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CHAPTER 6

Michael Reiter: March 2005

Chief Reiter looks more like a bank president than a cop. He's well built, with an air of formality and discretion. But he's got twenty-four years on the job. Decades earlier, he was a campus police officer in Pittsburgh. Then he rose, steadily, through the ranks in Palm Beach, moving up from patrol officer to detective, working vice, narcotics, and organized crime, then becoming a sergeant, captain, major, and assistant chief—a job he held for three years—before becoming chief of police. Reiter is what you'd call seasoned, although chief of police in Palm Beach is a job that calls upon his political skills as much as his street smarts.

Then again, from time to time, things do happen.
Once in a blue moon there are murders—though these are so rare that they tend to be remembered for decades.
Sometimes there are hurricanes to contend with, and, when the

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sea calms, human cargo
fickers aim the bows of the
order their passengers to g
Most of the passengers
who stake all they have on
to time, Palm Beach cops h
Things get busier dur
it, the season. It's when t
ties and balls, shop, and t
Worth Avenue. The popu
who work under Chief R
ers, and snotty skateboar
tic disturbances. Chokin
stuff, but there's always
women who work for Rei
Chief Reiter's proud o
knows, they're lucky to ha
for the job. If anything, h
the John F. Kennedy Scho
terrorist training at Quan
up often at cocktail partie
hijackers lived in Palm Be
local airstrips. A few, incl
had been regulars at 251
There they had regaled
made-up stories about the
But 251 Sunrise is shu
2004, after an avalanche of
Beach is as quiet and calm
For the moment.

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