Jacobi once had been mine, too – that is, he used to be my partner. And although we’d swapped jobs and disagreed often, we’d put in so many years and miles together, he could read my thoughts like no one else – not Claire, not Conklin, not Cindy, not Joe.

Jacobi was sitting behind his junkyard of a desk when we walked in. My old friend and boss is a gray-haired, lumpy-featured, fifty-three-year-old cop with more than twenty-five years’ experience in Homicide. His sharp gray eyes fixed on me, and I noted the laugh lines bracketing his mouth – because he wasn’t laughing.

Not even a little.

“What the hell have you two been doing all day?” he asked me. “Have I got this right? You’ve been working a homeless DOA?”

Inspector Hottie, as Conklin is known around the Hall, offered me the chair across from Jacobi’s desk, then parked his cute butt on the credenza – and started to laugh.

“I say something funny, Conklin?” Jacobi snapped. “You’ve got twelve unsolveds on your desk. Want me to list them?”

Jacobi was touchy because San Francisco ’s homicide-solution rate was hovering at the bottom, somewhere below Detroit ’s.

“I’ll tell him,” I said to Conklin.

I put my feet up against the front edge of Jacobi’s desk and said, “Time got away from us, Warren. This crime has a few odd angles, and the victim’s death is going to be written up in great big type in the Chronicle tomorrow. I thought we should get out in front of the story.”

“Keep talking,” said Jacobi, as if I were a suspect and he had me in the box.

I filled him in on the reported good works and the varying theories: that Bagman Jesus was a missionary or a philanthropist, that the baby on his crucifix was a pro-life statement or that it symbolized how we’d all once been innocent and pure – like Baby Jesus.