“WANT TO go to the Albany field office?” I buckled my seat belt and put the key in the ignition. “Still didn’t make my decision about consulting, Hale.” “I have inducements,” he said, pushing the seat back several inches so that he was almost lounging. “You know how I’ve been promising the clear video from the car rental place?” “Yeah?” “I don’t have that.” “I don’t think ‘inducements’ means what you think it means.” “However,” he said, giving me a cocky grin, “I do have grainy images of the guy who leased the van.” That was enough for me. We wound our way out of the hospital parking lot, braking as a pair of exhausted interns skittered across the street to a Starbucks. We drove through to Arbor Hill, the African-American section of the city. This area of town had the same colonial townhouses as the section where Hale lived, but without the self-conscious gas lamps and ironwork the developer had used in Hale’s neighborhood to make it old-timey.
