"Got it. He say when he's coming in?"

"No. But he said to ask if anything has happened with the abducted woman."

"Not a peep."

"Thank you," Matt said. "Good-bye."

"What?"

"I said good-bye."

"Yeah," Sergeant Frizell said, and the line went dead.

When he went into the dining room of the Melrose Diner, he looked around until he spotted them. They were in a corner banquette, and a waitress was delivering drinks.

"Anything?" Inspector Wohl asked him.

"No, sir."

"Damn," Wohl said. "What are you drinking?"

Drinking on duty, Matt saw, was not the absolute no-no he had been led to believe, from watchingDragnet and the other cop shows on television. Both Wohl and Washington had small glasses dark with whiskey in front of them, obviously something-on-the-rocks, and Harris had a taller glass of clear liquid with a slice of lime on the rim, probably a vodka tonic.

"Have you any ale?" Matt asked the waitress.

She recited a litany of the available beers and ales and Matt picked one.

"You going to eat, too?" the waitress asked. "I already got their orders."

Matt took a menu, glanced at it quickly, and ordered a shrimp salad.

From the look-mixed curiosity and mild contempt-he got from Detective Washington, Matt surmised that both the ale and the shrimp salad had been the wrong things to order.

When the waitress left, Peter Wohl picked up his glass, and with mock solemnity said, "I would like to take this happy occasion to welcome you aboard, men."

"Shit," Jason Washington said, unsmiling.

"Jason, I need you," Wohl said, seriously.

"Oh, I know why you did it," Washington said. "But that doesn't mean I agree that it was necessary, or that I have to like it."

Wohl looked as if he had started to say something and then changed his mind.

"I told Tony in the Roundhouse lobby, Jason, that if it's overtime you're worried about, you can have as much as you want."

"I should have drowned you when you were a sergeant in Homicide," Washington said, matter-of-factly. "Inspector, you know what Homicide is."

"Yeah, and I know you two guys are the best detectives in Homicide. Were the best two."

"When he's through shoveling the horseshit, Tony," Washington said, " hand the shovel to me. It's already up to my waist, and I don't want to suffocate."

Harris grunted.

"What you're doing, Inspector, is covering your ass, and using Tony and me to do it."

"Guilty, okay?" Wohl said. "Now can we get at it?"

"Now that the air, so to speak, is clear between us," Washington said, "why not?"

"Special Operations has the Northwest Philadelphia rapist job," Wohl said. "That came from the Commissioner, and I think he was following orders."

Jason Washington's eyebrows rose.

"This is the file," Wohl said. "I borrowed it from Northwest Detectives."

They were interrupted by the waitress, who set a bottle of ale and a glass in front of Matt, and then a shrimp cocktail in front of each of the others.

"I want it handled like a homicide," Wohl said.

"It's not a homicide," Washington said. "Yet. Or is it?"

"Not yet," Wohl said.

Tony Harris, who had been sitting slumped back in his chair, now leaned forward and pulled the manila folder from under Wohl's hand. He laid it beside his plate, then picked up his seafood fork. He stabbed a shrimp, dipped it in the cocktail sauce, put it in his mouth, and started to read the file.

"Who had the job at Northwest Detectives?" Jason Washington asked.

"As they came up on the wheel," Wohl said. "But, starting with the Flannery job-"

"That's the one that's missing?" Washington interrupted.

"The one before that. The one he turned loose naked with her hands tied behind her in Fairmount Park."

Washington nodded his understanding, put a shrimp in his mouth, and waited for Wohl to continue.

"Dick Hemmings got the Flannery job on the wheel," Wohl said. "Then Teddy Spanner gave him the whole job. When it became pretty certain what it was, one doer."

"Dick Hemmings is a good cop," Washington said. "What do you think we can do he hasn't already done?"

Then he raised his whiskey glass, which Matt saw was now empty, over his head. When he had caught the waitress's eye, he raised his other hand and made a circular motion, ordering another round.

Matt took another sip of his ale. He was doing his best to follow the conversation, which he found fascinating. He wondered what "the wheel" they were talking about was, but decided it would not to be wise to ask. Washington had already made it plain he held him in contempt; a further proof of ignorance would only make things worse.

"The one thing we need is a-two things. We need first a good description of the doer. Since we don't have a description, we need a profile. I've been thinking of talking to a psychiatrist-"

"Save your time," Tony Harris said. "I can tell you what a shrink will tell you. We're dealing with a sicko here. He gets his rocks off humiliating women. He hates his mother. Maybe he was screwing his mother, or she kept bringing guys home and taking them to bed. Something. Anyway, he hates her, and is getting back at her by hitting on these women. No hookers, you notice. Nice little middle-class women. That's what you'd get from a shrink."

He closed the file and handed it across the table to Washington.

"Jason's very good with people," Wohl said. "I thought it would be a good idea if he reinterviewed all the victims."

If Jason Washington heard Wohl, there was no sign. He was very carefully reading the file.

"I'll lay you ten to one that when we finally catch this scumbag," Tony Harris said, "it will come out that he's been going to one of your shrinks, Inspector, and that one ofthose scumbags has been reading the papers and knows fucking well his seventy-five-dollar-anhour patient is the guy who's been doing this. But he won't call us. Physician-patient confidentiality is fucking sacred. Particularly when the patient is coughing up seventy-five bucks an hour two, three times a week."

"I don't know how far Hemmings, or anybody, has checked out sexual offenders," Wohl said.

"I'll start there," Harris said. "These fuckers don't just start out big. Somewhere there's a record on him. Even if it's for something like soliciting for prostitution."

He said this as the waitress delivered the fresh round of drinks. She gave him a very strange look.

"I'm going to be in court most of this week and next," Washington said, without looking up from the file any longer than it took to locate the fresh drink.

"I figured that would probably be the case," Wohl said. "So why don't you work the four-to-midnight shift? It is my professional judgment that the people you will be interviewing will be more readily available in the evening hours."

Washington snorted, but there was a hint of a smile at his eyes and on his lips. He knew the reason Wohl had assigned him to the four-totwelve shift had nothing to do with more readily available witnesses. It would make all the time he spent in court during the day overtime.

"I'm going to be in court a lot, too," Tony Harris said. "That apply to me, too?"

"Since it is also my professional judgment that you can do whatever you plan to do during the evening hours better than during the day, sure," Wohl said.

Peter Wohl had been in Homicide and knew that, because of the overtime pay, Homicide detectives were the best paid officers in the Police Department. There was no question in his mind that Washington and Harris were taking home as much money as a Chief Inspector. That was the major, but not the only, reason they were unhappy with their transfer to Special Operations; they thought it was going to cut their pay.

It posed, he realized, what Sergeant Frizell would term a "personnel motivation problem" for him: if they didn't want to work for him, they didn't have to. About the only weapon he had as a supervisor short of official disciplinary action- and both Washington and Harris were too smart to make themselves vulnerable to something like that-was to send his men back where they had come from. Which would not make either Washington or Harris at all unhappy.