Next to Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky's bed, the telephone rang with a muted insistence.

A widower, Glitsky lived in an upper duplex unit with his youngest son Orel and a housekeeper/nanny named Rita. During his wife's illness, he'd deadened the phone's ringer so that it wouldn't wake anyone else in the house when, as often occurred, it rang in the middle of the night.

He located the source of the noise in the dark and picked up the receiver, whispering hoarsely, 'Glitsky. What?'

Surfacing slowly into consciousness, he didn't really have to ask. He was the head of San Francisco 's homicide detail. When he got calls in the dead dark, they did not tend to be salespeople inquiring about his satisfaction with his long distance service provider. It was nearly two hours past midnight on Monday, the first day of February, and the city had produced only two homicides thus far this year -a slow month. In spite of that, Glitsky spent no time, ever, wondering if his job was going to dry up.

The caller wasn't the police dispatcher, but one of his inspectors, Ridley Banks, on his cell phone directly from the crime scene. It wasn't standard procedure to call the lieutenant from the street – so this homicide must have an unusual element. Though Ridley spoke concisely with little inflection, even in his groggy state Glitsky detected urgency.

A downtown patrol car had seen some suspicious movement in Maiden Lane, a walking street just off Union Square. When the officers had hit their spotlight, they flushed a man squatting over what looked like, and turned out to be, a body.

The suspect ran and the officers gave chase. Apparently drunk, the man staggered into a fire hydrant, fell in a heap, and was apprehended. Cuffed now, in the back seat of the squad car, he had passed out awaiting his eventual trip to the jail.