Free Look Again by Lisa Scottoline

America."
    Ellen absorbed her words, and her emotion. She wondered if she could convey all that feeling in the piece.
    "It's like Katrina, we're livin' in a different country. We got two sets of rules, two sets of laws, two things you can get outta life, whether you're white or black, rich or poor. That's the thing in a nutshell." Laticia pointed a stiff index finger at Ellen. "You live in America, but I don't. You live in Philadelphia, but I don't."
    Ellen didn't know how to respond, so she didn't.
    "Where I live, my kid can get shot on the street, and nobody sees nothin'. You wanna blame them, tell people to snitch, I know, but you can't blame people. I can't and I don't. If they snitch, they're dead. Their family's dead. Their kids are dead."
    Ellen didn't want to interrupt Laticia with a question. Nothing could be as valuable as what she was saying and she deserved at least that much.
    "So I could sit here and tell you all about Teef and how cute he was, "cause he was." Laticia smiled briefly, light returning to her angry eyes, softening them for just an instant. "He was a funny child, a goof-ball. He cracked us up. At the last reunion, he was freestylin', he tore it up. I miss him every minute."
    Ellen thought of Susan Sulaman, talking about her son. And Carol Braverman, praying for a miracle on her website.
    "But even though Teef was mine, what matters is he isn't the only one killed here." Laticia put her hand to her chest, resting on the painted photo of her son's face. "Three other kids were killed in this neighborhood, all of them shot to death. Lemme ask you, that happen where you live?"
    "No."
    "And that jus' this year. You figure in the year before that and the one before that, we got eight kids killed. You can make a big pile outta those bodies."
    Ellen tried to make sense of the number. Everybody counted bodies, to quantify the cost. But whether it cost nine kids or twelve, it was no worse than one. One child was enough. One body was one too many. One was the only number.
    "We don't have kids walkin' around here, we got ghosts. This neighborhood's full a ghosts. Pretty soon they'll be nobody left to kill. Philly's gonna be a ghost town, like in the wild wild west. A ghost town."
    Ellen heard the bitterness in her words, and she realized that Laticia Williams and Susan Sulaman, two very different women from two very different cities in the same city, had that much in common. Both of them were haunted, and they always would be. She wondered if
    Carol Braverman felt the same way, and it nagged at her. She thought of the files, waiting for her in the garage. Answers would be inside.
    "You got a child?" Laticia asked, abruptly.
    "Yes," Ellen answered. "A boy."
    "That's good." Laticia smiled, the gold winking again. "You hold that baby close, you hear? Hold him close. You never know when you gonna lose him."
    Ellen nodded, because for a minute, she couldn't speak.

Chapter Twenty-one
    Ellen surveyed the garage, her breath chalky in the cold. Kids' bicycles stood propped up in front of metal shelves that held Nerf footballs, a black plastic mountain of Rollerblades and kneepads, and a spare jug of sea-blue antifreeze. There were greasy jars of Turtle Wax and Bug-B-Gone, and an exercise bicycle had been relegated to a corner, wedged behind a workbench. Fluorescent panels overhead cast light on the left well of the garage, where Rick Musko must park, because there were a few grease spots on the concrete floor. In the other well, where Karen Batz's car would have been, sat cardboard boxes piled like a Rubik's Cube. An old green tennis ball hung uselessly from the ceiling, resting on the top of the boxes, its string slack.
    Dead files.
    Ellen fastened her down coat, went over to the boxes, and started moving them aside. They were piled alphabetically, and she searched for the Go's. Ten minutes later, boxes lay all around the garage floor, and she wasn't cold anymore. She wedged off the lid of a box labeled Ga-Go and looked