“Eighth floor,” the guard said. “Elevator’s behind the wall to the back.”

I knew the way well. In over ten years as a prosecutor, I had come to this building more times than I cared to count. Some days I was sent to sit in at meetings called by the commissioner in which the district attorney himself had no interest; on other occasions I came to brainstorm on investigative strategies in cases the department was struggling to solve; frequently I was there to plead for manpower in a matter that was not getting appropriate police attention; and every now and then-under this administration’s budget-driven oversight-I walked over to attend the promotion of a friend to a higher-ranking post.

Compstat had revolutionized the accountability of precinct commanders when it was introduced to the department in the early nineties. Several times a month, at seven o’clock in the morning, bosses from one of the city’s geographic divisions were summoned to appear at One Police Plaza, to spend the next three hours being grilled by the chief of operations and two of his trusted henchmen. There was only one direction in which this mayor wanted the crime rate to move, and each man was called upon to answer for the evil that crossed his borderlines and played havoc with the numbers regularly released to the press by the Public Information deputy.

When the elevator doors opened on eight, I was facing a wall of blue-uniformed backs of the commanding officers, pressing ahead against each other as the invited guests who were not members of the department turned the corner to enter the Operations Room and take their seats in anticipation of the arrival of Chief Lunetta.

Chapman called out to me before I noticed him, wedged between two full inspectors who were laughing at whatever tale he was spinning. “Hey, Coop! Meet Lenny McNab. Just been transferred over to clean up the Three-three. Take a good look at him now, because after this meeting I doubt he’ll be able to sit down for a week.”

McNab shook his head and my hand at the same time. The newspapers had been full of stories about the string of bodega burglaries in McNab’s territory. If he couldn’t account for progress in the investigation by this morning, he’d be made to look like a fool by the three grand inquisitors.

Lunetta’s voice boomed out at us from the stairwell door. “Let’s get it going, guys. We’ve got a lot to cover this morning.” His entourage brushed past us and we dutifully followed.

Room 802 was a cavernous space, with double-height ceilings and state-of-the-art electronic equipment, that had been designed to become Command Central in case of any terrorist takeover or natural disaster in New York City. Three gigantic media screens filled the front wall of the room, which was lined on one length with concealed booths-to hold the crisis solvers at more critical points in time, and observers on more benign occasions-while the other wall was decorated with police shields and murals featuring flags of various law enforcement agencies. Two tables ran through the center of the room from forward to rear, around which the commanders seated themselves with the personnel who ran their investigative and uniformed forces, as well as a few detectives who might be called upon to explain the status of a particular case that had attracted media attention.

Directly beneath the huge screens was the podium, to which speakers would be called at the whim of the chief of operations. Lunetta would tell the computer programmer who sat beside him which graphics to display over their heads on the three screens-usually starting with a map of the precinct, a chart of the previous month’s crime statistics, and a graph plotting the most recent week’s violent crime activity, with robberies flagged in red, rapes in blue, and burglaries in green.

Lunetta and his superchiefs sat in the rear at a table perpendicular to the array of well-decorated men spread down the center of the room. He was tall and lean, with angled features and black hair that was drawn sleekly back and trimmed at the neck in military fashion. He looked great in the dark navy blue uniform, and knew it.

My seat was in one of the three rows of folding chairs behind the chief’s position, which were reserved for non-NYPD spectators. Each chair was labeled with a scrap of paper torn from a legal pad. Excusing myself, I tried to slither into place, passing over two lawyers from the United States Attorney’s Office and four guys from upstate police departments, before sitting down next to a woman who introduced herself as a trend researcher from the Department of Justice. I opened the lid of my coffee cup and took a slug as Lunetta called the first group of officers to the podium.

Frank Guffey moved forward to the mike, flanked by his supervising staff. He was smart and well liked by police and prosecutors, a tough boss who had been moved from the East Harlem area a year earlier down to the cushy confines of Wall Street, and now back to the high-crime neighborhood of the Twenty-eighth Precinct.

“G’morning, Chief. I’m reporting on the period that closed July thirty-first.” Guffey smiled and paused briefly, weighing whether to add a personal pleasantry. “Nice to be here again in the North, after a brief visit to Manhattan South, sir.”

Lunetta shot back, “I hope you can say as much after the meeting.”

“First of all, the decrease in overall crime continues.” Clearly, Guffey knew the drill. That’s what these guys wanted to hear, right out of the box. “Now, we do show an increase in robberies, but-”

Forget the “buts,” buddy. I watched as Lunetta turned his head ninety degrees and gave a command to the computer programmer sitting at his right shoulder. Seconds later, the three overhead graphics changed. A map of the Twenty-eighth Precinct’s territory dominated the middle screen.

Lunetta barked, “Break them down for me, Inspector. I want them by day of the week, and then by the time of day of the tour.”

Before Guffey could lift his papers and find the correct answers, we could all see the numbers in the projections that the chief’s team had prepared for this attack.

“I want to get right into these spikes, Guffey. Take us through them. Give me reasons.”

I could see the color rise in Frank’s cheeks, as most of the bosses around the tables seemed to squirm in sympathy.

Guffey started to respond. “Several of them seem to be the work of the same team, Chief. The numbers started to spike when a pair of male Hispanics began to hit a couple of apartments on Broadway, just north of McDonald’s. Same M.O. Gain entry with a ruse-female knocking on the door for the perps and asking for her sister. Then she disappears while the guys tie up everyone inside with speaker wire-”

“Drug related?”

“Probably. Only, the one last week, on the twenty-ninth-”

“You mean the restaurant manager they burned with an iron?” Lunetta thrived on displaying to the crowd how well he could learn the detail of hundreds of these cases, outlined for him in his briefing books, and talk about them as familiarly as if he were working on them himself.

“Yeah. We figure that was a mistake. They went to the wrong apartment. I got Louis Robertson here. They’re his cases, if you’d like to hear from him.”

“Not unless he’s got answers for me, Guffey. Excuses I got plenty of. It’s answers I want. You guys doing the obvious? Running fingerprints through Safis?” The new, automated fingerprint-matching system was solving scores of cases that used to require tedious hand searches. “Checking with surrounding precincts to see if they got anything like this going? Parole-probation-informants? I assume you’ll study these charts and decide how to redeploy your manpower to address the situation more aggressively.”

Guffey said his men had been doing all of the above and that he would certainly make use of the time charts. He got through the other crime categories fairly gracefully and back to his seat without a great deal of damage.