Culligan respected Braddock County the most. Of all the prosecutors, however, theirs resided on the bottom of the list. J. Daniel Petrelli could not stand in front of enough television cameras, couldn’t spout enough crush-the-criminals rhetoric, and couldn’t play hardball any more aggressively in the courtroom. Elected in the standard four-year voting cycle, he’d wormed his way into office six times now. Combined with the limp-wristed board of supervisors that governed the county, Petrelli had begun to think of himself in somewhat Caesarean terms, consistently filing the toughest charges against even minor infractions. The assistant Commonwealth’s attorneys who worked for him were well aware that the sole path to promotion lay in being equally intractable. It all played so well with the voters. It didn’t, however, play very well with the police department. The chief, Warren Michaels, famously despised J. Daniel, and he encouraged his police officers to serve as a kind of Petrelli antidote, at least to the extent that they could.
