“Goddamn it!” She looked around, as if she might recognize the person who had dared this perpetration.

Other cops were pulling in and out, and transporting prisoners in this constantly moving department of sixteen hundred police and unsworn support. For a moment, West sat and scanned, teased by the aroma of the Bojangles bacon and egg biscuit that by now was cold. Settling on a fifteen-minute slot in front of sparkling glass doors, she parked and climbed out, doing the best she could with briefcase, pocketbook, files, newspapers, breakfast, a large coffee.

She slammed her door shut with a hip as the dude she was looking for emerged from the building. He was jailing, jeans at low tide in that cool lockup look of six inches of pastel undershorts showing. The fashion statement got started in jail when inmates had their belts confiscated so they wouldn’t hang themselves or someone else. The trend had crossed over every racial and socioeconomic line until half of the city’s pants were falling off. West did not understand it. She left her car right where it was, fought with her armload as the dude mumbled good morning, trotting past.

“Brewster!” Her voice halted him like a pointed gun. “What the hell you think you’re doing parking in my space!”

He grinned, flashing rings and a fake Rolex as he swept arms open wide, the pistol beneath his jacket peeking out. “Look around. Tell me what you see. Not one damn parking place in all of Charlotte.”

“That’s why important people like me are assigned one,” she said to this detective she supervised as she tossed him her keys. “Bring them back when you’ve moved my car,” she ordered.

West was forty-two, a woman who still turned heads and had never been married to anything beyond what she thought she was here on earth to do. She had deep red hair, a little unattended and longer than she liked it, her eyes dark and quick, and a serious body that she did not deserve, for she did nothing to maintain curves and straightness in the right places. She wore her uniform in a way that made other women want one, but that was not why she chose police blues over plain clothes. She supervised more than three hundred wiseass investigators like Ronald Brewster who needed every reminder of law and order West could muster.

Cops greeted her on her way in. She turned right, headed to offices where Chief Judy Hammer decided everything that mattered in law enforcement in this hundred-mile area of almost six million people. West loved her boss but right now didn’t like her. West knew why she had been called in early for a meeting, and it was a situation beyond reason or her control. This was insane. She walked into Hammer’s outer office, where Captain Fred Horgess was talking on the phone. He held his hand over the receiver and shook his head in a there’s nothing I can do way to West as she walked up to the dark wooden door, where Hammer’s name was announced brightly in brass.