Chaz:

Everything went black for a long, awful moment. Like the universe had been dipped in tar. I was coming out of it, swimming to the top, arms burning, like the bodies, like the smudged blue-black horizon of tiny bodies. I caught a breath when my head came above the resin-dark surface, thought I felt the heat of a coal-burning furnace.

“Hey! You can’t do that”—Angelique seemed upset—“this is his crime scene—”

“Really?” Some nameless mug came over and held her down. Poured liquidmetal cuffs around her wrists. Paused a heartbeat while the nano-alloy hardened.

“This is against the law,” she protested. “You morons have no jurisdiction here—”

She was right, of course. Apparently everything she had learned in a previous life as a lawyer was bubbling up to the surface of the pitch, smoke-filled bubbles that burst when they crested the tar skin.

I was on fire.

A second mug pulled a laser from the holster on his hip, then flashed a red-hot beam on my palm, burned off the top layer of skin, erasing my tattoo. I yelled and jammed my knee in Mug Number Two’s gut.

“Stop it!” My voice wasn’t loud enough. No one heard me.

Through the doorway I could see Russ and Pete on their knees, hands behind their backs while Skellar read them their rights. Meanwhile, a group of distraught parents stood in the hallway, some crying, some trying to push their way through the crime scene barriers. A VR camera scanned the scene, beams of white light scorching the room, white arrows that pierced swirling ash. Any minute now we would go live with the rest of world. Film at 11. Look, everybody, the Domingues are going down.

“Your badge is on the line,” Angelique said to the mug who held me down. She was standing now, hands braced against the counter, a glazed expression on her face.

“What the hell’s goin’ on here?” Skellar growled when he walked back in the doorway. “Drop that laser, Broussard! We haven’t even processed him yet. And Domingue, tell your Newbie to settle down.”

The other mugs took a half step backward. Meanwhile, Angelique threatened to charge the police department with her bill—a thousand dollars an hour—when this was all over. She promised to make sure the lieutenant’s supervisor got a detailed account of his incompetence.

Skellar glanced at me, raised an eyebrow. I was as confused as he was, but I tried to hide it.

“In the case of a murder that takes place in a private residence”—she stared at the floor, frowned as if trying to figure out what to do next—“a Babysitter has seniority over a police lieutenant.”

Skellar narrowed his eyes, seemed to remember some piece of information, probably buried away in a back file cabinet inside his dusty brain. “Okay, that’s enough with the client-lawyer routine.” An unexpected grin revealed teeth stained by years of jive-sweet. We all have our addictions, some legal, some not. “I’d fancy up, if I was you, Domingue. It’s time to walk the gauntlet.”

“You aren’t seriously going to make him walk through all those—” Angelique tried to stop him, but he and his crew of brainless musclemen were already dragging me out the door.

“In the case of a capital,” he said, leaning toward her as he paraphrased as best he could, “where the crime involves a minor, where the crime takes place in the home of a ’sitter—or a home that belongs to anyone in the ’sitter’s ugly family—then the ’sitter may as well pack his bags and move into an eight-by-ten cell, custom decorated just for him.”

His jack-o’-lantern grin was fixed in place.

“Get the Newbie too,” the lieutenant said then, almost as if he’d been planning it all along.

I didn’t see it of course. Not until all the excitement had worn off and nobody really cared anymore. But I heard that our exit from the crime scene got the highest viewer rating in almost twenty years, that it ranked higher than that Super Bowl incident where a Chicago Bears quarterback blew himself up to protest the war. Russell, Pete, Angelique and I were all dragged out, hands cuffed behind our backs like villains.

The gauntlet.

A special scenario reserved for top-notch terrorists and serial killers, those who had already lost all their civil rights and were one short step away from conviction.

Virtual-reality recording beams sizzled through the darkness like serpentine strobe lights; they caught and captured our every nuance, memorized our movements in 3-D. We got in-your-face-and-then-some exposure as we were hauled past the parents of the dead children.

This same group of people, who had cowered downstairs only moments before, now demonstrated a callous bravado. They spat, cursed and clawed as we passed. One woman yanked a handful of Angelique’s hair. One man swung the broken chair I had used to open the bathroom door. Pete stumbled beneath the blow.

“Murderers!” another man bellowed.

“That’s enough!” Skellar said as he pushed the man out of the way.

The screams deafened and assaulted. The blows weakened us with every step.

Still there was something else, something much more sinister, which ran beneath the surface. Something that the video technicians quickly edited out.

It stood at the edges of the wild crowd. Passive and cold and calculating.

While some of the parents reacted with violent, out-of-control anger, a larger majority of them stood back, silent, almost numb. A familiar expression on their faces. One I immediately recognized.

Apathy.

These children hadn’t been kidnapped: they were dead. There would be a legal death certificate in the mail in a few days.

These children could be replaced.