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chill running up and down his spine, like the brain freeze he got as a little boy when he ate his ice cream cone too quickly. He casually passed it off to the nurses as the temperature in the morgue, but privately knew better.
    Having completed his job at the hospital, Altman thanked the nurses for their help in disrobing and securing Brent’s body. He said his good-byes, then went outside and stood in the parking lot in the night air. The sky looked like an ocean of black and deep purple. The moon looked as if it was hiding its face behind a cloud, perhaps ashamed of what had been witnessed earlier on the beach.

CHAPTER 8
    Captain Sam Hendrick was accustomed to his phone ringing late at night. A light sleeper by design, he rolled over in his bed to answer the phone.
    â€œSorry to wake you, sir,” Sergeant John King drawled, “but there’s been a shooting at the beach we think needs your attention.”
    King was the on-duty supervisor at the MBPD Investigation Division. It was his responsibility to notify the higher-ranking detectives about a serious case or a shooting. He had been a policeman for fourteen years, inching his way up from a detention officer to sergeant in the investigative unit. Ten of those years, he had worked under Hendrick’s command. In fact, the two had been working together so closely that King had developed a sense of when he thought Hendrick needed to be called in on a case. He was convinced this shooting was definitely one of those times.
    â€œWhat have you got, John?” Hendrick cut the lamp on beside his bed, then patted his wife back to sleep.
    â€œHate to get you out of bed for this,” King apologized, “but it looks like we have a homicide on the beach. I’ve already called the lieutenant. I thought you both would want to be in on this one.”
    Hendrick had been in law enforcement for twenty-six years—as long as he and his wife, Jennie, had been married. They both accepted the fact his job was always going to be a forty-hour-plus week. Like most police officers, when Sam wasn’t working, he was thinking about work. This would not be the first or the last time he would have to crawl out of bed after midnight, put on a coat and tie and drive to the beach to investigate a murder.
    Hendrick straightened his tie in the mirror, kissed his wife good-bye, then headed out the door. Without saying so, they both knew it would be some time before he would see his family again. On his way out the door, he remembered being told over the phone that the young man who had just been shot on the beach was twenty-three years old. His own son, Sandy, had just turned twenty-one.
    It was a little after 12:30 A.M . when Captain Hendrick arrived at the Eighty-first Avenue beach access. As he stepped off the boardwalk and onto the beach, there was an assembled crowd of law enforcement officers to greet him. Hendrick recognized there were two elements in working a crime on the beach that he could always count on. Regardless of the time of year, he always found the beach windy at night, and he always had a heck of a time walking on the beach without the gritty sand clinging to his shoes and clothes like a layer of glue.
    As chief of the Investigation Division, Hendrick not only had the control of the day-to-day operations with the detectives, narcotics and crime scene investigations, but at any time a major crime occurred every department fell under his jurisdiction for chain of command. Although he didn’t directly supervise the beach patrol, he had jurisdiction over them and anything that related to this crime scene. Hendrick expected a full report from every department who was working this case.
    â€œWhat have you got so far?” Hendrick asked, singling out his sergeant.
    Sergeant King looked up. “Good morning, Chief. We’ve got a robbery here, where this one guy was shot. Wife was with him, but she wasn’t shot. She’s our only witness.