West couldn’t be certain, but thought Wanda had gained more weight. God help her. Wanda took up two lanes of traffic.

“You sit on down.” Wanda pointed with her chin, as if she were Chinese. “I’ll get the microfilm.”

While Wanda’s minions typed, stacked, and racked, West went through microfilm. She had her glasses on and was hurt by what she saw when she got to old articles about Brazil’s father. His name, too, was Andrew, but people had called him Drew. He had been a cop here when West was a rookie. She had forgotten all about him and had never made the connection. Christ, but now that she was looking at it, the tragedy came back to her and somehow put Brazil’s life in focus.

Drew Brazil was a thirty-six-year-old robbery detective when he made a traffic stop in an unmarked car. He was shot close range in the chest, and died instantly. West took a long time looking at articles, and staring at his picture. She headed upstairs to her division and pulled the case, which no one had looked at in a decade, because it had been exceptionally cleared, and the dirtbag was still on death row. Drew Brazil was handsome. In one photograph, he wore a leather bomber jacket that West had seen before.

The scene photographs clubbed her somewhere in her chest. He was dead in the street, on his back, staring up at the sun on a spring Sunday morning. The .45 caliber bullet had almost ripped his heart in half, and in autopsy photographs, Odom had two thick fingers through the hole to demonstrate. This was something young Andy Brazil need never see, and West had no intention of talking to him ever again.

FIVE

Brazil was looking up articles, too, in the Observer file room. It was amazing how little had been written about Virginia West over the years. He scrolled through small stories and black and white photographs taken back in a day when her hair was long and pinned up under her police hat. She had been the first female selected as rookie of the year, and this impressed him quite a lot.

The librarian was impressed, too. She peeked at Andy Brazil about every other second, her heart stumbling whenever he walked into her domain, which was fairly regularly. She’d never seen anyone research stories quite the way this young man did. It didn’t matter what he was writing about, Brazil had to look something up or ask questions. It was especially gratifying when he spoke to her directly as she sat primly at her neat maple desk. She had been a public school librarian before taking this job after her husband had retired and was underfoot all the time. Her name was Mrs. Booth. She was well past sixty and believed that Brazil was the most beautiful human being she had ever met. He was nice and gentle and always thanked her.

It shocked Brazil to read that West had been shot. He could not believe it. He scrolled faster, desperate for more details, but the lamebrain who had covered the incident had completely missed an opportunity for a huge 1-A story. Damn. The most that Brazil could pin down was that eleven years ago, when West was the first female homicide detective, she had gotten a tip from a snitch.