Dark Rivers of the Heart

staggering around in the infuriatingly dim lamplight, naked and confused. His limbs twitched, his knees repeatedly buckled, and the room seemed to tumble like a giant barrel in a carnival fun house.
        Though his ears were ringing, he heard men shouting elsewhere in the house: "FBI! FBI! FBI!" The booming voices weren't reassuring.
        Addled by a stun grenade he couldn't think what those letters meant.
        He remembered the nightstand. His revolver. Loaded.
        He couldn't recall how to open a drawer. Suddenly it seemed to require superhuman intelligence, the dexterity of a torch juggler.
        Then the bedroom was crowded with men as big as professional football players, all shouting at once. They forced Harris to lie facedown on the floor, with his hands behind his head.
        His mind cleared. He remembered the meaning of FBI. Terror and confusion didn't evaporate, but diminished to fear and bafflement.
        A helicopter roared into position above the house. Searchlights swept the yard. Over the furious pounding of the rotors, Harris heard a sound so cold that he felt as if ice had formed in his blood: his daughters, screaming as the doors to their rooms crashed open.
        Being required to lie naked on the floor while Jessica was rousted from bed, equally naked, was deeply humiliating. They made her stand in a corner, with only her hands to cover herself, while they searched the bed for weapons. After an eternity, they tossed a blanket to her, and she wrapped herself in it.
        Harris was eventually permitted to sit on the edge of the bed, still naked, burning with humiliation. They presented the search warrant, and he was surprised to find his name and address. He had assumed that they had invaded the wrong house. He explained that he was an LAPD captain, but they already knew and were unmoved.
        At last Harris was permitted to dress in gray exercise sweats. He and Jessica were taken into the living room.
        Ondine and Willa were huddled on the sofa, hugging each other for emotional support. The girls tried to rush to their parents but were restrained by officers who ordered them to remain seated.
        Ondine was thirteen, and Willa was fourteen. Both girls had their mother's beauty. Ondine was dressed for bed in panties and a T-shirt that featured the face of a rap singer. Willa was wearing a cut-off T-shirt, cutoff pajama bottoms, and yellow knee socks.
        Some officers were looking at the girls in a way they had no right to look: Harris asked that his daughters be allowed to put on robes, but he was ignored. While Jessica was taken to an armchair, Harris was flanked by two men who tried to lead him out of the room.
        When he again requested that the girls be given robes and was ignored, he pulled away from his escorts, indignant. His indignation was interpreted as resistance. He was hit in the stomach with the butt of an assault rifle, driven to his knees, and handcuffed.
        In the garage, a man who identified himself as "Agent Gurland" was at the workbench, examining a hundred plastic-wrapped kilos of cocaine, worth millions. Harris stared in disbelief, with a growing chill, as he was told that the coke had been found in his garage.
        "I'm innocent. I'm a cop. I've been set up. This is nuts!"
        Gurland perfunctorily recited a list of constitutional rights.
        Harris was infuriated by their indifference to everything he said.
        His anger and frustration earned him more rough handling as he was escorted out of the house to a car at the curb. Along the street, neighbors had come onto their lawns and porches to watch.
        He was taken to a federal detention facility. There he was permitted to call his attorney-who was his brother, Darius.
        By virtue of being a policeman, and therefore endangered if confined with cop-hating felons, he expected to be segregated in the lockup.
        Instead, he was put into a holding cell with six men waiting to be charged on offenses ranging from interstate transportation of illegal drugs to the hatchet murder of a federal marshal.
        All claimed that they were being railroaded. Although a few were obviously bad pieces of work, the captain found himself more than half believing their protestations of innocence.
        At two-thirty Saturday morning, sitting across from Harris at a scarred Formica-topped table in a lawyer-client conference room, Darius