been invaluable over the years. It had helped bring him through the case which had resulted in his promotion, the case which had turned him—however briefly—into a media golden boy. In that investigation, as in most that involved organized crime, there came a point where the path the investigators had been following disappeared into a bewildering maze of diverging paths, and the straight way was lost. The difference in the drug case was that Norman Daniels was—for the first time in his career—in charge, and when logic failed, he did without hesitation what most cops could not or would not do: he had switched over to intuition and then trusted his entire future to what it told him, plunging forward aggressively and fearlessly.
To Norman there was no such thing as “a little rekky”; to Norman there was only trolling. When you were stumped, you went somewhere that had a bearing on the case, you looked at it with your mind perfectly open, not junked up with a lot of worthless ideas and half-baked suppositions, and when you did that you were like a guy sitting in a slow-moving boat, casting your line out and reeling it in, casting out and reeling in, waiting for something to grab hold. Sometimes nothing did. Sometimes you got nothing but a submerged tree-limb or an old rubber boot or the kind of fish not even a hungry raccoon would eat.
Sometimes, though, you hooked a tasty one.
He put on the hat and the sunglasses, then turned left onto Harrison Street, now on his way to Durham Avenue. It was easily a three-mile hike to the neighborhood where Daughters and Sisters was located, but Norman didn’t mind; he could use the walk to empty out his head. By the time he reached 251, he would be like a blank sheet of photographic paper, ready to receive whatever images and ideas might come, without trying to change them so they would fit his own preconceptions. If you didn’t have any preconceptions, you couldn’t do that.
His overpriced map was in his back pocket, but he only stopped to consult it once. He had been in the city less than a week, but he already had its geography much more clearly fixed in his mind than Rosie did, and again, this was not so much training as it was a gift.
When he had awakened yesterday morning with his hands and shoulders and groin aching, with his jaws too sore to open his mouth more than halfway (the first attempt at a wakeup yawn as he swung his feet out of bed had been agony), he had done so with the dismaying realization that what he had done to Peter Slowik—aka Thumperstein, aka The Amazing Urban Jewboy—had probably been a mistake. Just how bad a mistake was hard to say, because a lot of what had happened at Slowik’s house was only a blur to him, but it had been a mistake, all right; by the time he had reached the hotel newsstand, he’d decided there was no probably about it. Probably was for the dinks of the world, anyway—this had been an unspoken but fiercely held tenet of his life’s code ever since his early teens, when his mother had left and his father had really started to crank up the beatings.
He had bought a paper at the newsstand and leafed through it rapidly in the elevator as he went back up to his room. There was nothing in it about Peter Slowik, but Norman had found that only a minor relief. Thumper’s body might not have been discovered in time for the news to make the early editions; might, in fact, still be lying where Norman had left it (where he thought he had left it, he amended; it was all pretty hazy), crammed in behind the basement water-heater. But guys like Thumper, guys who did lots of public-service work and had lots of bleeding-heart friends, didn’t go undiscovered for long. Someone would get worried, other someones would come around looking for him at his cozy little rabbit-hole on Beaudry Place, and eventually some someone would make an exceptionally unpleasant discovery behind the water-heater.
And sure enough, what had not been in the paper yesterday morning was there today, on page one of the Metro section: CITY SOCIAL WORKER SLAIN IN HOME. According to the piece, Travelers Aid had been only one of Thumper’s after-hours activities ... and he hadn’t exactly been poor, either. According to the paper, his