Still inside the Porsche, Mike could hear Steve's "Patrolman Madsen," a little louder than necessary, and knew he was being warned. He got out of the car in time to see Steve approaching the passenger side of a black-and-white and leaning down to look inside and shake hands with the occupants.

Mike joined him, and Madsen looked up, squinting in the sunlight. "Lieutenant, good to see you looking so good, sir," he said with impressive sincerity, and Mike smiled.

"Thank you, Patrolman." Steve had stepped back and Mike held out his hand to shake Madsen's. "I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to thank you and your partner for everything you did for Steve and me. We owe our lives to you two and your quick thinking." Mike leaned into the car and shook McKinley's hand as well.

"It was our pleasure, sir," McKinley said with a wide smile. "I'm just happy were we in the right place at the right time."

As Mike straightened up, Madsen said, "Have you two heard anything more about what happened to that Grand Jury witness? All we heard was that he didn't show and they've put the case on the backburner."

Steve glanced quickly at Mike then smiled. "That's pretty well all we heard too. So we're just waiting, like everyone else."

Madsen's smiling face turned towards Mike. "Well, I just hope things work out for you, Lieutenant. That's a pretty shitty wrap you've been collared with, and I can tell you, to a man, there isn't a patrolman out here who thinks you did anything wrong." He glanced at his watch. "We gotta hit the streets, sir. Good luck with everything," he finished as McKinley stepped on the gas and the black-and-white rolled away.

The detectives watched it go then Steve turned to his partner. "Wow," he said slowly, "that is one cool bastard. I think he could even beat a polygraph – butter wouldn't melt in his mouth."

Mike was shaking his head. "He's smooth, that's for sure. We gotta make sure he doesn't get one whiff of what we're up to, 'cause I have a feeling we haven't seen the best of what Mr. Madsen can do."

# # # # #

"Okay, so, the only prints on the knife are Pettet's. That's set in stone, pardon the pun." Healey looked up and chuckled. "We went through all the reports and came up with a timeline – but, just so everyone is aware, some of the times are approximations, of course. That being said, there seems to be a minimum two minute gap from when Madsen left Steve and McKinley at the foot of the stairs to make his way to the second floor, to when the ambulance guys arrived at the apartment door. Obviously that's plenty of time for him to assess the situation and, possibly, move the knife from the vicinity of Pettet's hand to underneath his body."

"So, if he didn't touch it," ventured Steve from his position on the sofa beside Mike, "he, what? Lifted the body slightly and kicked it under?"

"Well, they weren't able to identify anything on the knife except a lot of blood, most of it yours, Steve, and Pettet's fingerprints," offered Haseejian, poring over the lab report. "As far as they were able to discern, there was nothing on the knife that suggested anything happened with it other than Pettet holding it, no unknown void marks or anything like that, so, ah, no help there…" He looked up at his boss.

Mike was sitting back on the sofa, staring unfocused into the middle distance, taking all of this in. He looked at his sergeants. "Anything turn up yet connecting Madsen and Abbott? Because you know, fellas, as strong as we make the case for Madsen staging the scene, so to speak, unless we can make a connection between Madsen and Abbott, all of this is just speculation."

Haseejian and Healey glanced at each other, discouraged. "Sorry, boss," said the Armenian detective with a shake of his head, "nothing yet."

"I, ah, I do have something I'm gonna look into," Healey took over, "but I have to make sure I have the right contact in the right place, so to speak, before I, how shall I put it? Ask for the favor?… I might know tomorrow but it might be a couple more days, sorry."

"Don't apologize, Dan," Mike smiled, "you guys are doing an amazing job here and I owe you a lot."

"You don't have to thank us," Haseejian said in all seriousness, "we wanna get this little bastard probably more than you do at this point. The fact that he stood beside us at the scene, looking and acting as upset about everything as we were…god, I can't believe the audacity of that guy."

Healey, who had been watching his partner with concern, slapped him on the shoulder as he stood. "Look, ah, we better get out of here, let you guys get to your dinner. Mike, I'll look into that, ah, 'theory' of mine and let you know what I find."

Mike shook Healey's hand, "Thanks, Dan." He escorted the sergeants to the door and turned back to Steve after they had gone. "What do you think?"

Steve smiled. "I think I'm glad they're on our side!"

# # # # #

Steve put the empty glass down with a thud. "God, I'm getting sick of these," he said with only slightly exaggerated self-pity.

Mike chuckled as he took his ginger ale glass to the sink to rinse it out. "It won't be too much longer, possess yourself. Your doctor said it's healing perfectly, didn't he?"

"Unh-hunh."

"Well then, just be thankful they don't have to operate on it."

"True," Steve sighed. "I swear, the minute I can open my mouth, I'm putting a steak in it."

"Yeah," Mike said slowly, "I don't think it works that way. I think you have to get back to solid food slowly. I'm going to lay in a stock of baby food –"

"What?!"

"I'm joking, I'm joking," Mike laughed. "I really don't know. Let's wait and talk to your doctor, all right?" He had crossed back to the kitchen table and sat, still chuckling.

"So," Steve began, his tone much more serious, "where did you say Garrity was living?"

"He's got a house in Bernal Heights, been there for years from what I was told. Bob said he was a security guard at a warehouse for over twenty years, but he's on some kind of disability right now, bad back or something like that. He wasn't sure."

"Gut feeling, do you think he's in cahoots with his son on this, or did the little sapling do this all by himself?"

Mike chortled. "Ah, your guess is as good as mine. If Garrity was so all-fired determined to scuttle my career, why did he wait almost twenty-five years?" he asked rhetorically. "It doesn't make any sense, at least not to me."

Steve nodded. "Me neither." He paused then looked at his watch. "Hey, game's gonna start. You find the station and I'll get our beers and the cards. I am going to beat you tonight!"

# # # # #

Mike opened the front door to a beaming Healey on his doorstep. The sergeant was almost vibrating and a chuckling Mike stepped back to let him in.

"I've got it, Mike, I've got it," he said as he crossed to the coffee table, opening the file in his hand. "Oh, hi, Steve," he greeted as the younger man emerged from the kitchen drying his hands on a towel.

Mike glanced at Steve with an amused smile as they followed the sergeant to the sofa and sat. Healey was perched on the edge of the armchair, laying the open file on the coffee table.

"So I got in touch with my 'friend' this morning," Healey began without preamble, "and I asked if I could see the booking slips and tickets for the past six weeks. It took me most of the day, but I found it!" He paused for a second, seeming to regroup. "Now, I still have some details to nail down, but this is the gist of it."

Mike and Steve looked at each other, smiling at the sergeant's enthusiasm.

"Okay," Healey took a breath and began, "I kept trying to think how Madsen's and Abbott's paths had crossed, and nothing seemed to make sense. Then I thought, maybe their 'run-in' was entirely professional. Turns out I was right. So I got ahold of the patrol schedule for the past six weeks and it turns out that three weeks before the Pettet incident, McKinley was out sick for two days and Madsen was on his own.

"So, on a hunch, I asked to see the booking slips and tickets issued for that time period – this is what I had to do on the sly, of course – and lo and behold, there's a ticket form missing from that time period, a ticket that Madsen issued. Now, I am the only one that seems to know about this right now, and I don't want to get someone in trouble that doesn't deserve it, but I did a little more digging, and the ticket issued before the missing one," he pointed at a photocopy in the file, "is made out to a Paul Anthony Beaumont. I tracked this guy down this afternoon and he is a street musician who plays guitar and harmonica downtown on street corners. Sound familiar?"

When the two detectives nodded, Healey smiled and continued, "Mr. Beaumont knows, or rather knew, our Mr. Abbot; they used to 'busk' together. It seems that on the day in question, he and Abbott were 'taking a break' to have some lunch and a toke, and they were both so ripped that they urinated against a building when this black-and-white drives by and they get busted for public urination. Seems they'd finished their 'smokes' and though the …odor… was still lingering in the air, there was no … evidence left so they didn't get arrested for possession.

"Anyway, this gets me to thinking, and I'm not sure if I'm right about this but hear me out … What if, and it might be a big if, none of this stuff with Pettet was premeditated? What if Madsen can think on his feet really, really fast and when an opportunity presented itself, he acted?" Healey paused.

Mike nodded, brow furrowed. "Go on."

"What if Madsen has been harboring this grudge against you, Mike, for years because of what happened to his father, but he is able to keep his anger under control? What if, when the Pettet thing happened, he was just a patrolman responding to a call? But when he got upstairs and found you, Mike, unconscious, your gun in your hand and Pettet dead with a bullet in his chest and a knife at his side, he thought, and rightly so it seems, that there was a more than good chance he could make it look like excessive force if it seemed the knife was under Pettet?

"Then, as his luck would have it, and knowing the sequence of events because of what we speculated at the scene, which he was helping to work, he remembers that kid from the Midwest he ticketed a couple of weeks before for a misdemeanor. The kid must have been scared shitless – this is a kid who up to then had had zero run-ins with the law, and now he's ticketed for public urination and he knows he was very close to getting busted for pot as well. This kid has got to be quaking in his boots."

Healey paused, almost anticipating he was going to be told he was crazy and on the wrong path, but the other two were just staring at him with what looked liked growing admiration. Encouraged, he continued.

"So Madsen gets to this kid, who by the most amazing coincidence lives right across the alley from Pettet, and he somehow coerces him into coming forward with this 'eyewitness account'. Now remember what we heard from IA, that the reason Abbott didn't come forward right away was he was out of town for a few days visiting his family and didn't realize that he was the only one who had seen what he did through the window. Suppose he didn't really leave town but he didn't see what he says he did and only came forward after coercion from Madsen."

Mike was nodding his head. "I'll buy that, but what form do you think this coercion took?"

Healey shrugged, "I don't know, but it probably had something to do with holding a pot conviction over this kid's head – it wouldn't be beyond Madsen to plant something in the kid's apartment, I would think – and also telling him he could make the ticket go away as well. I mean, he already made the ticket disappear from Records. Madsen could have threatened him with something else too, something bigger and nastier. I mean, if he's gonna frame you for a possible manslaughter charge, who knows what he's capable of doing."

Finished, Healey sat back in the armchair and folded his arms. "So…?"

Mike leaned forward slowly and glanced down at the file on the coffee table. Both Steve and Healey were watching him closely, knowing how much was on the line here. Mike eventually raised his head and met Healey's gaze directly.

"Dan, have you and Norm decided on which judge you want to approach for a warrant?"