The Witness Who Wasn't There

Detective Ray Vance had closed the Okafor case eleven weeks ago, and he had been sleeping better ever since. That was the part he would come to be ashamed of: not that he had been wrong, but that being wrong had let him sleep.

It had been a clean case, or as clean as they came in the 9th. Daniel Okafor, thirty-four, found dead in the stairwell of a tenement on Vesey Street with two bullets in his chest and his wallet still on him, which made it personal rather than profit. No prints worth a damn, no weapon, no camera that worked. What it had, the one thing every detective prays for and almost never gets, was a witness — a woman named Carla Reyes who lived on the third floor and who had looked out her window at 11:40 on the night in question and seen, clear as day under the one working streetlight, a young man named Marcus Bell standing over the body with a gun in his hand. She knew Bell by sight. She picked him out of a array without a flicker of hesitation. And Marcus Bell, twenty-two, with a sheet for possession and a temper everyone on Vesey Street could testify to, had no alibi worth the name and a motive the size of a grudge — Okafor had testified against Bell's brother two years back, and Bell had said, in front of witnesses, that Okafor would pay for it.

Means, motive, an eyewitness who knew him. Vance had made the arrest, the DA had run with it, and Marcus Bell was eleven weeks into pre-trial detention, swearing up and down he'd been nowhere near Vesey Street, the way every man Vance ever arrested swore he'd been nowhere near anything. Case closed. Vance had moved on. He had slept.