Anne folded the bag and tossed it for me to catch, explaining that since technically it wasn’t a St. Paul or Ramsey County case, technically she wasn’t violating department regulations by lending me her file. Technically.

“But I want it back. Without any rocket ships or baseball diamonds doodled in the margins,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to grease the skids for you with Teeters.”

“You’re being awfully cooperative, Annie,” I told her.

She leaned across the desk and spoke slowly between clenched teeth. “I do not like it when women are killed simply because they are women. It is UN-AC-CEPT-ABLE.”

Now you know why Anne Scalasi is the best in the business. It’s not the training; it’s not the experience. It’s the outrage. She never lost it. The rest of us had. We were afraid of it, afraid of how it twisted our perceptions of the real world, afraid of the pain it made us feel. So we hid from it—hid behind bad jokes and out-and-out goofiness, hid behind booze and drugs and sex and macho behavior that bordered on the self-destructive until the outrage went away, leaving us numb. Not Anne. Anne did not hide from her outrage. She drew it like a gun.

“I’ll tell you another thing,” she said but never did. That’s because she was interrupted by a detective, a black man whose reputation was also unfairly marred by an affirmative-action label.

“Yo, mama!” Martin McGaney called as he danced toward us, waving a folded piece of paper like a baton before him.

“Yo, mama?” I repeated quietly.

“This better be good, Martin,” Anne warned as the detective approached. The warning was unnecessary. You could tell by the smile on his face.

“Lookee what I have,” he said, drawing out the words, handing Anne the paper. It was an arrest warrant.

“You finally found the guy who stole my ten-speed when I was in high school,” I ventured.

“Taylor, you’ll appreciate this. You used to be a good investigator.”

“Used to be?”

“When you were young.”

“Ahh.”

“The bastard who raped and murdered that woman in front of her twelve-year-old daughter a couple weeks back? I got ’im!” He pumped his fist as he said it.

The case had made daily headlines since the crime occurred. A woman and her daughter had been driving home from a movie late at night when their car broke down. A “good Samaritan” stopped to offer assistance. Some assistance. He forced the woman and the girl into his car at gunpoint, drove to a secluded spot, and raped the mother, threatening to shoot the daughter if the woman resisted. When he was finished, he told the daughter she was next. The mother went to protect her child, and he shot her dead. In a panic, he shoved both mother and daughter out of the car and drove off. The daughter described the well-dressed assailant in detail but not the car, telling the police only that it was dark and “sporty looking.”

“I took the daughter with me,” McGaney said. “She wanted desperately to help us find her mother’s killer. We cruised the car dealerships on the 1-494 strip, looking for a model she might recognize. We found it. A Ford Taurus GL.”

“A Taurus is sporty looking?!”

“She’s a little girl, what does she know from cars? Anyway, I obtained a list of every black or dark-blue Taurus in Minnesota from DMV, concentrating only on those vehicles owned by men who fit the age and general description the girl gave us. I found nineteen within five miles of where the woman’s car had stalled. I questioned each one, telling them I was investigating a hit-and-run and wanted to see their vehicles. One guy told me he’d sold his. Yeah, he sold it all right. The day after the murder he practically gave it away to a guy in St. Cloud. I drove the girl up to St. Cloud. She said it looked like the same car, but what clinched it was the radio. One of the buttons was still set for the station the guy was playing when he raped the mother—a station you can’t pick up in St. Cloud. The new owner allowed us to impound the car, and I had forensics do a search. They found bloodstains and strands of hair in the back seat. The samples were identical to the victim’s.”

“Nice,” I told McGaney, and I meant it; he’d done a helluva job. “Very nice.”

“Where is the daughter now?” Anne asked.

“At home, waiting for me to call her about a lineup.”

“The county attorney?”

“Licking his chops.”

“And the sorry sonuvabitch named in the warrant?”

McGaney smiled. “At his place of business.”

Anne grinned, too—grinned like she’d just learned her own daughter had been named class valedictorian. She took a small school bell from her desk drawer and rang it vigorously. “Ticket to ride, boys! We have a ticket to ride!” she shouted across the room. The detectives, smiling just as incandescently, literally hopped up from behind their partitions and started holstering guns, fastening bulletproof Kevlar vests, and donning dark-blue windbreakers with the word POLICE spelled out in huge white letters on the back. Conversations grew louder, jokes flew; it was like a party had suddenly broken out. This was why most of the detectives had come to this line of work—to get the bad guys— and they were loving it.

Anne told one of the detectives to arrange for uniform backup.

“Backup? We don’t need no stinking backup,” another replied in an accent that was supposed to be Hispanic, paraphrasing a line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

They headed for the door en masse, Anne leading the way.

I hadn’t felt so excluded since my friends won the softball league championship the season after I retired from the team.

Cynthia Grey always greeted me the same way, like an old friend she hadn’t seen since the last high-school reunion. This time she gave me a warm hug and happy smile in her office suite, located in a former cloister not far from the St. Paul PD. Her office manager didn’t approve—not of the hug and certainly not of me. Once again I had arrived without an appointment, distracting Cynthia from the task at hand, which was the practice of law.

Cynthia was known in the Twin Cities for her stalwart defense of DWI suspects, and her quotes were often sought by the local media. Like MADD, she wanted them off the street. But unlike those militant enemies of drunk drivers everywhere, she wanted the lawbreakers in treatment, not in jail. However, it was a stunning victory in a single civil suit that had recently thrust her into the public eye.

She had filed a complaint against a women’s clothing manufacturer on behalf of a dozen female employees, alleging that the company’s TV and print ads—which always depicted women in a sexual context—fostered an environment inside the company that condoned, if not encouraged, sexual harassment. Stories about the suit appeared in several local and national publications, usually accompanied by a photograph of the women and their lawyer. You could always tell which woman was Cynthia. She was the beautiful one in back who wasn’t smiling.

Anyway, the clothing manufacturer settled. No one knows for how much because the settlement was sealed. But it was big time. You could tell by the quality of the cars the plaintiffs went out and bought immediately afterward. Cynthia bought a car, too. And gave it to me. True, it was only a 1991 Dodge Colt—it was all I would accept—but, still, when was the last time your girlfriend bought you a car?

Which brings me back to Miss Efficiency, aka Desirée Smith, the office manager. The phone had been ringing nonstop since the settlement, and without her, Cynthia wouldn’t have time for all that media schmoozing. Without her, Cynthia probably would be late for most of her court appearances and client meetings, few of her motions would be filed on time, and her highly organized brigade of freelance attorneys and legal assistants would become a confused rabble. Chaos would reign, and the firm would fall. At least, that’s how Miss Efficiency sees it. And whenever I come along, well, there goes the schedule.