We do not speak as Ransom drives back to my parents’ house. I watch the dark streets drift by, lost in memory. I think mostly of the malpractice trial, of Marston’s savage cross-examination of my father just five weeks after his triple coronary bypass surgery. It required a supreme concentration of will on my part not to jump up in the courtroom and attack the man. In all my years as a prosecutor, I never stooped to the tactics Marston used that day.

“You got any FBI contacts?” Ike asks.

“A few. Why?”

“You might not want to use them on this.”

“Why not?”

“Free advice. Take it or leave it.”

“You know Ray Presley worked the Payton case, don’t you?”

Ike glances away from the road long enough to give me a warning look. “Presley was dirty from the day he was born. That motherfucker crazy as a wall-eyed bull and mean as a snake. You don’t talk to him unless I’m somewhere close.”

This does not bode well for my meeting tomorrow morning.

The radio chatters over a low background of static. There’s a domestic-violence call in the southern part of the county, followed by a disturbance at the gangplank of the riverboat casino. As we roll into my parents’ neighborhood, I glance over at Ransom. The man is too old to be doing the job he has.

“Can I ask you a question, Ike?”

He takes a Kool Menthol from his shirt pocket, lights up, and blows a stream of smoke at the windshield.

“How’d you wind up a cop?”

“That’s what college boys ask whores. How’d a girl like you end up here?”

“I remember the stories about you playing ball. Ike the Spike. You were a hero around here.”

He sniffs and takes another drag. “Like the man said, that was my fifteen minutes.”

“You must have played college ball.”

“Oh, yeah, I was the BNOC.”

“What’s that?”

“The Big Nigger On Campus.” His voice is laced with bitterness. “I got a full scholarship to Ohio State, but I went to Jackson State instead. First quarter of the first game, a guy took out my shoulder. Back then doctors couldn’t do shit for that.”

“You lost your scholarship?”

“They gave me my walking papers before I even caught my breath. I was good enough for the army, though. I’d been drafted in early sixty-six, but I had a college deferment. When I lost my scholarship, I couldn’t afford to stay in school. Next thing I knew, I was landing at Tan Son Nhut air base in DaNang.”

I am starting to perceive the twisted road that led Ike Ransom to this job. “I’d like to hear about it sometime.”

Another drag on the Kool. “You one of them war junkies?”

“No.”