SLOANE: Well—thank you for the tissues and water. And you really must stop people from smoking so close to this building. It’s a danger to people who actually value their health.

QUINN. I—I don’t know if I want to be a part of this anymore.

SLOANE. I don’t know if you have much of a choice in the matter.

[Indeterminate sounds. Footsteps. Sound of a door opening and closing. End of recording.]

I took my earphones out just as my waiter, a young server with a ginger hipster beard and a variety of earrings, came over to my table.

“Need anything else, Mr. Snow?” the waiter said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Hemlock with a splash of tonic.”

“How ’bout another iced tea instead?”

“Yeah, let’s go with that.”

22

22

It wasn’t quite whiteout conditions, but the downfall of snow turned my usually quick drive from Mexicantown to downtown into a white-knuckle, slip-and-slide adventure.

While I was making every effort to avoid fishtailing into road embankments, other vehicles and pedestrians staring at their phones, a call came through the dashboard’s entertainment system. It was from the Wayne County Coroner’s Office.

“Bobby,” I said, accepting the call. “What’s up?”

“Did you know there are shoes that cost as much as a new car?” Bobby said, his voice filling the cavernous cabin of the GMC Yukon. “Who the hell buys shoes that cost what a car does?”

Bobby’s ongoing analysis of the dead man pulled from the water processing plant had introduced him to the rarified world of custom footwear.

“Figure out that embossed logo yet?” I said.

“Two letters,” Bobby said. “Looks like FM or EM. Second letter could be an N. I’ll keep trying to raise the embossing.”

“Thanks, Bobby.”

“One more thing. My fabric-forensics friend? The one who’s at the Louvre? I sent her my analysis of the shoe leather. A lot of wastewater had soaked in, but she was still able to make an eighty-five percent determination. She said the tanning methodology and chemical signatures point to a Central or South American manufacture.”

“I owe you a single malt, Bobby.”

“No, August,” he said. “You owe the City of Detroit and the Wayne County Coroner’s Office six thousand four hundred thirty-eight dollars and seventeen cents for putting a shoe under a microscope.”

“Ouch.”

Lincoln Quinn’s office at 2 Woodward Avenue, City Hall, would make a Fortune 500 CEO envious. It had the overall vibe of an English gentleman’s club reading room, complete with varnished dark-wood floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large Persian rug of indeterminate age, overstuffed leather wingback chairs and an expansive desk that might very well have been an ornate cherrywood heirloom from John R. Williams, Detroit’s first mayor. The office included an impressive lord-of-the-village corner view of Jefferson Avenue and Woodward.