"Brewster!" Her voice halted him like a pointed gun.

"What the hell you think you're doing parking in my space!"

He grinned, flashing rings and a fake Rolex as he swept arms open wide, the pistol beneath his jacket peeking out.

"Look around. Tell me what you see. Not one damn parking place in all of Charlotte."

"That's why important people like me are assigned one," she said to this detective she supervised as she tossed him her keys.

"Bring them back when you've moved my car," she ordered.

West was forty-two, a woman who still turned heads and had never been married to anything beyond what she thought she was here on earth to do. She had deep red hair, a little unattended and longer than she liked it, her eyes dark and quick, and a serious body that she did not deserve, for she did nothing to maintain curves and straightness in the right places. She wore her uniform in a way that made other women want one, but that was not why she chose police blues over plain clothes. She supervised more than three hundred wiseass investigators like Ronald Brewster who needed every reminder of law and order West could muster.

Cops greeted her on her way in. She turned right, headed to offices where Chief Judy Hammer decided everything that mattered in law enforcement in this hundred-mile area of almost six million people.

West loved her boss but right now didn't like her. West knew why she had been called in early for a meeting, and it was a situation beyond reason or her control. This was insane. She walked into Hammer's outer office, where Captain Fred Horgess was talking on the phone. He held his hand over the receiver and shook his head in a there's nothing I can do way to West as she walked up to the dark wooden door, where Hammer's name was announced brightly in brass.