“Don’t,” said Devra.

He pressed harder at her objection, and she said, “Uh.”

“That hurt you? I didn’t mean to.” McKinley inspected her body. “Let’s see what else we got here.”

His hand slid up and over her shirt and went to her right breast. He kneaded it and found her nipple. His forefinger made small circles there. Her nipple grew hard. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and it grew harder still.

“There you go,” said McKinley, smiling silver. “Your body is betrayin’ you now.”

He pinched her nipple harder and heard her breath catch. Devra’s eyes filled with tears and one broke free and rolled down her cheek. He tightened his fingers more, pinching her there until she closed her eyes completely. He got very close to her face.

“I know you’ll stand tall,” said McKinley. “You gonna do this for your son. Make sure he has the kind of childhood you never had. Boy needs his mother, right?”

Devra’s lip trembled. She couldn’t bring herself to speak. She nodded instead.

McKinley released her and stepped back. He brought the cigar around and put it to his mouth. He drew on it and backed up toward the doorway. At the open frame he stopped and looked at her.

“We understand each other, right?”

Devra said, “Yes.”

But in her mind she said, You have made a mistake.

THAT afternoon, a boy was cutting through the woods of Oxon Run and came upon a body lying on its back in a small clearing beside an oak. The body was bloated and ripe from the heat. If not for the smell and the sound of the flies, the boy might have missed it.

He picked up a stick. He approached the body cautiously and touched the stick to its side. It was a woman. She was dead, and he was frightened, but he had the curiosity of a boy, and even as he trembled he knew that this would be a story to tell his friends later on.

Flies buzzed all around him, some scattering momentarily as he bent down to inspect the body. There were three bullet holes he could count, two in her stomach and another in one of her breasts. The blood around the holes was close to black and looked thick, like syrup. The thing that made him run was her face: The bottom part of her jaw was set off from the top part, and her lips were drawn back over her teeth so it looked like she had died trying to smile. Also, one of her eyes had come out some and was lying on her fat purple cheek. In the empty socket, maggots clustered and writhed where the flies had laid their eggs.

The boy, who was named Barry Waters, bolted from the woods, saying things like “Go, boy” and “Go now” under his breath as he ran. He realized that the woman was beyond the need of help, but he went directly to Greater Southeast Community Hospital, which he knew to be close by. He tried to tell the woman behind the desk of the ER what had happened, and as he did she tried to calm him down. Barry Waters would be a celebrity of sorts in his neighborhood for the next few days. For years he would dream about the maggots, and in those nightmares he would see that anguished thing that looked something like a smile.

Sixth District police officers and homicide detectives were dispatched to the scene. For the next couple of hours a forensics team and photographers worked over the body before it was moved by ambulance to the D.C. morgue. Neighborhood people watched as “the white shirts” – lieutenants and the like -arrived in their unmarked vehicles. Obvious gang-related killings and hits on young men did not usually draw this kind of official attention; murders of women and children brought out both suit and uniform heat.

It wasn’t long before the investigation became focused on a Toyota Tercel, one of two cars parked on the street closest to the entrance to the woods. Blood was visibly smudged on its driver’s door handle. In a nearby sewer police found a shower curtain stained with blood along with the keys to the car.

The Tercel was dusted for prints. The car had been wiped down but not thoroughly. Its glove box yielded a registration in the name of Olivia Elliot, with an Anacostia address. Prints on the car would be matched to the prints of the corpse, and a photo ID of Elliot, in the system, would be matched to her body as well. When this was done, a homicide detective would notify family and next of kin. The notification would also serve as the initial investigation into the case.

This would fall to homicide cop Nathan Grady, formerly of the Fourth District. His territory now, in the aftermath of the recent duty realignment, was citywide. Grady, like most of the men and women who shared his kind of shield, hated this part of the job. It would be a while, but not too long, before the final identification was made, but his gut told him that the woman found in the woods was the owner of that Tercel. Once he knew for sure, he’d go tell the husband, or the kid, or whomever, that their loved one was forever gone.

ULYSSES Foreman had scored Ashley Swann a real nice gun for Christmas, a piece she had been wanting for a long time. The revolver had come from that retail gun store down in Virginia, his most frequent source. As was his usual practice, he had paid a commission to a clean Virginia resident to make the buy.

Ashley sat on the edge of their bed in her pajamas, having changed back into them after Long and Jones, Dewayne Durham’s boys, had come, bought that pretty blue Taurus.38, and gone. She had taken her gun out of the drawer of her nightstand, which is where she kept it all the time. Ulysses had instructed her that this would be its most useful spot; he kept his, the 9mm Colt, the one with the custom bonded ivory grips, in his own nightstand on his side of the bed.

She was giving the gun a good inspection. She liked the weight of it in her hand.

It was the Smith amp; Wesson 60LS, the LadySmith, a.357 stainless-steel revolver with a speed-loader cutout and smooth rosewood grips, specially contoured to fit a woman’s hand. The grips were smooth and carried the S amp;W monogram; Ashley oiled them often, and she used her Hoppes kit to clean the chambers and barrel at least twice a month. It was a beautiful gun. She had her eye on a similar model, the 9mm auto, manufactured in frosted stainless with matching gray grips.

“Ulee?”

“Huh.” He was lying on his back on the bed, his head propped up on pillows, his eyes on their flat-screen Sony.

“You know that LadySmith nine, the pretty one I seen in the magazine, all gray?”

“Yeah.”

“I want one.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Foreman was watching ESPN Classic. Ashley didn’t know how men could stand to look at some old basketball game, had been played years before, when they knew how it was gonna end. But she did like to see him lying there, one arm behind his head, his bicep rounded, that rug of tight, curly hair covering the upper part of his chest.

“I’m thinkin’ on goin’ to see my daddy down in Port Tobacco,” said Ashley.

“Go ahead.”

On the tube was game 6 of the Bulls-Jazz finals from ’98, played in Salt Lake. He watched Karl Malone take a dish from Stockton – white boy had to do something about those tight drawers, but he could orchestrate the shit out of some ball – and go underneath for a one-handed reverse dunk.

“The Mailman,” said Foreman with admiration.

“Ulee?”

Foreman thought about how Malone was wastin’ hisself out there in Morman land. Handsome man like him, going home to his dull-ass family after the games, listenin’ to country music and shit, when he could be playing in a real city like New York, spending his dollars in clubs, gettin’ fresh pussy every night. To Foreman it seemed like Malone wasn’t having any fun. Playing with Stockton and his short shorts, and that other white boy, wiped his face like there was somethin’ runnin’ down it every time he got to the foul line. Lack of fun was probably the reason why Malone had never won the ring.