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was from just to the dead cop’s left, taken almost from ground level, showing his frozen eyes and the murky puddle erupting from his chest and engulfing his shoulders and face. The blood spattered in his beard could have come from the blast or it could have bubbled out after he was shot. Leonard had seen a good number of crime scene photos and autopsies: the tools of the paper investigator. He wasn’t a doctor, but it didn’t take one to see that Rowson had taken a single shot and been stopped in his tracks. From this angle, Leonard could see how close he was to the edge of the boat. His hand may even have hit the railing as he went back. They had removed his shield before taking the picture. Too inflammatory.
    Finished with the photos, Leonard clicked open what had come through on the shooter. Less than he would have liked, if he was going to interview the guy the next day. Mulino had fired one shot from his thirty-eight. There were fewer than a dozen cops on the force who still used the revolver. Most of the ones who had fought off the upgrade to an automatic weapon changed their minds the first time they actually tried one out at the range, and the rest had almost all retired. Mulino had hung on to his old habit alone.
    He had been stationed in OCCB for the past ten years. A catch-all assignment. One day he could be put on the security detail of a diplomat who wasn’t in danger but wanted to feel important, and the next he could be catching a murder case. A funny unit, the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Leonard thought. It sure never seemed to have anything much to do with organized crime.
    For someone who had been on the force so long, Ralph Mulino had a pretty clean history with DIMAC. Most guys who tough it out either get promoted to the upper echelons of One Police Plaza or start getting bitter and taking it out on the citizenry. There were a lot of cops waiting out their last few years of work behind a well-polished desk, serving as the Deputy Commissioner of Looking Like You’re Doing Something Important.
    There were also plenty of guys who hadn’t retired yet because it would mean spending more time with a wife they didn’t like. They would arrest people for petty crimes that they knew would get dismissed just for the rush of making the collar. Others would just set out and start busting heads. But Ralph Mulino hadn’t been given so much as a Command Discipline in the past seventeen years. He had never fired his weapon on the job except at the range. This man had whiled away a quiet little career in the New York Police Department, only to shoot a colleague in the chest one late summer night.
    Leonard always started with the questions he truly didn’t know the answer to. Why was Rowson on the container ship on what the roll call showed was his day off? Why was Ralph Mulino called out to investigate when there were plenty of cops who regularly work a midnight tour? Who had killed the civilian officer of the shipping company? And where was Rowson’s gun? He was a detective after all. He had been wearing his badge. The recovered evidence list wasn’t in the packet that had come in Tuesday. Leonard would have to interview Mulino based just on the photographs. Maybe there had been a gun, but it was out of the frame of the pictures; maybe it flew off the boat when Rowson had been shot. Or maybe he was out on the ship unarmed. If Leonard could unravel it, maybe the administration would keep him on after all. With crime back on the rise, with the little disasters keeping the city skittish, the administration would want to show that it was still serious about weeding out bad cops. Middle-aged, white, carrying an old-school revolver, Detective Ralph Mulino would be a perfect trophy.
    Clear of Trinity Church, Leonard was imagining himself at a press conference next to the mayor when he nearly stumbled into a teenager being grabbed by a police officer. The kid was very thin, maybe nineteen, black, wearing loose jeans