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already told you I ain’t no snitch.”
    “Okay, we’ll give you a smoke if you tell us what happened the night you got shot.”
    “What did I just tell you about not being a snitch? Why you try to play me? You just brought me into court and tried to put me on trial with no judge. That’s what they call a kangaroo court, right?” He looked toward Greene.
    “You weren’t on trial,” Connie said. “You’re the victim here. You’ve been shot and we’re trying to find out who did this so we can charge him with the crime.”
    “If I’m the victim, why you putting me through this shit, dragging me into a courtroom and threatening me with contempt.”
    “I’m not trying to put you through anything. The people in that courtroom were grand jurors. Their job is to investigate crimes and indict the people who committed those crimes. That’s why there’s no judge. It’s a secret proceeding, and I’m the one that runs the show.”
    “I didn’t like it and I ain’t going back, not to testify, not for nothing.”
    “I’m not talking about testifying, and you don’t need to go back. I just want you to tell me and the detective what happened that night. It doesn’t leave this room. No grand jury minutes with your name on them floating around the neighborhood.”
    “Why should I trust you?”
    “I’m a man of my word. And I ain’t no snitch either. You don’t tell anyone I gave you a smoke and I don’t tell anyone about our conversation in this room.”
    “No tapes?”
    Connie shook his head.
    “No report with my name in it?”
    “No tapes. No reports. I just want to know who you were with that night, who shot you, and what your beef is with him.”
    “What’s in it for me?”
    “You get to nail the dude who left you crapping in a bag. And you get a smoke.”
    “Can you do anything with my sentence?”
    “No.”
    “Can you get me into some programs so I can earn more good time?”
    “I know a deputy superintendent at the jail. I can make a call for you. No guarantees. That’s it, a smoke and a phone call. And no one knows we talked.”
    “How about you take these cuffs off so I can enjoy the smoke.”
    “First we talk.”

CHAPTER 10
    T he feeling of anxiety was the same every time Alves stepped into the sterile room. He had witnessed dozens of autopsies, but he still felt the way he did before the first one. Death was not a pretty thing, especially unnatural death. It wasn’t like an elderly person dying in bed after a long life, a tired body giving out. There was something about the machinery that is the human body being stopped abruptly, unlawfully, violently, and the pathologist trying to determine which piece of the mechanism was toyed with, hindered, severed, obliterated.
    Besides him and Mooney, there were three people in the room. The medical examiner, Jacob Belsky, was all suited up and preparing his equipment and a BPD photographer taking some “before” shots of the John Doe corpse. Eunice Curran, the head of the BPD crime lab, stood by, waiting to examine the body for trace evidence. At his request, she had been at the crime scene the night before, too. Eunice was the best, and Alves couldn’t risk one of her newer criminalists missing an important piece of evidence.
    “Find anything yet?” Alves asked Eunice.
    “Nothing.” She was all business today. None of the usual harmless flirting, not during an autopsy, and certainly not in front of Belsky. She walked over to another metal table where she had laid out John Doe’sclothing on large individual sheets of brown paper torn from a roll. As always, she was careful to keep each item separate for further analysis and storage. “I gave these a visual inspection before I removed them. I’ll go over them more thoroughly with an alternate light source when I get back to headquarters.” She rested her hand on a duffel bag at the end of the table. “I brought a portable light to go over the bodies before Belsky starts