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houses to hoist and carry for minimum wage.”
    “Hoist and carry what?”
    Howard shrugged. The product wasn’t his point. “I know this type of guy,” he said, his voice lower, “from when I was a kid.”
    This, I realized, was why Howard had moved upstairs. He rarely mentioned his childhood and never without a flurry of embarrassment as if he had exposed a raw and suspicious rash. He had grown up in a series of valley towns to which his free-spirited mother had flitted, alighting for months, weeks, or on more than one occasion fewer than seven days, yanking her son from the hope of security time after time. For Howard, the lure of stability grew so seductive that he chose a career protecting the kind of life he’d never had and a house he could spend the rest of his life rehabilitating. As if she understood the symbolism, his mother had never even been to this house. She still moved so often that Howard had no address for her, and his annual contact was likely to consist of a box of cookies she sent on a whim—with no return address. But she held sway in his mind, the ultimately alluring absent parent.
    Now he said, “Those preachers with their tiny missions always had their fangs out for us. Sometimes they’d come after me to join the youth group or the choir, but it was my mother they wanted.”
    “Physically?” I’d seen an old picture of her. She’d been tall like Howard, with his high cheekbones, blue eyes, and red, curly hair. In the photo she wore a gauzy dress that flowed as if she’d been floating free on the zephyrs. “Or did they envy her freedom?”
    Howard flinched at the word. I ached to take it back, to keep from reminding him that the freedom she desired was also freedom from him. He swallowed and said, “They envied it, sure; they lusted to capture her and keep her like—like a pigeon in a cage.”
    I put my hand on his arm and felt the muscles tense. “Pigeon?”
    “In the Bible they kept pigeons in cages.”
    “So they could never fly off?”
    “So they were there for sacrifices.”
    Before I could ask more, he shoved himself off the bed and headed into the bathroom. He ran the shower long after the water had to have gone cold.
    Patrol teams work four ten-hour days. That’s the price of three free days: three from 4:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M. and one from 10:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M .
    I got to the station at twenty to ten on Monday morning. Dressing in uniform takes a while, particularly in winter, when it’s good to have a few layers on under the bulletproof vest. November’s tricky, and today was going to be only a thermal T-shirt day, but still, adjusting the Velcro so the vest protects but doesn’t fit like something out of Gone with the Wind takes time. So do the lace-up ankle boots, the leather belt, the equipment belt over it with the baton and flashlight. I don’t wear much makeup—I’m from Berkeley after all—but I do like a little shadow over the eyelids, a touch of rouge, a couple of swipes of lipstick when I’m going on patrol. Most times on duty I’m working to cut the tension, to ease the fear of witnesses, to calm the suspects. The blue uniform screams authority. A little bit of makeup reminds people the officer in blue is a person too.
    I climbed up to the second floor, checked my mailbox—nothing new—and my voice mail, hoping for a message from Herman Ott. There wasn’t one. Howard and I hadn’t mentioned Ott again last night. Nor had he called. Today I’d have to deal with him; have to make a bigger deal than the issue merited just to remind him what the pecking order was. But that would come after my beat assignments. For the moment I was assigned to Howard’s team, not the best of arrangements at the best of times. Even with a sergeant as well liked as Howard, it’s hard for a patrol officer stuck with chasing teenagers off Telegraph not to wonder if the sergeant gave the better beat to his girlfriend. Howard bent over backward to be fair, and I ended up