He carried a badge for thirty years. Now he carries a basket.

Dominick keeps the badge in a tin on top of the icebox. He doesn't take it down often, but he knows exactly where it is — the way a man knows where his father's wedding ring sits, or the loose floorboard above the third step. Thirty years in the NYPD will give you that kind of memory. It will also give you a knee that predicts rain and a habit of watching every door in every room you enter.

The farm is called The White House. He named it himself, with the dry humor of a man who has seen too many press conferences. Eleven acres of bottomland in upstate New York, a clapboard farmhouse the color of fresh paper, and a barn that leans, charitably, to the east. He bought it the spring after he turned in his shield.

"I thought I'd fish," he says, pouring coffee that could strip varnish. "I lasted about four days." Within a month he had ordered seed catalogs. By the end of that first autumn, he had grown four hundred pounds of garlic he didn't know what to do with.

What he was really after — though he wouldn't have said it then — was a problem he could solve with his hands. Detective work, he says, is mostly waiting and writing. Farming is mostly waiting and lifting. The waiting feels different out here.