I straightened up in my seat so I could look over the sound partitions of the pod my desk was in. I could see the newsroom was filling up now. Glenn was out of his office and at the city desk talking with the morning editor about the Coverage plan for the abortion-doctor shooting slumped back down in my chair so they wouldn't see . mee and get the idea of assigning me to rewrite. I was always dodging rewrite. They'd send out a bunch Of reporters to'a crime scene or disaster and these people would call their info back to me. I then had to write up the story on deadline and decide which names went on the byline. It was the newspaper business at its most fast and furious, but I was burned out by it. I just wanted to write my stories about murder and be left alone.

I almost took the printout up to the cafeteria so I'd be Out of sight but decided to take my chances. I went back to reading. The most impressive piece had run in the New York Times five Months earlier. No surprise there. The Times was the Holy Grail of journalism. The best. I started reading the piece and then decided to put it down and save it for last. After I had scanned and read through the rest of the material, I went up for another cup of coffee, then started to reread the Times article, taking my time with it.

The news peg was the seemingly unrelated suicides of three of New York's finest within a six-week period. The victims dit know each other but all succumbed to the police blues, as it was called in the article. Two with their guns at home; one hanged himself in a heroin shooting gallery while six stoned hypes watched in dazed horror.

The article reported at length on the ongoing police suicide study being conducted jointly by the FBI's Behavioral Science Services in Quantico, Virginia, and the Law Enforcement Foundation. The article quoted the foundation's director, Nathan Ford, and I wrote the name down in my notebook before going on. Ford said the project had studied every reported police suicide in the last five years looking for similarities in causes. He said the bottom line was that it was impossible to determine who might be susceptible to the police blues. But once diagnosed, it could be properly treated if a suffering officer sought help. Ford said the goal of the project was to build a database that could be translated into a protocol that would help police managers spot officers with the police blues before it was too late.

The Times article included a sidebar story about a year-old Chicago case where the officer had come forward but still was not saved. As I read, my stomach tightened. The article said Chicago police detective John Brooks had begun therapy sessions with a psychiatrist after a particular homicide case he was assigned to began bothering him. The case was the kidnapping and murder of a twelve-year-old boy named Bobby Smathers. The boy was missing for two days before his remains were found in a snowbank near the Lincoln Park Zoo. He had been strangled. Eight of his fingers were missing.