Copper’s
Instinct

“Can anyone tell me why Knight would have blood in his refrigerator?”

Even while asserting his certainty of a logical explanation, Schanke winced inside.  Did Knight have to be such an eccentric?  He’d probably never even have come under suspicion if he’d only put ten bucks in the betting pool, joined the bowling league, and gone for a beer now and then like the rest of the guys. No one else decorated his apartment with archæ­o­logical artifacts!  “Price­less,” Schanke called one, as he snatched it protectively, and saw surprise behind the stony eyes of the man holding it.

The echoes of the word rang in his head as he stood, helplessly watching as Ident tore apart the room.  Who was Knight to have “priceless”?  He couldn’t afford “priceless”:  no detective could.  (Yet Metro P.D. was as well paid as any in North America, and better than most.)

He stayed to the bitter end, the shock of Knight’s arrest still not worn off, knowing that his partner—his partner—was in a holding cell in the basement of the station, fingerprinted and strip-searched like any criminal, and that he himself was the only one in the loft who could stand up for Nick in his absence.  And someone had to be there to speak for him.

After they had gone, leaving crime-tape crossing the door, Schanke drove back to the 96th.  The night was almost over; he should be signing out and heading home.  Yet instead he went to the Captain’s office, knowing that his protests would do no good, but that he had to make them.

“Take a week off,” said Cohen.  Her voice was not unkind, but it was firm.  “There’ll be questions,” she added.  “So make yourself available.”

It was only on the drive home that it dawned on Schanke that he himself was under suspicion.

The Schankes’ house.

Myra listened as her anguished husband poured it all out, and felt outrage on his behalf.

“It’s just circum­stantial,” he cried.  “He’s a cop!  They should give him the benefit of the doubt.”  He added bitterly, “It’s because of the transfer.  We’re the new guys at the Nine-Six.  They don’t know us from Adam; and they’d rather it’s us than one of their own.”

Myra murmured reassurances and patted his shoulder.  Still, she wondered.  Not about her Donny, of course, but….  How much, after all, did Don really know of Nick?  He hadn’t wanted him as a partner in the first place; she knew that.  And, even after the better part of two years, she still felt the man was an enigma.  She had scarcely met him.  Just briefly at the Police Picnic the previous year, and that a mere token introduction.

To no surprise, she found that Don was too wrought up to fall asleep easily; and the next morning, when the alarm went, she stifled it quickly and left him snoring while she got Jenny off to school.  She could easily then have gone back to bed, for she had had too little sleep herself; but she sat at the table with a glass of orange juice and read the morning paper.  The arrest had made the front page.  There was not much detail beyond what Don had told her the previous night; but the crime reporter’s account was rather more coherent.  The picture she painted was not a pretty one:  vigilante cop “cleaning up the streets” (as the phrase had it) by killing drug dealers and addicts.

Could Nick have done it?

On the whole, Myra was inclined to trust her husband’s instincts.  He was a good and experienced cop.  Yet … I.A. would not have made the arrest—not of one of Metro’s own—unless they felt the evidence was sound and the case locked tight.

Don knew that too, of course.  Why else did he feel so betrayed?

Capt. Amanda Cohen

The two empty desks outside Cohen’s office were starkly obvious when she came into work.  She ignored them, went in, and took off her coat.  A few minutes later, as she was going quickly through the stack of reports on her desk, Sgt. Mandrake rapped on the door.

“Cap’n, I wonder if I could have a word?”

“Certainly.  What’s it about?” she said, setting the files aside.

“Well, it’s Detective Knight,” he began, and then stopped.  He looked more than a little embarrassed; and she rather suspected he hoped she’d intuit his meaning without his having to say more.

Unhelpfully, she simply said, “Yes?”

“He’s down in Holding,” he said (as if she didn’t know).

“Yes, Mandrake,” she said drily, “I would imagine he is—unless someone has cleared him of suspicion, of course.”

The man just looked at her.

“No, I suppose that was too much to hope for.”  There was still no response.  “Well,” she went on impatiently, “is Knight being a nuisance in some way?”

“Not really,” Mandrake admitted.  “Not in himself.  But it’s very awkward having him in there, you know.”

“You’ll just have to put up with it,” she said briskly.  “I’ve had a word with the Crown—more to the point, the Chief and the Police Association have had a word with the Crown—and they’ve agreed that it would be unfair to charge him until the DNA evidence comes through.  Ruin his career; and for nothing if there’s no match.  But there’s no way they’re granting bail; and it would be risky to remand him to the Don Jail.  So here he stays.”

“He’s taking up a whole cell all to himself,” said Mandrake plaintively.

“So shuffle ’em round and double ’em up.”  She let her impatience show; and, as she expected, he simply said, “Yes, ma’am,” and left.

Oh, grow a pair, she thought, irritated that he let it slide so fast.  The overcrowding in Holding—for however long it took to get the test results—was going to be a pain in the neck; as sergeant in charge, Mandrake had a right to make that point.  She shook her head in despair at the man, but turned straight back to the rest of the reports.  Knight could wait—would wait—for as long as it took.  And given the speed with which the lab did DNA tests, she knew it would take a while.

Sgt. Mandrake

Sgt. Mandrake left the Captain’s office glumly, passed the two empty desks, and started up the centre aisle of the squad room.  He did not get far.  One of the detectives sitting filling out forms stuck his foot ostentatiously out to bar the way, and called him to a halt.

“So what’s up with Knight?”

“Well, you know,” said Mandrake.  “He got arrested for murdering those drug dealers.”

Det. McCabe looked impatient.  “Yeah, the whole precinct—the whole force—knows that.  Not to mention the papers.  Were you there when he was booked?  Has he said anything?”

“Not to me,” said Mandrake simply.

“I guess I.A.’re going to be interrogating him.”

“I wouldn’t know.”  Hiding a faint malice, Mandrake added, “Why don’t you come down and have a word with him yourself if you want?”

Taking this as meant, McCabe simply snorted.

Mandrake waited a moment to see if the other man had more to say, then looked round.  Fascinated eyes turned hurriedly away; and he was able to make it to the far exit without further interruption.

With some relief, he went downstairs to the basement, to Holding, to his own domain.  There he walked along the row of cells, checking that all was in order, before returning to the entrance and sitting down at his desk.  He busied himself with updating the logbook.

“Hey, Mandrake!”

It was Knight, calling softly but all too clearly.  He ignored it.

“Sergeant!”

Reluctantly, Mandrake looked up.  “Whatcha want, Knight?  Let you out for a drink of water?”

“No, that’s all right.  I just—”  Knight broke off.

“I really can’t talk, you know.”

“I was just wondering how things were going.  Who’s investigating the case.  If I could speak to the Captain.”

Mandrake looked at him thoughtfully.  “Well, things aren’t going so good, Knight:  you’re under arrest.  And it’s I.A. investigating, as you know.  And I guess, if the Captain wants to talk to you, she’ll come down herself.”  He paused, and then added more kindly, “Did you talk to your rep, yet?  Have you got a lawyer?”

Knight’s silence answered him.

“You really should get a lawyer.”

Schanke might have been told to stay home; but “stay home” is a phrase susceptible to interpretation.  It was a long morning, though followed with the pleasure of lunch at home with his daughter before she headed back to school for the afternoon.  His own afternoon was spent waiting far too long for I.A. to turn up.  The following day, without either phone call or ring at the door, his long-suffering wife finally sent him out with a shopping list.  She did not expect him to be back for hours.  Nor was he:  a lot of gasoline got wasted.  But he did at least remember to return with several bags from the supermarket.

“How was your day?” he asked, as she unpacked and put away the groceries.

“There was a phone call from the school.”

“Jenny in trouble?” said Schanke, a bit startled, for their daughter was not, on the whole, inclined to misbehave.

“It seems some of the other kids were teasing her in recess.  Someone got hold of the fact that your partner’s under arrest.”

“That’s nothing to do with Jenny!”

“You know that, and I know that—and, in all fairness, so does her teacher, and no doubt the others kids’ parents.  But you know what kids are like.  If they want to tease her, they’ll grab any insult, even if they don’t know what it means.”

“You want me to go round the school tomorrow?”

“No, let Miss Bradley handle it.  She just wanted us to know in case Jenny came home upset.”

Later, there were patient explanations to a little girl who couldn’t really understand them; but, as they got ready for bed, Schanke burst out, “And it isn’t even me got arrested.”  To which Myra had no answer.

Det. Dreyfus (I.A.)

In the offices of Internal Affairs, Dets. Dreyfus and Rogers suffered the muted congratulations of their peers.  It was good to get a crooked cop off the streets; but it was not easy to live with the fact of the necessity, and this was not a simple case of theft or excessive force.  The evidence was almost damning.  (The watch was the clincher, in their view.)  If Knight had not been a fellow cop, he’d have been charged already.  Both of them privately wished he were tried, convicted, and jailed; and the whole mess over and done with.

Meanwhile, since the brass had agreed to wait on the DNA tests (and God knows how long that would take), there were i’s to dot and t’s to cross.  Over coffee they agreed to split up:  Rogers would go to the 27th Precinct, from which Knight had so recently transferred, to see what—if anything—could be gleaned from his recent colleagues.  Dreyfus would go to Det. Schanke’s.

It was mid-afternoon when he rang the bell.  Mrs. Schanke opened the door.  He would have preferred to talk to them separately; but he was not in the controlled environment of a police station.  There was no choice but to sit in their living room with the two of them opposite, side by side on the couch.

He began with routine.  How long had Schanke been partnered with Knight (a question to which, of course, he knew the answer to the day)?  What cases had they worked?  Had Knight’s behaviour ever troubled him?  Had he ever seen his partner use excessive force?

Schanke’s responses were irreproachable.  But then, any cop would back his partner; Dreyfus expected as much.

He turned then to the vigilante murders themselves:  where had Det. Schanke been on the 5th of March? and on the 17th?

These were, of course, the dates of the first two murders.  They had also been days off for both Knight and Schanke; so Dreyfus expected from the latter much the same response that the former had given when arrested, that is, that he had been at home.  Certainly, for the 17th, this was precisely the response that Schanke gave, though he quickly added (lying through his teeth, for there was no way he was landing the uniform he’d bribed smack dab in the middle of this shit heap) that he had phoned the precinct to keep apprised of what was going on that night, been told of the murder, and dashed over there in his car.

“In your pyjamas, I believe,” put in Dreyfus.

It was Mrs. Schanke who blushed—and then put a hand out to pat her husband’s arm, with a little defiant toss of her head.

“We were getting ready for bed,” she said.  “But Donny would call.  He’s very responsible about his job, Detective; and he wants to make a good impression on his new Captain.  He just got transferred, you know.”

Actually, the pyjamas were a good touch:  it was hard to imagine someone committing serial murder in gaudy PJs with moose printed on them.

Which, in Dreyfus’s mind, was suspicious in itself.

Jenny was sitting quietly at her desk opening her reader to page 46 when the class phone rang, and Miss Bradley interrupted the lesson to answer it.  After listening, the teacher told the class to stay in their seats, read ahead in the story, and keep quiet while she was out of the room.  Then she went along to the office, not at all expecting to find a plainclothes police officer waiting with the principal.  Just a few routine questions, he said:  would she cast her mind back to the 5th of the month.

“It was a perfectly ordinary schoolday,” she said.  “Should I get my lesson plan?  I don’t recall anything unusual happening.”

“In the evening?” he asked.

“Oh, the Parent-Teacher Meeting.”

“Can you tell me who turned up for it?”

She ran through those she remembered, and racked her brains to recall the rest, wishing that he’d let her go back to her room to collect her records.

“And Jenny Schanke’s parents both came,” she said, finally seeing the light in his eyes that said she’d got to the point that interested him.  “That was about eight thirty.  We were running rather late.  Another couple came in while they were there—the Pattersons—and insisted on interrupting; and the Schankes spent some time looking round the pictures the children had drawn.  They were tacked up on the bulletin board to show the parents, and some cut-out flowers taped up on the walls, and Jenny had four gold stars….”

“Yes,” Det. Dreyfus said, breaking in.  “And when did they leave?”

“It must have been after nine.  The janitor came round wanting to lock up.”

“So that’s two witnesses that put you at the school at nine,” said Cohen over the phone.  “Since the pathologist says the murder under the pier happened within that time frame, you can return to duty.”

“What about Nick?” asked Schanke.

“Take the good news,” said Cohen drily.  “If you want to see him, I’ll authorize it.  He’s still in Holding.”

Schanke hung up, with a look at Myra, who was hanging close to hear what the Captain had said.  “I.A’s cleared me.”

“What was that about Nick?”

“At least he’s not in the Don.  Count that blessing.”  His tone belied his words; but, the next morning, as Myra made him sandwiches, he realized that, perversely, Cohen’s call did hide a blessing.  If it hadn’t been for the PTA meeting, it might have been himself in Holding—if not worse.

So he headed off to work for that afternoon’s swing shift, with a slightly lighter heart, but the knowledge that he had several days’ work to catch up and no partner to share the load.  As he drove into the lot behind the police station, he was surprised therefore for a moment when he saw Nick’s car in the next parking spot.  Then he took a closer look, and realized that it was sifted white with fine snow that no one had bothered to clear.  So, as soon as he had hung up his coat and acknowledged the slightly embarrassed welcomes of the others in the squad room, he rapped at Cohen’s door.

“Glad to have you back,” she said warmly.

“Glad to be back,” he responded, automatically.  “Look, Captain, should Knight’s car just be left in the lot like that?  His Caddy’s damn near antique:  it should be in a garage.  We could still have a major snowfall, you know.  It’s not spring yet.”

She looked surprised at the question.  It nettled him:  why shouldn’t he be concerned?

“Not much else I can do for Nick,” he pointed out, with more than a trace of bitterness.  “It never was our case; and any evidence I found would be suspect anyway.  At least I can see his car’s taken care of, right?  He gives a damn about that old car of his.”

Cohen gave him a long and thoughtful look.  Then she got up, unlocked the filing cabinet in the corner, and took out a sealed envelope.  “I’ve got Knight’s effects here,” she said, and opened the envelope.  “Yes, all right.  You may as well drive it back to his place and put it away properly.”  She shook the contents onto her desk, and picked out the key ring.  “But—”  She spoke admonishingly as she held the keys out.  “—be sure to bring them back here.  I’ll need to seal them away again.”

“Right, Cap’n.” Schanke took the keys with alacrity, backed to the door with a sloppy salute, and grabbed his coat before she could change her mind.

He drove the Caddy to the loft with a guilty thrill (so seldom did he get to drive it!), yet took the straightest route with no pleasurable detours—and not because he feared another accident, either.  This was a responsibility he had to his partner; and he would discharge it without dalliance.

Once the car was garaged, he pulled out his wallet, fishing for a token among the small change so that he could take the TTC back to the station.  As he crossed the yard heading for the street, though, he turned to check the garage door was shut properly, tilted his head, and noticed that a light was on at the top floor.

Someone was in the loft.

He headed up at a run, taking the stairs two at a time rather than use the elevator with its noisy motor; flung the door open, gun in hand if needed; and then saw that the intruder was merely Dr. Lambert.

She turned at the sound of his entrance.

“Hey, Schank!”

He flipped his coat open and holstered his weapon.  “Dr. Lambert.  Long time, no see.”

“Sorry,” she said.  “I thought it might be better—espec­i­ally since I’ve been dropping in to see Nick a couple of times a day.”

He drifted up the room, looking round to see how badly messed up it was after the Ident invasion.  “You tidying up?” he asked.

She looked down at the collection of misfiled CDs in her hand.  “Yeah, you know how it is.  They’re supposed to leave everything exactly as they found it….”  She trailed off with a wry grin.

“Need any help?”

She shook her head.  “No, I’m good.”  She put the CDs on the shelf by the stereo and came up the room to meet him near the stairs.  “Have you been in to see him?” she asked.

“Hardly.  I’ve been stuck at home until today,” he pointed out.  “No, this is my first day back.  I just came here to put Nick’s car in the garage—”

“Oh, good.”

“—so Cohen’s expecting me to get back to the station and get on with the job.  We’ve a couple of cases on our plate.  Routine, probably.”

“I heard you’d been cleared.  I’m so glad.”

“Yeah,” said Schanke wrily.  “Me too.”

There was a tongue-tied moment.

“Sooo….  I’ll just finish up here,” Natalie finally said, with a flip of her thumb over her shoulder to the messed-up room.

“I’ll just get going,” he said, simultaneously; and they smiled awkwardly.

“I’ll drop in on Nick, I promise,” he added.  “Cohen cleared it.”

“He’ll be glad to know you’re okay, at least.”

She sounded, he thought, as though there was much that she longed to say but dared not; and he understood.  She was too close to the forensic evidence; and he was Knight’s partner and out of the loop, perforce.

He headed for the door, only to turn back, impelled to ask.

“Did they find any of that DNA evidence?  Can you do a test to clear him?”

She brightened.  “It’s gone off to the lab,” she said, and relaxed (too deliberately, it seemed to him), smiling over-brightly to reassure him.  “When it comes back, they’ll have to let him go.”

“Of course,” he said stoutly.  “It’s just a damned long wait, that’s all.”

Janette

It was the next day that it occurred to Schanke to drop by the Raven.  Janette, glancing out of the door of her office, was surprised to see him sashay up to the bar.  With her vampire hearing, she had no difficulty catching his inquiry into her whereabouts.  Yet Nicolas was not with him; and she had quite thought her old lover had broken his stout human partner of his penchant for wandering into strange nightclubs without his vampire chaperone.

Miklos pointed the way to the office; and Janette withdrew to her desk lest she seem overeager.

Schanke came in, sweating a little under his overcoat, and took off his hat.  “I wasn’t sure if you’d heard about Nick,” he opened, “and I know you two are friends, I guess; so I figured I ought to come by.”

“What about Nicolas?” Janette said.  “I can see he is not with you.”  And more sharply, “Is something wrong?”  She could not help but remember Nicolas’s worry when he had come by, too many days ago:  he had been certain that someone was looking for him, claiming to feel a sensation that some danger was near.  (Indeed, she had felt it herself, lightly.)

“You didn’t see it on the news?  Read the paper?”

Of course not.  She didn’t bother with mortal news.

Clearly, her expression told Schanke that she had no idea what had been happening.  “Nick’s been arrested,” he told her.  “For murder.”

“Indeed,” she said coolly, though her mind was racing.  “And … do you think that he has done it?”

“What?”  He was astounded.  “Of course not!”  He looked at her indignantly.  “I thought you were a friend of his!”

“Yes, yes, of course,” she said soothingly.  “But even murderers have friends, you know.  You are a police officer, after all.  How often have you heard someone say, ‘He could not possibly have done such a thing,’ when the evidence is incontrovertible?”

“All the time,” he admitted.  “But this is Nick we’re talking about.  There’s no way he did it!”

“Your faith does you honour,” she said, slightly formal, suppressing her sense of humour.  “But I would not worry about Nicolas, you know.  He is quite well able to take care of himself.  This little contretemps will pass and be forgotten, I assure you.”

She let him expostulate for a while about the peril of his partner; and the more she heard, the more she seethed.  What was Nicolas playing at, to let mortals imprison him?  He should whisk himself free, blank their memories, and move on.  Any other vampire would have done so already!  It was, of course, this infernal fascination he had with his police hobby.  Janette had been too tolerant:  no one else in the community would show such restraint.

Eventually her patience with the mortal’s worries grew thin and she wearied of humouring him.  Looking him firmly in the eye, she laid a light hypnosis—for she had no wish to see him back at the Raven bothering her again—and escorted him to the door of the club, showing him out with a smiling assurance that all would, in the end, turn out quite all right.  Closing the door behind him, she sailed serenely back through the crowd to the privacy of her office; and only then did she let her concern show on her face.

A week later and the DNA results were still not back—nor did anyone expect them to be, not so soon.  Through her open door, Cohen saw Schanke get up from his desk and head for the back of the room.  She knew he was going down to Holding to visit Knight; and she knew he’d be back in a coffee-break’s length of fifteen minutes having been told by his erstwhile partner, yet again, that he really shouldn’t keep coming.  Sgt. Mandrake heard all, and told her a good deal of it; and, while she deplored his tendency to gossip, she appreciated being kept on top of it all.  As for her reaction to Schanke’s behaviour:  on the one hand, she respected his staunch support of Knight; on the other, she wished he’d finally come round to accepting the obvious—for the sake of his relations with his fellow officers, as well as for his professional reputation.  The DNA evidence, when it came, would be no more than the icing on the cake.  They all knew that:  the evidence might be circumstantial, but it was airtight.

That, after all, was why Knight’s continued presence in the basement was so hard on everyone.

In the due quarter hour, Schanke returned to his desk.  He then made a phone call, grabbed his coat, and headed for the parking lot.  Cohen sighed.  He was trying to handle a double load—manfully, but impossibly.  There was no way this could go on.

An hour or so later, as she expected, Dr. Lambert passed by her door.  (It is marvellous how quickly a routine can be established.)  Not for the first time, Cohen thought it a pity that, being so conveniently on the spot, the young pathologist had been the one to take the blood sample from Knight.  Not that Cohen doubted the woman’s probity; yet, always, one eye must be kept on the presentation of evidence in a future court case, never more so than when the crime is murder.  Of course, at the time, Cohen had had no idea that Lambert and Knight were close.  Retrospectively, though, the signs of their friendship were clear:  she knew they would be ready fodder for the defence.

Shortly thereafter, Schanke popped in, still in his overcoat, to give her a quick update on his latest interview.  He then sat down to fill out his time sheet.  The shift was nearly over.

Cohen got up, making her usual tour of the squad room to check that everything was running smoothly.  When, on her return, she paused for a moment at the empty desk, Schanke lifted his eyes from the typewriter with an inquiring look.  She managed to come up with an innocuous comment.

“Sure thing, Captain,” he said.  “You want me to do it now, or wait till tomorrow?”

Still brown-nosing, she wondered?  It was already past the end of shift:  time he yanked the form from the platen and headed home.

No, she thought.  He’s on thin ice, as Knight’s partner; and he’s worried—about himself, as well as the other man.

She went into the office to initial her own final reports and get her coat, debating with herself what to do with him once the tests came back and Knight went off to jail.  Schanke would obviously need a new partner.  Or should she have him transferred out?

Through the open slats of the blinds on the office windows, Schanke could see Cohen put a stack of files in the cabinet and hitch her coat off the rack in the corner.  He turned back to the typewriter on his desk; scrolled the platen down, carefully adjusting the paper so that the keys would hit inside the box; and finished the final entries on the form.  Taking it out, albeit without his usual ebullient flourish, he signed his name at the bottom and stuck it in his outbox.

Then, thinking better of it, he picked the form back up and went to the front desk to hand it directly to Lipinski.

“I’m off,” he said.

“See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, see you.”  But instead of heading back to grab his coat, Schanke paused.  “You heard anything on the grapevine?”

“Not so far.”  Lipinski gave him a kindly look.  “No news is good news.”

Schanke summoned a grin.  “Nah.  Good news is good news.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

But, as he drove home, Schanke could only think, “Yeah, and bad news is bad news.”  He went in quietly to kiss his sleeping daughter, and was uncharacteristically subdued as he ate the late dinner that Myra produced.

Shortly thereafter, they headed up for bed themselves.

“Seriously,” said Schanke, as he took off his watch and set it on the bedside table, “it’s bad enough that everyone at work is sure Nick’s guilty.  They look at me with that pity in their eyes—pity for the poor damned idiot who won’t see the obvious.”

Myra murmured, a soothing nothing.  He sounded bitter; and she didn’t know what to say.  She turned back the sheet on her side of the bed, and reached over to plump up his pillow.  He sighed, and sat on edge of the bed.  She waited for a bit.  Then, when he didn’t move, she turned off the lamp on her bedside table, got in, and snuggled down.  She took care, though, to face his side of the bed.

After a while, he swung his legs up and under the covers, reached out to switch off his own lamp, and slid down to join her.

He said nothing; and she wondered if he was drifting off to sleep.

Very softly, she ventured, “You know, those DNA tests’ll come back eventually.  Have you thought what’ll happen then?”

There was no answer—but there was no snoring, either.

“Have you thought…?”  Quickly she amended, “I know you don’t want to think it, but have you thought that maybe … just maybe … he might be guilty after all?”

Still silence.  For a while, she thought that maybe she was wrong, and he was actually asleep.  Then….

“Of course, I’ve thought it,” he murmured, so quietly that she almost missed it.  He buried his face in the pillow, and sobbed, “Oh, I’m not a fool, Myra.  Do you think I am?  Of course, I’ve thought it.”

He said no more; and, for a while, she thought that this time he really must have fallen asleep.  Then, as she was drifting off herself, she heard him say, “But you know, I’d do anything—any­thing—if it would prove he didn’t do it.  Just tell me what to do, that’s all.  Just someone, please, tell me what to do.”

Later, of course, the DNA tests came back with a positive match, yet were proven false; the true murderer was caught, and Schanke’s loyalty vindicated; and Dr. Lambert confessed, after a fashion, to a most curious mix-up with the blood samples.  Captain Cohen faced the trio—and a quandary—in her office, debated with herself how best to handle the situation, and proffered a more plausible (albeit false) explanation than the young pathologist’s stammered improb­abil­ities.  When they jumped on the lie with alacrity, she knew that her suspicions had been right.

The Three Musketeers, she thought, as she shooed them out of her office.  All for one, at any rate.  Still, their trust in Knight’s innocence had, in the end, proved justified.

They stayed clustered, only feet away, by Knight’s desk:  she could see them clearly, though the hum of the squad room largely masked their conversation.  Cohen opened a random file on her desk, concealing the direction of her thoughts with a blind downward glance.

Up till now, Dr. Lambert had been to her no more than one of several pathologists at the Coroner’s Office:  clearly, she’d be seeing rather more of her than before.  As for the new detectives—well, Knight had yet to prove his worth.  It was Schanke whose mettle had been tested; and, for now, Cohen would take his partner at his valuation.

She rather thought any man to whom Don Schanke gave his trust would prove an officer worth having at the Nine-Six.

Schanke got home that night a little late, and simply told his wife that Nick had been cleared.  As Knight’s arrest and escape had been on the six o’clock news, Myra knew that there had to be more to the tale; but she didn’t press the matter.  The rest came out bit by bit:  some as he ate the dinner she had warmed back up in the microwave, some as they lay in bed; and the final details piecemeal over the next day or so.  In the end, she knew most of it—or, at least, the most of it that Schanke himself knew.  There was much that neither Knight nor Lambert ever let slip in his hearing, particularly anything that bore on vampires.

Of course, Jeff Morris’s role as the true vigilante was transparent.  As they got undressed for bed, Schanke crowed to Myra that it was he who had talked down the man who had framed Nick.  His voice grew louder and faster as he relived each move Morris had made as he ran and hid in the old factory, how he had tracked and cornered him, and each word of the argument that had finally convinced Morris to surrender.

Myra gave him a congratulatory hug and kiss, and forbore to chide him about the confrontation.  It could so easily have gone wrong, but it hadn’t; and right at the moment he needed his glory.

“I never doubted Nick for an instant,” he said.  “Never.”

She forbore to contradict him, though she knew better.

“He’ll be back on the job in a day or two,” he said.  “Once they get all the red tape cut.  God, it’ll be good to have him back.  One thing he’s lucky to miss, though—”

She could hear the grin in his voice.

“—with all that came down today, Morris’s arrest, all the rest of it—”

“Yes?”

“Mountain of forms to fill out tomorrow.”