Fusco's voice was gravelly in the pre-dawn gloom of the cramped Bronx apartment.
"This how you found her?"
To Carter he sounded like he had just crawled out of an undersea cave of sleep and still resented the interruption.
The younger cop, his brow shiny with anxious sweat in the blast of Fusco's irritation, kept his eyes on his notebook, flipping its pages as he stuttered a reply.
"Yeah, wrapped up like a birthday present in that blue sheet."
Young Crawford's eagerness to share his own impressions failed to dent the senior officer's bad mood. But he plunged on anyway.
"Stretched out on the rug just as pretty as you please. All peaceful like and everything. Tall, ain't she? For a girl, I mean."
Carter overheard the details of this murder as she walked slowly around the apartment, weaving her way among the busy specialists scratching for clues in the puny wreckage of another lost life.
The space was narrow, but the corners were swept clean around the edges of the dingy parlor carpet. Every wall was painted in non-committal shades of drab peach.
But the occupant had tacked stunning cloths in bright primary stripes on all four walls of the living room. Another long swath of colorful fabric was festooned along the grimy corridor wall leading toward the rear of the apartment.
Loud reds and yellows, black, white, green. With bold fringe draping down from the ends of each textile like braided coils from a woman's head.
This one had been an optimistic decorator, Carter felt, determined to display her own tokens of pride and hope where she could treasure them every day.
Growling and aggressive, Fusco boxed the quavering landlord into a corner and extracted some bare details:
Aminata Diallo was an immigrant from West Africa who had lived in the building only ten months.
She braided hair for seven hours a day six days a week in the Nu-Wave Locateria beauty parlor a few blocks from her home. When she wasn't in night classes studying to be an interpreter, she cleaned houses to make enough off-the-books cash to pay her rent.
Aminata Diallo was twenty years old.
She lived quietly and died the same way, a deep knife gash across the throat exposing the white cartilage of her windpipe.
But whoever ended her life had wanted her to leave it with dignity.
So Aminata's long spray of micro-braids had been arranged carefully in a cascade over her right shoulder, a white ribbon gathering the strands like a sheaf of black wheat.
Her slim body had been swaddled tightly in its shroud of sky blue fabric.
The thin cloth was pulled up over her mouth and nose so that only her dark almond shaped eyes stared back at the twenty cops who bustled around the living room investigating her last minutes on earth.
Though her eyelashes were heavy and silky as a doe's, Carter noted she had only a scattering of brow hairs arranged in a sculpted arc to punctuate the smooth dome of her forehead.
"Jesus! Can't somebody put a plug in that cat howling in the kitchen?"
Fusco's voice was loud and penetrated the buzz of official activity. "It's drivin' me crazy with the racket!"
His increasing impatience with the sketchy account dragged from the landlord mirrored Carter's own snappish frustration this morning.
She bent over to touch the soft skin behind the girl's left ear; blood was still wet on the blue folds over her neck, her murderer only hours away.
Crawford, the slick faced young cop who was first on the scene, crept toward the back of the apartment to investigate the howls echoing from the kitchen.
"It ain't a cat, Detective." Crawford's skinny neck craned around the swinging door.
"It's a kid. Mewling his head off in here like there's no tomorrow."
"Well, stifle him before I come back there and put him out of his misery." Fusco barked at the swarm of technicians and cops in general, not really caring who accomplished the task.
Carter was on a short fuse too.
She and Fusco had made a good collar on a long-dormant homicide case the previous morning. Closing that frozen file, shutting down their Lieutenant's pestering jibes at last, deserved a celebration they agreed.
So the first jubilant round at Swanetta's turned into three, which probably became five by the time they quit the bar after midnight. Taylor was away on a spring break trip to Washington for the week, so she had no curfew.
This dawn's headache throbbing behind her nose was well and truly earned. Stopping the wailing in the kitchen was priority number one.
She had just stepped into the dimly lit hallway to shut down the ruckus, when a tall shadow whipped past her, pushed aside Crawford, and vanished through the kitchen door.
A navy windbreaker over broad shoulders proclaimed that the shadow belonged to an Emergency Medical Technician, but she didn't believe it for a minute.
The distinctive angle of the hair at the nape of the neck, the glint of steel at the dark temples; above all the sharp male scent invading her veins made blood rise towards her cheeks in a familiar surge of desire.
John. Was he here because of her? Following her, intercepting her case even as it unrolled?
She had not seen him in nine days or spoken to him in four.
How could he know she would be attending this forlorn death in this dismal sector of the Bronx battlefield at this hour of the morning?
She wanted to rush into the kitchen, confront him directly, at least touch his cheek for an instant.
She wanted to press him against her breasts and demand an explanation for all the missing days and the silent hours since they had last kissed.
She felt the moisture in her mouth gather in involuntary readiness for his tongue, the wetness condensing between her legs for his cock.
A bubbling resentment competed with the erotic ache low in her stomach and since she wasn't sure which emotion would commandeer her actions, she decided to stay clear of the kitchen until she cooled down.
Her colleagues were too busy with the minutiae of their work to notice her loitering in the dark hallway, unoccupied.
They swept up microscopic shards of glass, shorn nails, motes of dust, flakes of discarded skin, fibers shed from the dead girl's clothing, and with luck the damning sliver of evidence that would convict her murderer.
Crouching, crawling, they plucked and picked until they had filled a hundred plastic envelopes with the sad treasures of their hunt.
"Get in here, Carter." John's voice was low and harsh.
She sprang from the hall and into the narrow kitchen, hoping her movements would not be noticed by the other cops.
John was standing in front of a grease spattered stove, his right hand enfolded in the larger palm of a lanky young man whose deep plum skin shone in stunning contrast to the white drapes of his long shirt and baggy pants.
The man, really just a boy as Carter could now see, was at least three inches taller than John.
Though his eyes were red and streaming with tears, his mouth curved into a smile that displayed two rows of startlingly white teeth. His cheeks were as poreless as glass and his smooth shaven head was beautifully symmetrical as it rose from his long graceful neck.
"Carter, this is Abou Diallo." John raised his right hand to waist height to show her the boy's huge fist, firmly clasped around his own.
"He is Amie's brother. He's been here in New York about four months. He said when he got up this morning to fix breakfast, he found her dead in the living room, wrapped up like you saw her."
A sob shuddered through Abou's sunken chest and he turned his handsome face toward John with beseeching eyes.
"Can he talk to me? Can I take him in for questioning?" She had so many more questions, but those were the first that popped out.
"He's afraid, Carter. Afraid of the people who killed his sister. I told him you were my friend. You would take care of him."
"How do you know what he says, John?"
"They're Peuhl from Mali. So he speaks some French, I speak a little Wolof and a little Pulaar. We pieced it together."
She remembered John's stories of his work in Senegal and other countries along the edge of the Sahara, but she hadn't known that he spoke any of the languages of the region.
"How about English, can he speak English?"
Abou nodded in response, but kept his eyes on John's face.
"He can speak enough. He'll tell you what he knows. It should help catch her killers."
Carefully prying each long black finger lose from his hand, John undid their connection and let Abou's arm drop.
The boy sobbed again, but moved closer to Carter as he had been instructed to do.
"John, what are you doing here? How did you know about this? The call went out less than an hour ago. Fusco and I were on the scene only a few minutes after the first responder."
He lowered his eyes to avoid her gaze and ran his hand through his hair and squeezed once at the back of his neck.
When he glanced at her again she thought she saw his eyes blaze before he blinked them shut. They were blue rather than the softer gray she was accustomed to and the change startled her as did his next words.
"Our sources gave us information indicating Amie would be in danger. But I got here too late to save her."
"What do you mean, sources? What sources?"
"You know I can't tell you that, Carter."
"Even if it means letting her killers go free?"
"You're a good detective, Carter. You can find them without me."
She took a deep breath. Anger made her lips tremble and she struggled to control the explosion and keep her voice low.
"It's fine for you two to play these games with me. Shut me out if you want to. It's O.K."
She closed the distance between them until her chest touched his.
"But not now. Not when this boy's life is at stake. Not when his sister is lying mangled out there."
His words were short and brittle.
"Not here, Carter. We are not doing this now."
He pushed to evade her, his shoulder jamming against hers until she was forced to step aside or fall.
He lowered his head almost as if to butt her. He was so close she could hear the crackle of a third voice in the charged air between them: "…can't tell her…She isn't…"
The kitchen's swinging door closed on his shadow and he was gone.
xxxxxxxxx
The grim day ended for Carter at an early hour.
She stowed Abou Diallo in the Eighth Precinct's lock-up after preliminary questioning uncovered little beyond what she had already learned from John.
The boy had arrived in the U.S. to visit his older sister four months ago and stayed with her in the apartment where she was killed. He was deathly afraid of his neighbors across the hall, but couldn't or wouldn't say what drove his fear.
The landlord proved to be just as miserly with information as Fusco had discovered in the first interview.
He didn't know anything useful about the three men who rented the rooms opposite Amie Diallo's apartment, only that they were also West Africans, quiet like she was, had no known employment but paid their rent on time every month.
He didn't know where these mysterious tenants were now, only that they had last been seen in the building the day before Amie's death.
After she brought Chinese take-out for Abou and explained the meaning of protective custody to him for the third time, Carter promised to see him the next day and headed for home before her shift ended.
Still smarting from the brief confrontation with John and blue from the spectacle of yet another young life wasted, she took a shower to ease the roar of her persistent headache.
Skipping dinner and her favorite home remodeling show, she was under the covers by nine.
And awake again at eleven.
"Carter, you need to get back down here pronto." No preamble, just desperation.
Sosa the night desk clerk was in a panic, his frayed nerves screaming down the precinct phone line directly into her muzzy brain.
"Your jungle boy is howling like a banshee in back and can't none of us shut him up."
"Well, what am I supposed to do about it, Sosa?"
"How in hell do I know? Kid keeps screeching, 'Cart-AIRE! Cart-AIRE!' Like he's your long-lost cousin or somethin'."
"Yeah, yeah, alright. I get the picture."
She felt exasperation more than anything else at this turn of events.
"An hour of pure hell, Carter! I'm telling ya. Pure hell!" Sosa's voice rose with every sentence.
"So finally, Sarge told me to get aholt of you and tell you to get back down here. Only what he said exactly was, quote: 'Get Carter's ass back here to clean up her mess before I write her the fuck up.' Unquote."
The night was ruined and probably her week of solitude as well.
"Jeez, Sosa! Don't crap your pants, ya big baby. I'll be there in thirty."
xxxxxxxxx
Retrieving Abou from lock-up was the easy part, settling him into her apartment that first night was tougher.
Joss put him in Taylor's empty room, but the sniffling and moaning quickly became intolerable even with both bedroom doors shut. Her mother's heart couldn't bear the suffering of a boy who so forcefully reminded her of her own son's vulnerability and innocence.
So Abou Diallo, Peuhl immigrant, bereaved brother, and lost child ended up sleeping on the carpet at the foot of her bed, curling his long frame into a comma around the blanket and pillow he dragged down the hall from Taylor's room.
The first time she got up to go to the bathroom, she stumbled over Abou's inert body as she rounded the bed.
Though she thought she had kicked him squarely, he didn't wake, only squeezing the pillow tighter between his oversized hands.
The second time she awoke, she remembered to roll to John's side of the bed, the one closer to the bathroom, thus avoiding her troubled guest.
In the morning, Abou was up before she was. He had two mugs of thick café au lait and a stack of butter-logged toast ready when she entered the kitchen.
Before she could object, he dropped four cubes of sugar into her cup. He smiled serenely at her and she couldn't help but smile back.
She gave him a pair of Taylor's jeans to wear—the frayed hems hitting two inches above his ankles—and one of John's white t-shirts.
Dressed that way, Abou looked like a normal boy, not one who had just lost his only relative in America.