'Are you still in front of your TV?'

'Yes.'

'Look at it now.'

On the screen was a still photograph that would in the coming days become as famous as the Rodney King videotapes. Arthur Wade was hanging from a streetlight and under him a white male was hugging him, apparently pulling down on his legs, trying to break his neck. Wade, in his last futile seconds, was holding the rope above his head with one hand, and with his other appeared to be trying to strike the man pulling his legs, to drive him away and purchase himself another few seconds of life.

Elaine stared transfixed at the horror of the scene. She had never expected to see it played out in her lifetime again, especially here, in supposedly liberal San Francisco.

She forced herself to look again – the black man hanging by the neck, surrounded by the white mob. All the faces were blurred except the two in the center, and they were in perfect focus. Arthur Wade and the man who'd hung him, whoever it was.

Chris Locke sounded raspy, drained. 'We're going to get proactive here, Elaine. That man's got to be found. And then we've got to crucify him. Can you come down to the Hall…?'

'You mean now?'

'I mean yesterday, Elaine.'

7

Shea made it home, walking.

It took him over two hours to make it on the smaller streets from where he had been dropped in the grassy center divider of Park Presidio Boulevard to his apartment on Green Street near Webster.

The details kept coming back. The black man struggling. Reaching for him. The man's weight on his shoulders while he was still alive.

Maybe, Shea kept thinking, reliving it, he shouldn't have gone for the guys near the fire hydrant, should have just stayed holding the man up, maybe then it would have turned out…

It still wasn't real.

He limped, stopped, leaned on things, vaguely aware of sirens, of the sky glowing now off to his right. At the moment, he couldn't put it together.