Deputy Chief of Investigations Abe Glitsky was sitting in his old office in homicide on the fourth floor of San Francisco's Hall of Justice. He was talking to the detail's lieutenant, Marcel Lanier. When another old homicide chief, Frank Batiste, had finally been appointed chief of police the previous summer, he'd rewarded Glitsky, his longtime colleague, with the plum job of deputy chief. Though Glitsky's civil service rank was lieutenant, for the year preceding his appointment he had labored unhappily in a sergeant's position as head of payroll. Now, as deputy chief, and still a civil service lieutenant, Glitsky supervised captains and commanders and, of course, every one of the two hundred and forty police inspectors in the city.

As deputy chief, Glitsky's role was important but nebulous. The Investigations Bureau had taken a very public hit about six months before, when the Chronicle had run a weeklong feature exposing the fact that of all the nation's largest cities, San Francisco came in dead last for its police record in arresting criminals and solving crimes of all types.

The article had revealed that during the previous four years, over 80 percent of all crimes committed in the city had gone unsolved. Many criminal acts, even violent ones such as street muggings, were never investigated at all, and with others- residential burglaries and the like- the investigation would consist of one inspector making one phone call to the victim, asking if anyone would like to come down to the Hall of Justice and file a report on what was missing. Though the scathing report had not yet seen print at the time, Batiste had of course been aware of the dismal numbers, the lackluster performance, and generally low morale of the department as a whole, and he'd brought Glitsky on to galvanize the bureau, to kick ass and take names, and above all to see that more bad guys actually found themselves arrested.