The Last witness

Blues had been Harry's partner when Blues was a cop. Harry was the veteran and Blues was the rookie, a mismatched odd couple. Harry was a by-the-book cop and Blues insisted on writing his own book. Their partnership, and Blues's career as a cop, had ended six years earlier when Blues shot and killed a woman during a drug bust. Internal Affairs gave Blues the choice of quitting or being prosecuted. He quit.

Harry had said little to Mason over the years about his relationship with Blues, except for warning him that Blues would go down one day and that Harry would be there, waiting. Blues had said less, and both men had refused to talk about the case that had fractured their relationship. The one constant was the tension between them. Mason wouldn't call it hatred. That was too simple. Harry and Blues shared a wound neither man could heal because they both had too much pain. Whenever the three of them were together, Mason felt like the bomb squad trying to guess whether Blues or Harry would go off first. а

Mason believed that gatekeepers ruled the world. They were the people who answered the phones, manned the desks, or kept the calendars for the people everyone else needed to see. The ideal gatekeeper was trained from birth in passive-aggressive behavior designed to cause acid reflux in anyone who petitioned for access to the gatekeeper's master. How else to explain the uncanny ability to dodge, defer, and deny Mason's always reasonable requests for access or information? Mason tried being humble, witty, flirtatious, or threatening, depending on what he'd had for breakfast. Sometimes the walls came down and sometimes they got higher.

"I'm Lou Mason," he told the desk sergeant. "Harry Ryman brought in Wilson Bluestone a few minutes ago. I'm Bluestone's lawyer."

The desk sergeant was reading USA Today. He wore a name tag that read sgt. Peterson and had a slack expression that read who cares? when he looked at Mason over his half glasses, sighed his resentment at Mason's intrusion, and picked up the phone. "He's here," Peterson said to whoever had picked up on the other end. Peterson traded the phone for his newspaper and resumed ignoring Mason.

A civilian police department employee materialized and escorted Mason to the second-floor detective squad room. She politely pointed him to a hard-backed chair that had been decorated with the carved initials of prior occupants. The squad room reflected the uninspired use of public money-pale walls, faded vanilla tile, and banged-up steel desks covered with the antiseptic details of destroyed lives.

Mason waited while the crosscurrents of cops and their cases flowed around him. He'd been here before, waiting to be questioned and accused. An ambivalent mix of urgency and resignation permeated the place. Cops had a special sweat, born of the need to preserve and protect and the fearful realization that they were too often outnumbered. That sweat was strongest in homicide.

Homicide cops took the darkest confessions of the cruelest impulses. They sweet-talked, cajoled, and deceived the guilty into speaking the unspeakable. The more they heard, the more they were overwhelmed by one simple truth: There were more people willing to kill than they could stop from killing or catch before the bodies were in the ground. Sterile statistics on closed cases couldn't mask the smell of blood and the taste for vengeance that clung to homicide cops like a second skin.

Justice was supposed to cleanse them, but justice was sometimes washed away by the pressure to make an arrest. Even a good cop like Harry Ryman wasn't immune from the pressure or his feelings toward Blues. Mason knew that saving Blues meant slowing down the clock.

Mason also knew that saving Blues meant taking on Harry Ryman. Mason could remember the days when Harry used to pick him up by his belt loops and swing him up over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. And Mason could remember the day he graduated from law school and Harry bear-hugged him with a father's pride. Easing his grip just enough to see Mason's face, Harry had told him how to navigate the uncertain waters that his clients would take him through.

"Just do the right thing," Harry had told him. "You won't have any trouble knowing what it is. The only hard part is doing it." Life was never more complicated than that for Harry.

Harry interrupted Mason's droughts. "You can see him now. He's in number three. No one will be watching or listening," Harry said, pointing Mason to the third interrogation room down the hall from where Mason sat. "Don't worry about it, Lou," Harry added. "Just do your job and I'll do mine." а

Blues was standing at the far end of the room staring into a mirror that covered most of the wall when Mason opened the door to Interrogation Room No. 3. Blues's burnished, coppery skin, straight black hair, and fiery eyes were muted under the exposed fluorescent tubes that hung from the ceiling.

"You're not that good-looking," Mason told him.