West and Brazil could not know of their personal peril. They were not thinking of themselves this Tuesday night as emergency lights flashed on broken glass and the torn, crumpled remains of a patrol car that had crashed in the affluent residential neighborhood of Myers Park. Raines and other paramedics were using hydraulic tools to get bodies out of a Mercedes 300E that was wrapped around a tree. Everyone was tense and upset as a siren screamed, and police had set up a barricade, blocking off the street. Brazil parked his BMW as close as anyone would let him. He ran toward red and blue lights and rumbling engines.

West arrived, and cops moved sawhorses to let her through. She spotted Brazil taking notes. He was dazed by horror as Raines and other paramedics lifted another bloody dead body out of the Mercedes and zipped it inside a pouch. Rescuers lowered a victim next to three others on pavement stained with spilled oil and blood. West stared at the totaled Charlotte cruiser with its hornet’s nest emblem on the doors. She turned her attention to another cruiser not far away, where Officer Michelle Johnson was collapsed in the backseat, holding a bloodstained handkerchief to her devastated face as she trembled and shook. West swiftly walked that way. She opened the cruiser’s back door and climbed in next to the distraught officer.

“It’s going to be okay,” West said, putting an arm around a young woman who could not comprehend what had just happened to her. “We need to get you to the hospital,” West told her.

“No! No!” Johnson screamed, covering her head with her hands, as if her plane were going down. “I didn’t see him until he was through the light. Mine was green! I was responding to the ten-thirty-three, but my light was green. I swear. Oh God! No, no. Please. No. Please, please, please.”

Brazil was inching closer to the cruiser and heard what Johnson said. He stepped up to the door and stared through the window, watching West comfort a cop who had just smashed into another car and killed all its occupants. For an instant, West looked out. Her eyes met his and held. His pen was poised and filled with quotes he now knew he would never put in any story. He lowered the pen and notepad. Slowly, he walked away, not the same reporter or person he had been.

Brazil returned to the newspaper. He walked in no hurry and was not happy to be here as he headed for his desk. He took his chair, typed in his password, and went into his computer basket. Betty Cutler, the night editor, was an old crow with an underbite. She had been pacing and waiting for Brazil and swooped in on him. She began her annoying habit of sniffing as she spoke. It had occurred to Brazil that she might have a cocaine problem.

“We got to ship this in forty-five minutes,” she said to him. “What did the cop say?”