Islam usually forbids lying, but there are exceptions. If Hannah asked me if her meatloaf was good, I could lie and say I love it as long as my intention was to avoid hurting her. I could also lie in times of warfare. While I didn’t have a background in Islamic law, I figured police work is as close to warfare as I could get without enlisting. Lee and I waited for about five minutes for the first officers to arrive. Both were young, and neither was of color. That wasn’t a good combination for successful policing in that neighborhood. We gave them the basic story we had concocted, and they looked at the scene for a moment. One of the guys looked as if he were going to puke when he saw the body, but he held it together. It took another half hour for the rest of the troops to show up. An old colleague of mine from homicide took our statements. Even if he didn’t believe our story completely, he wouldn’t jam us up; he knew that if we had dropped Rollo, we must have had a damn good reason.
