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Greg Lowman was a security guard for Trickster Enterprises, a toy company that had diversified (according to Braun’s sources) into various technological concerns. Lowman was a black member of the NRA and a solid believer in every American’s right to defend him- or herself.

Christopher “Kit” Carson had done six stints in jail, mostly for burglary. One of these was due to an arrest that Pratt had made.

Son Mali was an Africanist who believed that one day a revolution would tear the United States apart. His day job was that of a master plumber.

Lamont Charles was the slickest member of the Blood Brothers of Broadway. He was a suspected con man who had never been charged, a Lothario of almost mythic proportions, and a poker player so devastating that he was allowed in only certain professional games from Atlantic City to Las Vegas.

Lana Ruiz was a Dominican who had cut the throat of her pimp in his sleep but somehow managed to get a judge to call it self-defense. Her picture was that of a beautiful dark-skinned woman who seemed defiant even while smiling for the photograph.

The BBB was not a fortunate lot. Lowman, Carson, and Mali had all been murdered in the eighteen months preceding Man’s shoot-out with Pratt and Valence. Lamont Charles had been shot but he survived; a triplegic living in a nursing home on Coney Island.

Lana Ruiz had been convicted of armed assault and attempted murder, while Tanya Lark had dropped off the map completely.

That was a whole lot of mayhem even for a militant political group, even for a Saturday night in summertime in Brownsville, New York.

There was a long list of witnesses who had claimed that the dead cops were involved in criminal activities and two witnesses who at first claimed that the cops opened fire on Man (they gave nearly identical testimony), only to recant within three days of each other.

Even though Braun hadn’t mentioned it in his arguments, I couldn’t see why the former Leonard Compton would decide to take on the cops in a one-on-two shoot-out. He was a marksman and they trained professionals. Why not set himself up on some roof and take them out when they were on a job?

And why drop a case just because the client might have been guilty? It was the lawyer’s job to work with the law, not worry about right and wrong.

I must have read four hundred pages when I noticed that it was closing in on 5:00 a.m. I should have gone to bed, but all that evidence gave me a thought: If Adamo Cortez wasn’t actually the name of an NYPD cop, then maybe it was an official alias or a confidential informant.

It was at that moment I knew I was going to take both cases: my frame and A Free Man’s murder conviction.

I was born to be an investigator. For me it was like putting together a three-dimensional, naturalistic puzzle that in the end would be an exact representation of the real world.

From the deep bottom drawer of my ancient desk I took out two reams of paper, both pastel colored—one blue and the other pink. That way my outline of the two investigations could be stacked together while following two different strands. I had, in my failed career, used as many as five colors to keep my place.

I’d been paid two hundred fifty dollars to work an eight-hour day seeing if the two investigations made sense. I had a clear pathway because nobody knew what I was up to.

For the first step I took a white sheet from the top drawer and penned across the top COMMON ELEMENTS.

The first question shared by both cases was whether or not I needed a partner in the process.

I considered Gladstone Palmer. He was my friend; there was no doubt about that. He went into Rikers and made sure that I was safe in solitary. When I was working a seventy-hour week at two security jobs he lent me the money to start the detective service, then sent me my first few clients. And Glad knew how the department worked. He was connected to every precinct, every captain, and most foot soldiers of the NYPD. His input would be invaluable and…if he was able to clear my name, he might also clear a pathway to his own advancement.

But Glad’s strengths were also deficits. He did know all the important players on, and off, the force and so might be beholden to people I’d have to hurt. Add to that the fact that I was trying to clear a cop killer of the crimes he was accused of while admitting that he pulled the trigger…that would be of no help to my friend.

Patrolman First Class Henri Tourneau was another choice. The young Haitian-born cop’s father asked me to help him prepare for getting on the force. I guided Henri through every step, including training himself in computers so that he’d have a skill that most prospective cops lacked. Once he was in I counseled him on how to deal with everything from his captain to the rank and file. I told him what rules could be bent or broken and those that were sacrosanct.

One thing he was never to do was admit that I was anything other than a friend of his father’s.

Henri allowed me to roam through the general databases, but using him as a partner in these investigations was above and beyond for the young and recently married policeman.

No other cop fit the bill, and so I let my thoughts range wider. There were half a dozen PIs I knew from work I’d done over the years. But I wasn’t close enough to any of them to feel they could be trusted with issues so serious.

The sun was beginning to peek over the bank building across the street when I thought, reluctantly, of Melquarth Frost. Melquarth, or Mel as he was better known, was a vicious criminal.

Mel had done many things wrong in his life. He’d robbed banks, murdered rivals, tortured marks, set bombs, and belonged to a few dangerous heist crews that had executed some of the most daring robberies of the twenty-first century so far.

I came across the lifelong criminal when the FBI tasked a few city cops to shore up some gaps in a net they set for the Byron gang. Ted and Francis Byron were truly architects of crime. They had planned and carried out at least eight bank burglaries where they were able to blast out an inner wall through to cash-gorged vaults.

On these jobs they always took along a man like Mel in case there was a need to fight.

The job was done at a little after three on a Wednesday morning at a midtown bank on West Fifty-Sixth. I was guarding a subway grate on Sixty-Third that the feds said might be used as an exit. It was just me because they didn’t think it likely that anyone would get that far and the brass was charging them twenty-five hundred dollars a head for boots on the ground.

I listened to the takedown over a secure line that all the participants had. The explosion had come at 3:09. Soon after that, six of the seven bank robbers were captured without a round being fired.