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every day and I give a fuck about this?”
    They walked out of the house carefully as the tech team kept at it. The plastic covering their shoes was cleared of the dirt they’d tracked, then put back into the room.
    It was a fact that a killer always left something behind at the scene of the crime. In the age of microscopic evidence, that was more likely than not.
    Danny wondered what the team would find inthe mess left by the killer, and if it would lead to anything. Beyond his preliminary thoughts about the case, however, he was deeply troubled by the thought of a killer who was so determined to kill and had the knowledge and foresight to thwart a forensic investigation.

7
FIRST YEAR
    Danny cruised down Six Mile on Detroit’s west side. The sounds of Busta Rhymes pounded the inside of his car. He passed Greenfield and turned down his street, Forrer. Danny neared his house, a little place with a nice patch of lawn that he hated to mow every week. He paid a kid named Jyrell from around the way to do it for him. He did a lousy job, but it helped to keep the kid out of trouble.
    The neighborhood was decent, though in recent years, the influence of crime was more and more obvious. Used to be at night, all you could see on Six Mile, the main road, was a few cars and buses on the street. The street itself had been lined with businesses, party stores, and restaurants. But eventually these nice little places were replaced by fast-food joints, gas stations, and empty storefronts.
    In the city proper, a proliferation of fast-food places was the surest sign of despair. There were alot of single-parent houses and a working mother couldn’t always come home and fix a meal for her kids. The people who make burgers, chicken, and tacos know this, so they set up shop, allowing these families to get a hot meal quickly and cheaply. A newspaper reporter called it “lifestyle need,” a nice term for a family who can’t have a sit-down meal every day. It was really a tragedy, the stark evidence that the world did not always change for the better.
    With the fast-food joints came shady brothers in big cars, kids without supervision, and young women with no particular place to go. Crime went up, and suddenly there were bars on windows in what was once a good place to live.
    The local neighborhood organizations got together and put an end to most of the illegal activity. The cops came around a little more (thanks in part to Danny and a few well-placed calls) and soon the neighborhood got back to normal. But the fast food still got eaten and some of the night people were around. That always made Danny feel better. He didn’t want to live in a place that was too clean.
    Danny went inside his house and called out to his girlfriend, Vinny. Vinny was a dark beauty who was soft-spoken, strong, and fiercely independent.
    Danny and Vinny had been partners for a whole year before they slept together. It was all he could do to keep from being all over her in that car. They’d shared the job and each other’s lives, stealing looks, and disapproving of each other’sdates. They used the partnership to feel each other out and test the waters, a sort of professional foreplay. In the end, it was Vinny who had made the first move. They’d gone to her place after work, and after some very weak denials, they’d slept together, making love until the wee hours.
    This frenzied lovemaking went on for about a week, every day. It was a while before they took their time and made love the right way. They’d both been thinking about it too much, wanted it too much. In truth, they’d both had a feeling that it would never last and just wanted to enjoy themselves.
    But it did last. They partnered three years without incident, if you didn’t count Vinny’s constant nagging about his overzealousness with the criminal element. They didn’t put their affair on display, so the department didn’t say anything