 tugged his overcoat closed and wished he'd worn boots. He could feel the chill of his metal flashlight through the worn glove on his right hand.
He had been working swing shift since Kennedy's assassination almost three months before. He'd volunteered. He wanted the night murders—the muggings gone bad, the 3 a.m. domestic tragedies, the knifings after last call—because he knew day shifts would get protection duty and the political cases. New York got its share of dignitaries, and after Dallas, all of them were afraid they'd be next.
He wanted straightforward crime, not babysitting so-called famous people. The kids were grown, and with Nola working nights at the hospital, swing seemed best for him as well.
Except at moments like this, when he stood next to a coroner's van outside a dirty little alley, and that feeling in his gut, the one he'd learned to trust at Anzio twenty years ago, flared so badly that he wanted to turn around and go home.
Instead, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure his new partner was behind him.
Joseph McKinnon was ten years younger, twenty pounds lighter, and six inches taller. He had the thick neck and broad shoulders of a former quarterback, and an all-American handsomeness that should have kept him out of undercover work. But it hadn't; he'd been one of the best vice cops in the city, and, as a promotion, he'd asked for homicide.
McKinnon was just beginning to learn that homicide wasn't really a step up. O'Reilly was just beginning to learn that having a new partner didn't mean he had a better partner.
McKinnon was looking at the surrounding buildings, his flashlight pointed down. The street was dark and empty. Which was not a surprise. Police presence made anyone who lived on this block vanish.
This neighborhood teetered between swank and corrupt. It was far enough from Central Park for degenerates and muggers to use the alleys as corridors and, conversely, close enough for new money to want to live with a peek of the city's most famous expanse of green.
So far, the new money hadn't overtaken the old ways—at least, not on this block. O'Reilly had handled four murders here since he transferred, but all of them were on the street itself, the bodies found by cops or delivery men. Someone in the alley might not get found for days.
On this block, most people looked the other way. One block north, they started watching out their windows. On the block across from the park, they might actually call the cops if they saw something going down.
But in this alley, it was amazing anyone had found the bodies at all.
Unlike the street, the alley wasn't dark. It looked like daylight in the small rectangular space. The coroner had set up his trademark battery-operated lights on garbage can lids placed on top of the dirty ice, one at the head of the bodies, the other near the feet.
O'Reilly wasn't going to look at the bodies—not yet. He liked to absorb the scene first. Sometimes, these few moments yielded the most important information. Impressions, feelings, seemingly small details often led him to the heart of any case he was working on.
Which was why he had one of the highest closure rates in the department, and why his bosses had fought his transfer to nights so hard.
The lights created crisp shadows on the brick walls. The two beat cops who had discovered the bodies were standing near the front of the alley, their shadows elongated and thick. The coroner's assistant stood behind one of the lights, next to the gurney he'd brought, so his shadow looked like someone had painted him in black. It was an eerie tableau, made eerier by the fact that the coroner—in the middle of the lights—had no shadow at all.
Thomas Brunner, the coroner, bent over the bodies. O'Reilly liked working with Brunner. They were the same age and had the same attitude toward work: Get it done, do the best job possible, and move on. Most everyone else in the department disliked Brunner. He was blunt, bigoted, and hard-nosed.
But he never messed with O'Reilly. They'd had a run-in the very first time they'd worked together—1946 or '47—right after both of them had come back from the war. O'Reilly's temper—hot, sudden, and violent—had won the encounter, but his willingness to forgive and forget had made the two of them if not friends, then at least amicable colleagues.
O'Reilly stepped into the alley proper. His dress shoes slipped on the ice, and he had to catch himself so that he wouldn't fall. Most of the sidewalks in the city were clear—a week of unusual warmth before this had guaranteed that the snow and ice would melt—but apparently the sun never got to this corner of the city.
And somehow that didn't surprise him.
The bodies, male and well dressed, sprawled side by side. They rested on their stomachs, heads facing north, arms bent as if they tried to catch themselves. One leg on each body was straight, the other bent at the knee, like the old white chalk images of dead bodies in black-and-white movies.
The entire thing looked like a movie set—like this neighborhood had looked not five years before when some Hollywood types filmed the exteriors for West Side Story. That had been one of the few times he hadn't minded doing protection—until he realized just how dull film-making could be.
He squatted beside Brunner. The dead men were white and fleshy, with manicured fingers and expensive wool coats. Too well dressed for this neighborhood. Maybe they'd walked down the wrong block.
Although that didn't explain how they got into the alley.
Their faces were mashed into the ice, their features distorted from the force of the impact. He wouldn't know what they really looked like until Brunner turned them over.
Clearly Brunner wasn't ready to do that. He was using his gloved hands to press lightly on the back of the corpse closest to him.
"What've we got?" O'Reilly asked.
"Dunno yet." The pressure from Brunner's hand caused blood to well out of a hole on the body's left side. The shot was perfect. It would have gone directly through a rib and into the heart.
"Looks like a good shot," O'Reilly said.
"Good shot, yeah," Brunner said. "Single shot. Matches the one on his friend here. They both died instantly."
"You sound unhappy about that."
Brunner kept his hand on the corpse's back, but looked at O'Reilly. Brunner was balding, his face whitish gray in the strong light.
"You see as many bodies as I do, you realize how rare it is for anybody to receive a perfectly made kill shot, let alone have two anybodies right next to each other get the exact same shot."
O'Reilly leaned forward. He didn't touch the bodies—he didn't have to—but he could see the blood soaking the other corpse, and the hole in the exact same spot as the one Brunner had just found.
"Christ," O'Reilly said. "You think these guys were targeted."
"I'm hoping." Brunner looked at him sideways, expression tight.
O'Reilly wasn't sure he'd heard Brunner right. "You're hoping they were targeted?"
"Damn straight. Otherwise we got a problem."
O'Reilly frowned, not quite following Brunner's point. At that moment, McKinnon came into the alley. He shined his flashlight on the darkened windows of the southern building's upper story.
Sometimes O'Reilly didn't understand his partner. Any more than he was understanding Brunner at the moment.
"What kind of problem?" O'Reilly asked.
"This ain't the only call I've had around here tonight."
"Really?" O'Reilly asked. "What else we got?"
"Some colored limosine driver shot a block from here." Brunner pressed on the back again. The blood stopped seeping. This corpse had to have a heck of an exit wound. 
O'Reilly felt a shiver run through him that had nothing to do with the cold. A limosine driver? Two white men pulled out of cars? Brunner was right; if these killings were random, then O'Reilly had a hell of a problem.
He asked, "You think the shootings are related?"
"Dunno," Brunner said. "But I think it's odd, don't you? Five dead in the space of an hour, all in a six-block radius."
O'Reilly closed his eyes for a moment. Two white guys pulled out of their cars, one Negro driver of a limosine, and now two white guys in an alley. Maybe they were related, maybe they weren't.
He opened his eyes, then wished he hadn't. Brunner had his finger inside a bullet hole, his favorite in-the-field way to judge caliber.
"Same type of bullet," Brunner said.
"You handled the other shootings?"
"I was on scene with the driver when some fag called this one in."
O'Reilly looked at Brunner. Eighteen years, and he still wasn't used to the man's casual bigotry.
"