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After Iglesia and Soo had first arrived at the house and were processing the scene before preparing to remove the deceased, Javier had overheard a good bit of what Sasha Bazelon had been telling the two blue shirts.

Iglesia had been impressed with her—at eighteen, she was a year younger than his baby sister—and while she was just shy of hysterical, it was clear that on any other day, the slender, light-brown-skinned young woman would be absolutely beautiful.

The five of them had all been in the living room, the two cops interviewing the girl while the techs did their work.

Officer Geoffrey Pope, nineteen years old, was a rail-thin five-nine with closely cropped blond hair and a youthful face. Javier knew he had exactly one year on the Philadelphia Police Department.

Corporal Charlene Crowe was a black, stout thirty-year-old with a friendly face and warm smile. She stood a head shorter than Sasha, and she had to look up at the girl while asking questions. The shoulder patches of Crowe’s blue uniform shirt had two blue chevrons outlined in silver.

In fits and starts, interspersed with crying jags, Sasha had told Corporal Crowe, “I came home late last night from my friend’s house down the street. Grammy was sound asleep on the couch, snoring. So I quietly went to my room. When I came downstairs this morning, she was still there. But no longer breathing. When I checked for a pulse, her body felt cold and hard.”

And then came the waterworks.

And then she’d basically repeated what she’d said.

And then came the waterworks again.

Javier found it curious that Sasha almost never looked Corporal Crowe in the eyes, and when she did it was for only a split second—then she’d bury her face in her hands and sob.

It wasn’t that he felt the tears were not authentic.

The girl was clearly in deep emotional distress, and damn near inconsolable.

She’s shaking to her core, she’s crying so much.

But . . . there’s something that’s just not right, something that’s missing, not being said.

Yet when asked if anything at all suspicious had happened in the last days, weeks, even months, she’d said there’d been nothing.

She said, “Grammy got sick a lot, mostly from her diabetes. And her weight. I guess . . . I guess her heart just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Kim Soo and Javier Iglesia rolled the gurney out the front door and the wooden boards of the porch creaked under all the weight. The two uniforms talking with Sasha Bazelon looked over their shoulders and made eye contact with the medical examiner techs.

Sasha looked up from her hands, saw the packed body bag strapped to the gurney, and let out a wail.

“Officer Pope,” Javier Iglesia said, “when you get a moment?”

Javier dipped his head once sideways, in the direction of the white Ford panel van.

Pope nodded.

Soo and Iglesia wheeled the gurney past the small crowd, trying to remain professional and not make eye contact. But then a tiny, ancient-looking black lady—Javier thought she easily could be in her nineties—held her Bible up to her forehead and cried, “Go with God, sweet Joelle. Rest in peace. Praise be the Lord!”

Javier saw that she was clearly upset, but unlike the other younger women had her crying under control.

A strong and brave lady, Iglesia thought as they made eye contact, and with sad eyes and thin pensive lips, he nodded. Far braver than I.

“Amen,” he said softly to her.

As Kim swung open the two rear doors of the white Ford panel van, Javier said, “You know, this and South Philly have been my home all my life. And it’s all changing. It’s all slowly going to shit.”

“Mine, too. The whole city is,” Kim replied. “So, what’s your point?”

“My point is, good people are getting hurt. And someone needs to step up, is my point. I mean, I know we did pot and stuff at South Philly High. But now dealers are selling to middle schoolers, and not just pot, but bad stuff like candy smack.”

“Candy smack?”

“Yeah. I mean black tar heroin, is what I mean. Cheap deadly shit from Mexico, mixed with sugar. And other junk. And then the kids get hooked, then need money to go score more, so then they go rob some old lady, maybe tie her up and kill her. That’s what I mean, man!”