ONE

    They always move the body, when it's a cop. It makes my job harder, but I understand. I did it once myself, when I was a patrolman. You know it's against procedure, but you can't help yourself. You see a brother officer lying in the street, you check the body and it's already getting cold, but you still call for an ambulance and insist they take him to the hospital. Part of it is the hope against hope that he'll make it, that there's a chance. The other part is to ease your own sense of vulnerability. The uniform reminds you of what you already know, that man in the street could be you.
 
   The chalk figure drawn on the pavement, arms and legs stretched out symmetrically like a paper doll, marked the spot where Patrolman Joseph Burnett had died. A dark wet spot glistened in the center of the outline.I looked up, perhaps to see if Burnett's spirit still hovered nearby. The sky beyond the streetlights' glare was empty as a killer's conscience. There was no moon, and only the brightest stars could compete with a thousand watts of electric light. I could see just enough of them to know it was clear overhead. Without cover of clouds, the temperature had dropped from the daytime humid heat of mid-July to a refreshingly cool sixties that made the coats we wore to cover our guns feel comfortable.
 
   The silence of the crime scene was haunting. Usually, a crime scene sounds like the hubbub of a successful party, the susurrus roll of a dozen conversations, sprinkles of laughter, technicians yelling directions to each other. But at the scene of a cop's murder, there's a church-like reserve to the conversation. The cops, uniform and detective, and the evidence techs speak in tones so hushed you can hear the click and whirr of the cameras.

    At first, because you know it should be true, you try to convince yourself that the murder of a cop is no different than the killing of a citizen. Later, because it's politically correct, you continue to give lip service to the concept when among civilians. But you know it isn't true. Cops are more real to you, even if you don't know them personally, so it hurts more. And, as the defenders of society, we represent its power. Killing a cop is a boast that society is powerless, and it scares us that it may be true. We hate most what scares us most. We track down whatever other killers we can because it's what we do. But we track down cop killers because we hate them.

I sensed someone coming up behind me and turned. It was my partner, Ray Mercer.

    "Here you go, Eddie," Ray said, handing me one of the two coffees he was carrying. Ray had picked me up from my house. After dropping me at the crime scene, he left briefly to get coffees. He's one of the few people who drinks more of it than me.

    I snapped the plastic lid and sipped. Ray did the same, tipping his hat back slightly as he sipped. Whatever the weather, indoors or out, Ray wore this gray snap-brim hat. He said well dressed gentlemen wore hats. His former partner said Ray became a gentleman when his hair started to thin. Ray used the hat as an annex to his face, punctuating his expressions with it. Tilt the hat back, snuggle it down tight, stroke the brim with a raised finger, peer out from its shadow.

    Ray was about my age…mid forties…but looked several years older. Forty is the age when the definition of 'looking your age' starts to spread out. Some people maintain the same basic appearance for the next fifteen or twenty years. For others, like Ray, the aging process seems to accelerate. Lines deepen, hair thins, waists thicken. At fifty, Ray would look like an old man.

    I was at neither extreme. People look at me and guess my age with reasonable accuracy. I still had most of my hair, and only an average amount had shifted from dark brown to gray. I had the blue-gray eyes of an old man, but I was born with them.

    "I checked the car on the way back," Ray said. "MODAT's up, and has our run. Want to read it?" Our in-car terminal wasn't receiving earlier, and we'd had to radio a request to Dispatch to have them reboot our computer from downtown. I nodded, following him back to where our unmarked unit was parked, just past the CRIME SCENE tape stretched across the street.