Fittyy RicH sea calms, human cargo washes up on the shore. Sometimes traf- fickers aim the bows of their boats at the glow of the Breakers resort, order their passengers to go overboard, then tell them to swim. Most of the passengers are Haitian—men, women, and children who stake all they have on a chance at a life in America. From time to time, Palm Beach cops have to retrieve their bodies from the surf. 6 | Things get busier during the wintertime, or, as the locals call CHAPTER i it, the season. It's when the very rich come to town, throw par- | ties and balls, shop, and tangle traffic at the intersections around | Worth Avenue. The population booms, and the men and women i who work under Chief Reiter deal with fender benders, shoplift- . ers, and snotty skateboarding teenagers. There are DUIs. Domes- tic disturbances. Choking victims and heart attacks. It’s routine stuff, but there’s always lots of it. Enough to keep the men and women who work for Reiter busy. : a bank president than a cop. Chief Reiter’s proud of the team he has built. And, the team of formality and discretion. But 4 knows, they’re lucky to have him. Reiter’s extremely well qualified on the job. Decades earlier, he : for the job. If anything, he’s overqualified, with a certificate from tsburgh. Then he rose, steadily, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and anti- moving up from patrol officer terrorist training at Quantico, courtesy of the FBI. It’s not brought tics, and organized crime, then q up often at cocktail parties in Palm Beach, but several of the 9/11 sjor, and assistant chi ef—a job : hijackers lived in Palm Beach County. They took flight lessons at secoming chief of p olice. Reiter ’ local airstrips. A few, including the mastermind, Mohamed Atta, hough chief of police in Palm 1 had been regulars at 251 Sunrise, a chic nightclub in Palm Beach. s political skills as mu ch as his 3 : There they had regaled any woman who would listen with : % made-up stories about their a