I hoped my obvious reluctance would inspire him to take me home instead.

“I want to retrace Eddie Heath’s last steps for you.”

He flipped on the turn signal. “In particular, I think you need to see where his body was found.”

The Heaths lived east of Chamberlayne Avenue, or on the wrong side of it, in Marino’s words. Their small brick house was but several blocks from a Golden Skillet fried chicken restaurant and the convenience store where Eddie had walked to buy his mother a can of soup. Several cars, large and American, were parked in -the Heaths’ driveway, and smoke drifted out the chimney and disappeared in the smoky gray sky. Aluminum glinted dully as the front screen door opened and an old woman bundled in a black coat emerged, then paused to speak to someone inside. Clinging to the railing as if the afternoon threatened to pitch her overboard, she made her way down the steps, glancing blankly at the white Ford LTD cruising past.

Had we continued east for another two miles, we would have entered the war zone of the federal housing projects.

“This neighborhood used to be all white,” Marino said. “I remember when I first came to Richmond this was a good area to live. Lots of decent, hardworking folks who kept their yards real nice and went to church on Sunday. Times change. Me, I wouldn’t let any kid of mine walk around out here after dark. But when you live in a place, you get comfortable. Eddie was comfortable walking around, delivering his papers, and running errands for his mother.

“The night it happened he came out the front door of his crib, cut through to Azalea, then took a right like we’re doing as I speak. There’s Lucky’s on our left, next to the gas station.”

He pointed out a convenience store with a green horseshoe on the lighted sign. “That corner right over there is a popular hangout for drug drones. They trade crack for cash and fade. We catch the cockroaches, and two days later they’re on another corner doing the same thing.”

“A possibility Eddie was involved in drugs?”

My question would have been somewhat farfetched back in the days when I began my career, but no longer. Juveniles now comprised approximately ten percent of all narcotics trafficking arrests in Virginia.

“No indication of it so far. My gut tells me he wasn’t,” Marino said.

He pulled into the convenience store’s parking lot, and we sat gazing out at advertisements taped to plate glass and lights shining garishly through fog. Customers formed a long line by the counter as the harried clerk worked the cash register without looking up. A young black man in high tops and a leather coat stared insolently at our car as he sauntered out with a quart of beer and dropped change in a pay phone near the front door. A man, red-faced and in paint-spattered jeans, peeled cellophane off a pack of cigarettes as he trotted to his truck.