My official NYPD vehicle was in the shop for repairs, so I was reduced to using the family car. It was a sturdy, battle-tested Dodge van, bought used a few months ago, although the way my luck was running, the horn would go any second now, like on the VW in Little Miss Sunshine.

I was on my way to 72nd Street, steering with one hand and knotting my tie with the other, when Chief of Detectives McGinnis called my cell.

“Where the hell are you, Bennett?” His voice was forceful enough to burst a blood vessel.

“Moving as fast as I can, Chief,” I said. “I’ll be there within five. What’s up?”

“The maître d’ at the Twenty-one Club just got popped!”

I felt an all-too-familiar twisting in the pit of my stomach. The Polo store and now 21? Two murders, at two of the city’s highest-profile places, within an hour of each other? This was starting to look as bad as last night, and maybe worse.

“You got any take on it?” I said.

“Maybe Donald Trump finally went postal. Maybe there’s a roving shooter, maybe a couple of them and it’s a coincidence. We’ve mobilized the Counter-Terror Unit, just in case that’s involved. That’s your specialty, right – terrorism? No, I’m sorry, catastrophes.”

I shook my head. The cat was all the way out of the bag about my working for the CRU, wasn’t it? Pretty soon the whole NYPD would learn my dirty little secret. Michael Bennett had once been a Fed.

“I wouldn’t call it a specialty,” I said.

“I don’t care what you call it. You’re the commissioner’s handpicked expert. Now get your ass over here and figure it all out for me, huh?”

So that was why McGinnis’s britches were in a knot, I thought. I wasn’t his first choice to handle this, but he’d been overridden by Commissioner Daly.

“You think I volunteered for this, Chief?” I shot back. But he’d already hung up.

I stomped down on the Dodge’s gas pedal, sending a tangle of errant soccer cleats and Happy Meal castoffs rattling around in the passenger-seat footwell.

The front of the Madison Avenue Polo store looked like a police vehicle sales auction. There were cop motorcycles, Emergency Service Unit heavy rescue trucks, dozens of blue-and-whites.

I’d seen hot crime scenes before, but this was way over the top. Then I realized it must have been part of the NYPD Counter-Terror Unit’s new surge tactic, which I’d heard about but hadn’t yet seen. At the first hint of a threat, as many as two hundred cops would be sent in to blanket an area with an overwhelming shock-and-awe presence.

Maybe Daly was right, I thought for a moment. The lights and cops and chaos, the adrenaline rush stiffening my spine. What I was seeing was definitely reminding me of the disaster scenes I once worked.

It was impressive, all right. As I badged my way past the Emergency Service Unit guys on the sidewalk, I blinked warily at the cut-down M16s they were strapping on. Those had been issued after 9/11, but I still couldn’t get used to them, and I probably never would. If we could just go back to the good old days when only the drug dealers had assault rifles, I thought.

The inside of Polo’s flagship store looked satanically plush, especially to a guy who did most of his shopping at Old Navy and the Children’s Place. A sandy-haired man at the top of the mahogany staircase came forward to meet me – Terry Lavery, a very competent Nineteenth Precinct detective. I was glad to see somebody who I knew I could get along with, and who was smart, to boot.

“What do you think of the army out there, Mikey?” he said. “I haven’t seen this much NYPD blue since the DC convention.”

I snapped my fingers, like a lightbulb in my head had just gone on.

“So that’s why I want to get naked and slide down this banister,” I said. “Hey, right off, I just want to let you know that it wasn’t my idea to come tromping on your turf. I actually called in for a personal today. But the PC insisted. He wants me out of the way, so I can’t be questioned about that debacle up in Harlem last night.”

“Sure, sure,” Lavery said, rolling his eyes. “Just tell the Commish I said hi, next time you meet him for lunch at Elaine’s.”

With the ritual chop-busting out of the way, Lavery flipped opened his notepad.

“Here’s what we got so far,” he said. “Victim’s name is Kyle Devens. He was forty-six, gay, lived in Brooklyn, been working here eleven years. There was one witness to the actual incident, another clerk. He managed to whisper about a dozen words to us, then he went catatonic, so we don’t have a description of the shooter yet.”

“Near as we can put it all together, he walked in here before noon, pulled out a semiautomatic pistol, pumped a full clip into our boy, then walked back out.”

“That’s it?” I said. “No robbery, no struggle, nothing else?”

“If he was trying to hold the place up, he really botched it, because absolutely nothing’s missing. If there’s another reason, we don’t know it.”

“Did Devens have a boyfriend?” I said. Despite the antiterror response, we had to treat this as a regular murder until we knew otherwise.

“The manager said he lived with a guy a couple of years ago, but it didn’t work out, so he moved back in with his mother. We’re still trying to contact her. But there didn’t seem to be anything in the wind like a lovers’ quarrel, and he got along with his coworkers. No priors or indications that he might have hung out with bad guys.”

My lousy luck was holding. It was already clear that this wasn’t going to be an easy case.

My gaze moved to the scattered cuff links in a crime scene cop’s camera FlashPack, sparkling like ornaments on the expensive rug – except that mixed in with them were several fat.45-caliber brass shell casings.

The Crime Scene Unit tech, an old friend named John Cleary, caught me eyeing them. “Don’t get your hopes up, Mike,” he said. “We already dusted them. No prints. And if that’s not good enough news, no exit wounds, from a.45 at point-blank range. I’m not the ME, but my guess is that means hollow points.”

More good news, all right. Not just a murderous psycho, but one who was locked and loaded with especially lethal ammo.

Kyle Devens’s body was still lying on the fancy rug, too. He’d fallen in such a way that he was reflected in the ten-foot-high corner try-on mirror – a composition of blood, death, and broken glass, multiplied by three. I stared down at the gaping wounds in his chest.

“Yeah, when you’re up against unarmed tie salesmen, everyone knows it’s all about stopping power.”

But almost more unsettling than the degree of violence was the shooter’s meticulousness. Not only had he been quick and efficient, he’d used gloves when he loaded his gun.

I thought of the 21 Club killing and I started to get the vague, uneasy hunch that we were dealing with the same man.

There was nothing vague about my feeling that this was going to be one heck of a long day. That settled down on me like a soggy raincoat.