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prepared to be savaged by the crowd.

CHAPTER FOUR

    THE BIG FEAR
    Eventually Leonard had it figured out—the best line out of the subway was from the second door back in the third car. New York’s antique infrastructure squeezed the rush hour throng through subway stairwells. If the bottleneck caught you, it could take twenty minutes to get out.
    The Wall Street station on the Four train served two clienteles. The downtown platform spewed forth finance guys from the Upper Eighties who would prance past the shoeshine booths and up to the street of their dreams. Across Broadway, civil servants trekked from Brooklyn to the municipal offices down Rector Street. The crowds wheedled past each other, each crossing Broadway just after a pair of subway cars stopped simultaneously. They pretended that each other didn’t exist.
    Slower, sleepier, and in cheaper suits, the city guys mainly shined their own shoes. There was no urgency up the stairway on the uptown track, so if Leonard wanted to get out quickly he had to place himself at exactly the right set of doors. Which he did every single day.
    He had been pondering the Mulino shooting the whole ride in. It had blown up the tabloids two days running. Each paper had an exclusive story with someone who claimed to be on the ship, the stories were completely at odds with each other, and Leonard knew they were each probably leaked by a cop on the force with some petty grievance to air. Still, there hadn’t been any protests. No one was quite sure who they would protest for, exactly, with a cop as a victim and a cop as the shooter. There was going to be a full-dress funeral in four days, and the commissioner and the mayor had both issued simpering meaningless statements. For two days, Leonard’s phone had been shut off; it was the only way to maintain even twenty minutes of silence.
    And he needed silence to do his job. City law provides that a cop in a shooting can’t be interviewed for forty-eight hours. A union rule, enough time so the officer can meet with his rep and put together a decent story. But the forty-eight hour rule gave Leonard time to prepare too.
    He had spent the afternoon of the public meeting taking the complaints of the general public. He wouldn’t have to investigate these cases, but the people who walked in on the day of a public meeting expected to talk to someone in charge, so Monday afternoon had been a parade of misfortune. The first was a seventeen-year-old who said a cop had whaled on his head with a nightstick four times before running scared when he saw how strong the kid was. A background check showed him to be a low-level drug dealer with a lawyer who made a living grinding out lawsuits that the city would routinely settle. The second person in brought X-rays of her husband, who actually had been hit in the head with a nightstick, just once. He had a broken orbital bone, a hairline skull fracture, and was expected to come out of the coma sometime in the next few weeks. It had gone on like that until well past eight, leaving Leonard only one day to prepare to interview Mulino.
    Out of the subway, across Broadway, he trucked along Rector Street, the wrought iron fence of Trinity Church and its famous tombstones looming above him. There was a man curled in a ball by the low wall abutting the graveyard. Every day another desperate wraith on the sidewalk. Every day another reminder of the city’s slow slide downward. Leonard stepped over him and looked up at the Bank of Bremen building. The last piece of the Trade Center puzzle, the sleek black tower had just been completed. The whole thing was over with, the obelisk seemed to be saying. After the horror on the day it happened, after the construction site that never seemed to end, after the armed men needlessly patrolling the subways and train stations, and after everything else, finally the whole place was just back to being a bunch of office buildings. Move along; nothing to see here.
    Leonard had