain how Dixon had done so well in the county, where jurors tended to be law-and-order types. Lenhardt, who was three-for-one lifetime against the lawyer, chalked it up to Dixon ’s way with voir dire. He had an eye for the bleeding hearts wrapped in the most unlikely packages-stern-faced White Marsh men, starchy Ruxton women.

“That’s an odd match,” the lieutenant said. “You wouldn’t expect a Glendale family to gravitate toward a city slick like Eddie.”

“He might have gravitated toward them,” the colonel said.

“More like orbited, circling Shock Trauma like the ambulance chaser he is. Helicopter chaser,” Lenhardt amended, caught up in his own whimsical vision. “I think I saw him hanging from the chopper as it lifted yesterday. It was like the fall of Saigon.”

“Were you there when the girls were taken out?” The colonel was not much for Lenhardt’s brand of humor, which was Lenhardt’s secondary complaint against the man. But then the colonel had never been a murder police, and that was Lenhardt’s primary complaint. The colonel had come up through various property crimes-burglary, auto theft. Want to follow a serial number? He was your guy. Need tips on how to canvass pawnshops? No one better.

But when it came to the simple task of talking to another human being one-on-one, the colonel was in way over his head.

“No, both had been transported by the time we got there,” Lenhardt said.

“First-four protocol,” Infante put in. “And of the first four who went in, not a single one was homicide.”

“So?” The colonel all but bristled at the implicit rebuke for the new policy, which he had helped implement.

“So,” Lenhardt said, “some things didn’t get done. No one thought to ride with the witness in the ambo, keep talking to her. They accepted what she said at the scene at face value and let her go unescorted.”

“Why shouldn’t they?” the colonel asked.

The question so appalled Lenhardt, went so directly to the heart of everything he believed, that he was left uncharacteristically speechless. In his head, however, he had an answer: Because people lie, dickhead. Especially people at murder scenes.

The lieutenant stepped in, all too familiar with the friction between his sergeant and colonel. “Did you get to her later, interview her at the hospital?”

“No, and that’s another thing that bugs me. She was sedated when we finally got there, at her parents’ insistence. Yet her injury is pretty superficial.”

“She was shot by her friend, who killed someone else and then planted a bullet in her own jaw,” the colonel said. “Even without an injury, she might have required a tranquilizer to sleep.”

Lenhardt would concede this point. “Also, she’s at GBMC.”

“GBMC, not Sinai?” The chief frowned. “But Sinai has the trauma center for north county.”

“Exactly. This teenage girl insisted on GBMC, and the EMTs followed her instructions because GBMC was slightly closer and can handle that kind of minor gunshot injury. So, on the one hand, she’s so hysterical that she needs to be sedated, and yet she also has this moment of clarity in which she demands a certain hospital.”

He let this information hang in the air, seizing the moment to begin passing around photocopies of his notes on the blood evidence in the restroom. Copies of the digital photos were attached, photos downloaded and printed with only seventeen malfunctions in the software and the laser printer. The chief may have been on the phone at all hours, but Lenhardt and Infante had been here until 1:00 A.M., at war with the computer.

“Here’s some potential problems as I see it-there’s some stuff that doesn’t match the preliminary story, neat as it’s shaping up. We’ve got a living witness who told the responders that this one girl did the shooting, and most of the evidence fits. But some doesn’t, and those are the kinds of details that Eddie Dixon can make hay out of-like this trail of blood that seems to be leading away from the door. Or these two locked stalls.”

He didn’t feel he had to mention the thing, as Infante insisted on calling the tampon. But it was another piece of the puzzle, or would be if it turned out that it didn’t match one of the three girls. The principal insisted that the restrooms were cleaned at day’s end, so it had to be from that morning, and the school’s doors had been open for only twenty minutes. Once these facts came up in discovery, Dixon was free to spin any fairy tale he wanted, defense attorneys not being bound by the facts, much less the burden of consistency. Their entire case was going to rest on the girl in GBMC, and Lenhardt was already troubled by her behavior so far. Why had she refused to open the door when rescuers arrived? Why hadn’t she crawled or hopped, if only to get away from the considerable carnage around her? He knew rookie cops who had thrown up on their shoes at lesser sights.

And why did she care which hospital treated her? Oh, how he wished he had been one of those first four. He would have knelt next to her, held her hand, ridden with her in the ambo, gotten her life story, been her best friend, her favorite uncle. Twenty-four hours later that opportunity was gone.

“You’ve linked the girl in Shock Trauma to the gun, at least indirectly,” the chief said. “What about the witness? Have you got anything concrete?”

“She’s a person of interest,” Lenhardt said. “And once we talk to her at length, she may be a lot more interesting. Even accounting for fear and shock, her actions don’t track. Maybe today she’ll be clearer. That’s what I’m hoping for.”

He thought of his daughter in the same situation. Of course, she was only eleven, but Jessica could be very cool in an emergency. She had a breezy confidence that astonished him at times, a certainty about herself that had only started to wobble in the past year, her first in middle school. Jessica was prepared for disaster, too, but that, sadly, was a part of life for cop kids.

Don’t ever tell anyone that Daddy is a cop, or that Daddy has a gun.

This was the brave new world of post-9/11, when no law-enforcement official was ever truly off duty. Earlier this year they had shown the officers a video from a robbery in a parking lot, where some thug confronted a man and his daughter, demanded money. Even as the guy reached for his gun, the little girl piped up, “You can’t do that. My daddy’s a policeman.” And bam, bam, bam, the guy was dead, killed in front of his child. They were told to instruct their families that Daddy’s job-or Mommy’s-was a kind of secret among strangers, that it was up to Daddy (or Mommy) to let people know.