“You finished the Mono Lisa yet?”

“You got paint on your jeans.”

“Whoa, doesn’t look like paint to me. You been bleeding, man?”

“Uh uh,” Weed lied.

Mrs. Grannis’s eyes got darker as she looked at him and his jeans. He could see a question mark in a little balloon over her head. Weed had nothing to say.

“Everybody ready to read what you wrote about your symbols?” She returned her attention to the class.

“Groan.”

“I can’t figure out what mine means.”

“No one said we had to write.”

“Let’s take a minute to talk about symbols.” Mrs. Grannis hushed them. “What is a symbol? Matthew?”

“Something that means something else.”

“And where do we find them? Joan?”

“In pyramids. And jewelry.”

“Annie?”

“In the catacombs, so the Christians could express themselves in secret.”

“Weed? Where else might we find symbols?” Mrs. Grannis’s face got soft with concern as she looked at him.

“Doodles and what I play in the band,” Weed said.

• • •

Brazil was at his desk, drawing designs on a legal pad, trying to come up with a newsletter logotype as the chairman of the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Crime Commission drove him crazy over the speakerphone.

“I think it is a dread-filled miscalculation,” Lelia Ehrhart’s emphatic, haughty voice sounded.

Brazil turned down the volume.

“To even suggest much less implicate we might have a gang here is to cause one,” she proclaimed.

The logo was for the website and needed to attract attention, and since it was agreed that CPR was out the window, Brazil had to start over. He hated newsletters, but Hammer had been insistent.

“And not every children are little mobsters. Many of them are misguided and misled astray, mistreated and abusive and need our help, Officer Brazil. To dwell on those few bad, especially those to band together in little groups you call gangs, is to give the public a very wrong, untrue and false view. My committee is completely all about prevention and doing that first before the other. That’s what the governor has mandated to tell us to do it.”

“The last governor,” Brazil politely reminded her.

“What is relevant about that and how does it matter?” retorted Ehrhart, who had been raised in Vienna and Yugoslavia and did not speak English well.

“It matters because Governor Feuer hasn’t gotten around to appointing a new commission yet. I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to be making assumptions about his policies and mandates, Mrs. Ehrhart.”

There was a high-pitched, outraged pause.

“Are you implicating that he might dissolute my commission and undo it? That he and I may be a problem in my relationship?” said Ehrhart.

Brazil knew that a good nameplate should attract attention without overdoing it. Perhaps because they were on the subject of gangs, Brazil suddenly scrawled Richmond P.D. graffiti-style.

“Wow,” he muttered in excitement.

“Wow which?” Ehrhart’s angry voice filled the office.

“I’m sorry.” Brazil came to. “What were you saying?”

“I demand you tell me when you were saying wow about just there,” she demanded.