The suspects in the Shoftel disappearance, all the known sex offenders, were being run through the Eleventh Precinct. Warren Johnson’s information, in fact, was twelve hours old. More than fifty men and six women had been in and out of the station, and the roundup was still going on. The theorists and armchair detectives downtown were guessing that the child had never left her neighborhood. Yesterday they had been saying that the case would never be solved. Leland’s father, captain of the Eleventh Precinct, had no ideas. He had been on the job since Saturday afternoon. The scheme to use the Eleventh had come from downtown, and John Leland, although he would not say it on the telephone, felt vindicated once again. The Eleventh was a dead-end assignment, not a punishment but an area that attracted no natural attention and required a consistent high effort. It belonged to John Leland because he did not advertise himself, and because he could not browbeat his subordinates for the sake of creating a record. He was interested in the man on the switchboard who was talking to reporters, but it would take him days to move on him.

It was the way he worked. The man would be checked out of the house to the most remote post on the foot patrol. If he didn’t figure out why, he would hear about it—after a time. It would come down from the captain through the lieutenant and the sergeant, and it might be distilled to a simple, “Oh, and keep your mouth shut when you’re on the board, will you?” If the captain liked him, the man might be brought back inside where he could be watched. A man with good qualities who could learn a lesson soon had nothing going against him. John Leland knew every man in his precinct, and he thought that it was part of his job to be a teacher.

He had no argument with the men who had quit working to be more than patrolmen. He had helped teach nearly every man of middle rank downtown, and they knew that he in his own turn was frozen where he was. His situation was as much a part of the Department lore as the name of the first commissioner, and his inability to resign and draw his pension told the beginning and the end of the story of his career: he had wanted to be a cop, just like the patrolmen. He had said it often: he would not change a thing.