“Hey, hey,” she says. “Easy.”

She’s piqued. But McGowan has learned to fortify herself. It’s not all psychotherapy and meditation either: she’s found some solace in the spirituality books on the shelves in Samhattan’s own Third-and-Fourth-Eye Books. The girls she questioned today, local jocks, would jeer if they knew how often she frequented that weird little store. But do they know what lessons are shelved there? And do they know that one day they will invariably need lessons of their own?

What lines will each of them cross one day, when the way things should be grate against the way they are?

Kids today, she believes, might not be any different from kids yesterday, but it sure wouldn’t hurt for them to grow up a little faster. A teammate of theirs was murdered last night. Did McGowan really need to go through the rigmarole of politely extracting answers?

Still, the girls did bring up an idea she hadn’t considered.

She turns right on Fifth Street.

It’s almost embarrassing, how little she has to go on. Driving the city’s blocks of ill repute (worst repute) feels something like going to an ex-boyfriend’s house late at night when nothing else worked out at the bar. Can’t find a criminal? Go to Fifth Street! They wear ribbons around their neck for first, second, and third place! Park and point out the window and you’ll finger a petty criminal or an eventual white-collar horror just beginning his climb up the shit-soaked ladder of “respectable” crime.

“Why do you think all criminals are men?” she mockingly asks herself. She shakes her head.

That was really something today, wasn’t it? The way those teens kept hammering home the idea it could’ve been a woman who did that to Tammy Jones. McGowan had to hold herself back from showing them the pictures, asking them if they ever heard of a woman doing anything close to that in their entire lives. But that’s how things were these days, she supposed. And she didn’t think it was so bad a thing either: people were fighting for a new perception out in the streets, out in the world. Women, this new generation was saying, are capable of anything men are.

Still, she senses hastiness in the distance. A feeling she knows intimately and one that has not served her well. If she’s not careful, if she takes her eye off it, things could go south in this case quickly. A murderer loose in Samhattan. A dead teen. Hey girls, she thinks, this might not be the best time for sociological arguments.

Yet…

As she passes the litter-strewn sidewalks and overgrown weeds at the base of these buildings, she thinks maybe these kids aren’t “arguing” after all; maybe they already see things this way. It’s possible McGowan is a dinosaur at forty-one and these teens are the new prism through which the world is seen. They want equal-opportunity everything, including the bad stuff. A murderer on the loose, you say? Don’t rule us out. Because, you know what? It means more to them that someone like Carla McGowan, a detective, has an open mind than that their suggestions are plausible.