The technician handed the doctor a petri dish. The doctor found a fresh scalpel and gently scraped the paint fragments off the dead man’s finger.

“You know what I think, Doc?” the technician said as he looked at the body.

“What?”

“I think this guy was left-handed, but whoever shot him didn’t know that. So when they tried to make it look like a suicide, they put the gun in his right hand and fired it. And when they did that, he was already dead.”

When Sandy Jackson’s squad car turned onto Chestnut at Seventeenth, she quickly scanned the block, hoping to see someone who matched the description that had been etched in her mind the night before.

She didn’t see anyone, and it left her feeling helpless. She hated being in that position. It always caused her mind to wander.

Sandy’s thoughts were everywhere as she sat in traffic so heavy that not even her police car could pass. She thought of the wasted MAC lipstick that was smeared on her walls. She’d paid good money for that. She thought of the lieutenant’s exam and wondered how she’d do. She thought of finding the man who’d turned her life upside down.

She inched the car forward and looked up at Liberty Place, the sixty-one-story structure of glass and steel that towered overhead. Then she turned her attention to the people around her. The man in the Mazda was picking his nose, no doubt believing that the car afforded him a level of invisibility. The woman in front of her was frantically applying makeup. Pedestrians on the sidewalk moved quickly, hustling to offices and stores.

Slowly, the traffic began to move again, and as she pulled up at the corner of Sixteenth Street, the light turned red once more. Sandy glanced quickly to her right as she prepared to make a left turn, but something on the corner caught her eye.

A pierced and bearded man with pasty skin and steel-blue eyes sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, his filthy blond Mohawk refusing to stand on end. He was rail thin but heavily tattooed, and he was wearing an olive green wifebeater and cargo pants. The steel toes of his boots had worn through the leather, and he was holding a handwritten sign that read, “Traveling and hungry. Anything will help.”

A small dog reclined at his knee, its eyebrows arching sadly as he looked up at passersby. Sandy watched a woman glance at the dog before placing a dollar in the young man’s cup. When he reached over to retrieve the money, Sandy saw a tattoo on his hand. It was a picture of a demon’s skull with angel’s wings. “Daniel 10” was written underneath.