For Detective Kevin Francis Byrne of the Philadelphia Police Department’s Homicide Unit, the answer was a moot point. He had tracked Gideon Pratt for a long time, and had lured him into this moment with precision and care, a scenario that had invaded his dreams.

Gideon Pratt had raped and murdered a fifteen-year-old girl named Deirdre Pettigrew in Fairmount Park, and the department had all but given up on solving the case. It was the first time Pratt had killed one of his victims, and Byrne had known that it would not be easy to draw him out. Byrne had invested a few hundred hours of his own time and many a night’s sleep in anticipation of this very second.

And now, as dawn remained a dim rumor in the City of Brotherly Love, as Kevin Byrne stepped forward and landed the first blow, came his receipt.

Twenty minutes later they were in a curtained emergency room at Jefferson Hospital. Gideon Pratt stood dead center, Byrne to one side, a staff intern named Avram Hirsch on the other.

Pratt had a knot on his forehead the size and shape of a rotted plum, a bloodied lip, a deep purple bruise on his right cheek, and what might have been a broken nose. His right eye was nearly swollen shut. The front of his formerly white shirt was a deep brown, caked with blood.

As Byrne looked at the man—humiliated, demeaned, disgraced, caught—he thought about his own partner in the Homicide Unit, a daunting piece of ironwork named Jimmy Purify. Jimmy would have loved this, Byrne thought. Jimmy loved the characters, of which Philly seemed to have an endless supply. The street professors, the junkie prophets, the hookers with hearts of marble.

But most of all, Detective Jimmy Purify loved catching the bad guys. The worse the man, the more Jimmy savored the hunt.

There was no one worse than Gideon Pratt.

They had tracked Pratt through an extensive labyrinth of informants, had followed him through the darkest veins of Philadelphia’s netherworld of sex clubs and child pornography rings. They had pursued him with the same sense of purpose, the same focus and rabid intent with which they had stepped out of the academy so many years earlier.

Which was just the way Jimmy Purify liked it.

It made him feel like a kid again, he said.

In his day Jimmy had been shot twice, run over once, beaten far too many times to calculate, but it was a triple bypass that finally took him out. While Kevin Byrne was so pleasantly engaged with Gideon Pratt, James “Clutch” Purify was resting in a post-op room in Mercy Hospital, tubes and drip lines snaking out of his body like Medusa’s snakes.

The good news was that Jimmy’s prognosis looked good. The sad news was that Jimmy thought he was coming back to the job. He wasn’t. No one ever did from a triple. Not at fifty. Not in Homicide. Not in Philly.

I miss you, Clutch, Byrne thought, knowing that he was going to meet his new partner later that day. It just ain’t the same without you, man.

It never will be.

Byrne had been there when Jimmy went down, not ten, powerless feet away. They had been standing near the register at Malik’s, a hole-inthe-bricks hoagie shop at Tenth and Washington. Byrne had been loading their coffees with sugar while Jimmy had been macking the waitress, Desiree, a young, cinnamon-skinned beauty at least three musical styles Jimmy’s junior and five miles out of his league. Desiree was the only real reason they ever stopped at Malik’s. It sure as hell wasn’t the food.

One minute Jimmy had been leaning against the counter, his younggirl rap firing on all eight, his smile on high beam. The next minute he was on the floor, his face contorted in pain, his body rigid, the fingers of his huge hands curling into claws.

Byrne had frozen that instant in his mind, the way he had stilled few others in his life. Over his twenty years on the force, he had found it almost routine to accept the moments of blind heroism and reckless courage in the people he loved and admired. He had even come to accept the senseless, random acts of savagery delivered by and unto strangers. These things came with the job: the steep premium to justice sought. It was the moments of naked humanity and weakness of flesh, however, he could not elude, the images of body and spirit betrayed that burrowed beneath the surface of his heart.

When he saw the big man on the muddied tile of the diner, his body skirmishing with death, the silent scream slashed into his jaw, he knew that he would never look at Jimmy Purify the same way again. Oh, he would love him, as he had come to over the years, and he would listen to his preposterous stories, and he would, by the grace of God, once again marvel at Jimmy’s lithe and fluid abilities behind a gas grill on those sweltering Philly summer Sundays, and he would, without a moment’s thought or hesitation, take a bullet to the heart for the man, but he knew immediately that this thing they did—the unflinching descent into the maw of violence and insanity, night after night—was over.

As much as it brought Byrne shame and regret, that was the reality of that long, terrible night.

The reality of this night, however, found a dark balance in Byrne’s mind, a delicate symmetry that he knew would bring Jimmy Purify peace. Deirdre Pettigrew was dead, and Gideon Pratt was going to take the full ride. Another family was shredded by grief, but this time the killer had left behind his DNA in the form of a gray pubic hair that would send him to the little tiled room at SCI Greene. There Gideon Pratt would meet the icy needle if Byrne had anything to say about it. Of course, the justice system being what it was, there was a fifty–fifty chance that, if convicted, Pratt would get life without parole. If that turned out to be the case, Byrne knew enough people in prison to finish the job. He would call in a chit. Either way, the sand was running on Gideon Pratt. He was in the hat.

“The suspect fell down a flight of concrete steps while he attempted to evade arrest,” Byrne offered to Dr. Hirsch.

Avram Hirsch wrote it down. He may have been young, but he was from Jefferson. He had already learned that, many times, sexual predators were also quite clumsy, and prone to tripping and falling. Sometimes they even had broken bones.

“Isn’t that right, Mr. Pratt?” Byrne asked.

Gideon Pratt just stared straight ahead.

“Isn’t that right, Mr. Pratt?” Byrne repeated.

“Yes,” Pratt said.

“Say it.”

“While I was running away from the police, I fell down a flight of steps and caused my injuries.”

Hirsch wrote this down, too.

Kevin Byrne shrugged, asked: “Do you find that Mr. Pratt’s injuries are consistent with a fall down a flight of concrete steps, Doctor?”

“Absolutely,” Hirsch replied.

More writing.

On the way to the hospital, Byrne had had a discussion with Gideon Pratt, imparting the wisdom that what Pratt had experienced in that parking lot was merely a taste of what he could expect if he considered a charge of police brutality. He had also informed Pratt that, at that moment, Byrne had three people standing by who were willing to go on the record that they had witnessed the suspect tripping and falling down the stairs while being chased. Upstanding citizens, all.