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moved to my left so Channel 7’s sunbrites can pick up his name and the glint from his silver bars. He tells a Homicide dick, "She does love our African Americans."
    I turn into the Homicide dick’s answer—"Almost as much as she does the reporters." He stares right at me. "Clears two or three murders, bitch thinks she’s a dick."
    Our Watch LT frowns agreement and checks the camera. "Does
not
hurt to have the superintendent’s ear either."
    The dick smiles, adding volume: "Ain’t just his ear."
    He and I are sharing eight feet of pavement and Channel 7’s camera lens. I make him forty pounds over and figure his wife has a boyfriend, hopefully two, and different colors.
    The fireman who hosed me steps between us and says, "You might want to look at this."
    I can’t tell whether he’s refereeing or he really has something. If he does, he needs to talk to the dicks running the scene, not me. I walk with him mainly because it’s away from my temper and my two fans with rank. As we pass the second body, a
Tribune
reporter I know yells my name. I say, "Sorry," and point at the guys in the blazers and keep walking.
    The street deputy arrives with his entourage. He’s a deputy superintendent, the highest CPD rank who responds to crime scenes and wields the superintendent’s authority. All the manpower that doesn’t migrate to him stays focused on the shoot-out crime scene. So far, only the firemen are interested in the gasolined six-flat—it’s theirs until they release it. As we cross the alley to the six-flat the fireman comments that it’s odd the building has a Gilbert Court address, then says, "Fuck those two. That move took balls, lady. You come to work for us whenever you want."
    He registers as honest, a nice change from most men. His eyes linger a bit longer than they should; probably a compliment but it just makes me fidget. "What’re we looking at?"
    "Basement."
    Downstairs, the six-flat’s basement is flooded twenty-four inches and already stinks. I stay on the stairs. He looks at me like more water can’t hurt, but he doesn’t have to buy my gym shoes. The other firemen are ringing back from a wall section they hacked up by the furnace. I squat and squint. One shines a light that reflects on the tricolor water. There’s something white in the rainbow. A bone. No, a hand, palm up with long rigid fingers and no skin. The floating hand’s connected to a sleeved arm and part of a body buried in the wall.
    Don’t see that every day
.
    The fireman waves me over. I slosh across—a mistake, since this basement is now a homicide scene. Up close, the bones wear a woman’s velour jacket popular in the ’90s; she’s crunched, facing away and tied with leather ligatures that run from neck to wrist. One ligature has snapped with age. I try to see her face but can’t. The fireman points his light inside the crypt over dead worms and roaches at what looks like fingernail ruts in the wood.
    He exhales in a whoosh, then says, "Went in alive."
    The hand’s floating near my shin; her fingertips are jagged. Above them her wrist bones have a metal wrist restraint,
pervmanacles
we call them, sex-crime equipment that vice and child services see more often than us.
    My wrists have manacle scars too, hard welts I avoid when I wash. She’s barefoot. I wasn’t allowed shoes when I was pregnant at fifteen. It was in the Bible and kept me from running away; they wanted the baby. The ankle bones glint in the light, but I don’t look. There might be manacles on them too. The basement shrinks; fouled air thickens, gasoline water wants to rise over my head. I stumble, flashing through years of piecing together a me, making a person out of the wreckage. I don’t want to fall, not in this water, not near the hand with the manacles. And I won’t, if I quit thinking.
    About all the things I’ve spent twenty-three years not thinking about.
     
     
     

Chapter 2
     
MONDAY, DAY 1: AFTERNOON
     
     
       My afternoon is