“It was your idea.”

“It was Cindy’s idea.”

“But you approved of it.”

“And so did you.”

“Only after you did. What could I do? It was two against one…as usual.”

“Oh for chrissakes, Jan,” he said. “Look, Cindy asked you to give me a message. I got the message. Anything else?”

“No.”

She hung up.

Two women hanging up on him. More than any man should have to take.

He dressed quickly, threw two quarters in the vending machine, and pulled out a cup of black coffee. He sipped away the sour taste in his mouth and walked at the same time, the coffee sloshing over the rim of the paper cup and burning his hands.

They’d placed the kid in the conference room. She seemed to be enjoying herself, scrawling over the morning-watch blackboard with white chalk. The room was littered with scraps of paper, cookie wrappers, and broken pencils and crayons.

“Hello there,” Decker said to the toddler. “Remember me?”

The kid ran around in circles and shrieked with unabashed joy. Someone had dressed her in makeshift clothes—baggy pants and a pullover sweater much too big for her. The cuffs were rolled up to her knees. Decker regarded the tot’s baby-sitter. Officer Lucinda Alvarez was in her twenties—slender but muscular—in the peak of health. At this moment, slumped in a folding chair, she looked as energetic as an overcooked noodle.

Lucinda said, “I didn’t bust my ass in the academy to do this kind of work.”

“Kids take it out of you.”

She stood up and frowned. “What really pisses me off is that they automatically assigned this to me ’cause I’m a woman.”

“I’ll take her now.”

“I mean, why didn’t Sarge assign this to O’Grady or Ramirez?”

“I don’t know, Lucinda.”

“Yeah, well, I’m going to find out.”

“Does she have a bottle or anything like that?”

“Yeah. Somewhere. The kid thought it was great fun throwing it around the room.”

Decker smiled.

Lucinda said, “Sure! Laugh! You haven’t been babysitting.”

“I had her all morning,” Decker said.

Lucinda eyed him with doubt. “So what do you want for that? A medal or something?”

“All I want is the kid.”

“Take her.” Lucinda threw her purse over her shoulder. “Take her with my blessings.”

She stormed out of the room. The kid giggled when she slammed the door.

The foster home was similar to the other houses on the block, built from whitewashed wood planks, the paint peeling around the window sashes, with a tarpaper roof and faded green awnings. The front yard was enclosed by a chain-link fence and held two swing sets and a climbing apparatus shaped like a geodesic dome. Several children, wearing shorts and T-shirts, were playing outside, supervised by a young black girl.