"W-William Three, this is Highway Twenty. I'm westbound on the Schuylkill Expressway at City Line."

"Highway Twenty, meet me at City Line and Monument."

"Twenty, 'kay."

Washington put down the microphone and turned to Matt. "They'll give you a ride to get your car," he said. "What I'm hoping is that your peers will not be struck dumb when they remember you're a cop. You just might pick up something. Go through the whole business. What is that again?"

"Not much. Just the wedding itself and the reception."

"The bachelor party was last night?"

"Yeah. I missed it."

"Pity. It might have been interesting."

Washington shifted around on the seat, taking out the stuff he had removed from Penelope Detweiler's wastebasket and clothing pockets and handing it to Matt. There were half a dozen matchbooks, several crumpled pieces of paper, several tissues with what could have been spots of dried blood on them, and the small plastic vial.

"What do you think is in the vial?"

"I wouldn't be surprised if what was in the vial was cocaine," Washington said. "I'll drop it by the lab and find out. The tissues indicate she might have been injecting heroin."

Washington saw the look of mingled surprise and confusion on Matt' s face and went on: "Heroin users will often dab the needle mark with tissues. Thus the blood spots. Cocaine is usually snorted or smoked, but some experienced junkies sometimes mix cocaine with their heroin and then inject it. They call it a speedball. The cocaine provides an immediate euphoria, a rush, lasting maybe fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes. Then the heroin kicks in, as a depressant, and brings the user down from the high into a mellow low lasting for several hours. Very powerful, very dangerous. "

"Jesus," Matt said, visibly upset. Then he asked, "Is it evidence? I mean, we didn't have a search warrant or probable cause."

"No. Moot point. No Assistant DA in his right mind is going to try to indict Penelope Detweiler for simple possession."

"Her mother said she probably didn't have fifty dollars in cash; she really had seven hundred and change."

"Her mother told us the truth, as far as she knew it. I don't think she knows that her daughter is doing cocaine. But that does suggest, since Penelope uses coke and didn't have any but had a lot of money, that she was shopping for some, doesn't it?"

"From DeZego?"

"We don't know that, but-"

"Somebody was trying to rip DeZego off, and/or his customer? "

"But why the shotgun? Why kill him?" Washington replied. "Any of that stuff ring a bell?"

"Gin-mill matchbooks," Matt said. "From saloons where Penny and her kind drink."

"They all familiar?"

"This one's new to me," Matt said, holding up a large matchbook with a flocked purple cover and the legend INDULGENCES stamped in silver.

Washington glanced at it.

"New to me too," he said. "Is there an address?"

"Not outside," Matt said. He opened it. "There's a phone number, printed inside."

"I'll check that out," Washington said. "Anything else?"

Matt examined the other matchbooks.

"Phone number in this one, handwritten."

Matt unfolded the crumpled pieces of paper.

"This one has a printed number: four eight two. Looks like something from the factory. There's another phone number in one of the others, and the last one is the same as the first."

"Call in to Special Operations every hour or so. When I get addresses, I'll pass them on to you. If you come up with something, pass it on. Leave a phone number, so if something interesting turns up I think you should know, I can call you." He paused and smiled. "I'll say I'm the Porsche service department."

"Clever," Matt said, chuckling.

"Yes, I sometimes think so," Washington said. "The evidence is overwhelming."

A Highway Patrol car was waiting at City Line and Monument when Jason Washington and Matt Payne got there. Washington stopped on the pedestrian crosswalk and Matt got out. Matt walked to the Highway car, opened the back door, and got in.

"Hi," he said. "I need a ride to Bustleton and Bowler."

"What the hell are we supposed to be, a fucking taxi?" asked the driver, a burly cop with an acne-scarred face.

"I thought you weresupposed to be the Gestapo," Matt said.

Oh, shit, there goes the automatic, out-of-control mouth again.

The Highway cop in the passenger seat, a lean, sharp-featured man with cold blue eyes, turned and put his arm on the back of the seat and looked at Matt. Then he smiled. It did not make him look much warmer.

"He can't be in the Gestapo, Payne," he said. "You have to be able to read and write to be in the Gestapo."

"Fuck you too," the driver said.

"You in a hurry or what?" the other one asked. "We was about to get coffee when we got the call."

"Coffee sounds like a fine idea," Matt said.

"Why don't we go to the Marriott on City Line?" he said to the driver, and then turned back to Matt. "Is that Washington as good as people say?"

"I was just thinking about that," Matt said. "Yeah. He's good. Very good. He not only knows what questions to ask, but how to ask them. A master psychologist."

"He better be a master something," the driver said. "They don't have shit on who shot the cop, much less the mob guy."

"Instead of going off shift," the cop with the cold blue eyes said, "we're doing four hours of overtime."

"I heard about that," Matt said. Peter Wohl had told him how it worked: While detectives rang doorbells and talked to people-conducted "neighborhood interviews"-Highway cops would cover the area, stopping people on the street and in cars, both looking for information and hoping to find someone with contraband-drugs, for example, or stolen property. If they did, the people caught would be given a chance to cooperate, in other words provide information. If they did, the contraband might get lost down the gutter or even dropped on the sidewalk where it could be recovered.

If they didn't have any information to offer, they would be arrested for the violation. By the time their trial came up, they might work hard on coming up with something the police could use, knowing that if they did and the Highway cops told one of the ADAs (assistant district attorneys) of their cooperation, he would be inclined to drop the charges.

Anyone caught in the area with an unlicensed pistol would be taken into Homicide for further questioning.

They pulled into the parking lot of the Marriott on City Line Avenue and went into the restaurant and sat at the counter. Matt sensed that they immediately had become the center of attention-much, if not most, of it nervous.

He remembered Amanda's reaction to the Highway cops in the diner at breakfast.

There is something menacing about the Highway Patrol. Is that bad? Any cop in uniform is a symbol of authority; that's why there is a badge, which, if you think about it, is descended from the coat of arms of a feudal lord and means about the same thing: I am in the service of authority. The badge says, "I am here to enforce the law, the purpose of which is to protect you. If you are obeying the law, you have nothing to fear from me. But, malefactor, watch out!"

Given that, isn't the very presence of these two, in their leather jackets and boots and rows of shiny cartridges, a deterrent to crime and thus of benefit to society? No stickup man in his right mind would try to rob this place with these two in here.

On the other hand, if some third-rate amateur came in here and saw only Officer Matthew Payne, in plainclothes, with his pistol cleverly concealed and his badge in his pocket, he would figure it was safe to help himself to what's in the cash register, using what force he considered necessary and appropriate.

A little fear of law enforcers, ergo sum, is not necessarily a bad thing.