I’m down to my last two weeks. So if you want to send this picture to somebody at the paper, I would send it to Dorothy Fowler, the city editor. But it’s not going to change who I talk to on this story or what I write. Besides that, do the narcs down in South Bureau know you’re showing their surveillance shots around like this? I mean, this is dangerous, Lieutenant.”

I held the photo up so he could see it now.

“More than what it says about me, it says your drug team had a setup inside somebody’s apartment in Rodia. If that gets out, those Crips down there will probably go on a witch hunt. You remember what happened up on Blythe Street a couple years ago, don’t you?”

Minter’s smile froze on his face as I watched his eyes go over the memory. Three years earlier the police had conducted a similar peep-and-sweep operation at a Latino gang–operated drive-through drug market on Blythe Street in Van Nuys. When surveillance photos of drug deals were turned over to lawyers defending those arrested, the gang soon figured out what apartment the shots had been taken from. One night the apartment was firebombed and a sixty-year-old woman was burned to death in her bed. The police department didn’t get much positive media attention out of it and I thought Minter was suddenly reliving the fiasco.

“I gotta go write,” I said. “I’ll go down to media relations and pick up the mug shot on my way out. Thanks, Lieutenant.”

“Okay, Jack,” he said routinely, as if the subterranean context of our conversation had not existed. “Hope to see you again before you go.”

I stepped through the door back into the press conference room. Some of the cameramen were still there, packing up their equipment. I looked around for Angela Cook but she hadn’t waited for me.

After picking up the mug shot of Darnell Hicks I walked back to the Times building and up to the third-floor newsroom. I didn’t bother checking in because I had already sent my editor a budget line on the drug sweep story. I planned to make some calls and flesh it out before I went back to Prendo and tried to convince him it was a story that ought to go out front on the home page as well as the print edition.

The 928-page printout of the Winslow confession as well as the other documents I’d sent to the copy shop were waiting for me on my desk. I sat down and had to resist the urge to immediately dive into the confession. But I pushed the six-inch stack to the side and went to the computer. I opened my address book on the screen and looked up the number for the Reverend William Treacher. He was the head of a South L.A. association of ministers and was always good for a viewpoint contrary to that of the LAPD.

I had just picked up the phone to call Preacher Treacher, as he was informally known by his flock as well as the local media, when I felt a presence hovering over me and looked up to see Alan Prendergast.

“Didn’t you get my message?” he asked.

“No, I just got back and wanted to call Preacher Treacher before everybody else did.