I looked at the ephemera gathered in Neddo’s dingy store: human remains reduced to the status of ornaments. I felt an overpowering urge to be gone from this place.

“I may have more questions for you,” I said.

I took a business card from my wallet and laid it on the desk. Neddo glanced at it, but didn’t pick it up.

“I’m always here,” he replied. “Naturally, I’m curious to see where your inquiries lead you. Feel free to contact me, day or night.”

He smiled thinly.

“In fact, night is probably best.”

Garcia watched the building, growing increasingly uneasy as one hour rolled by, then another. He had tried to follow the man who was of such concern to Brightwell, but he was not yet familiar with the streets of this huge city and had lost him within minutes. He believed that the man would return to his friends, and they were now Garcia’s most pressing concern, as they were still in his apartment. He had expected the police to come, but they had not. At first, it gave him hope, but now he was not so sure. They must have seen what was there. Perhaps they had even watched some of the tapes in his collection. What kind of men did not call the police in such a situation?

Garcia wanted his possessions back, and one in particular. It was important to him, but it was also one of the few items that could connect him, and the others, to the girl. Without it, the trail would be almost impossible to find.

A car pulled up, and the man got out and rang the bell to Garcia’s building. Garcia was relieved to see that he had the large wooden box in his hands. He only hoped that whatever he had removed from the apartment was still contained within it.

Minutes later, the door opened, and the Negro and his smaller companion left. Now there was only one man in the apartment, alone.

Garcia uncloaked himself from the shadows and moved toward the doorway.

I made one last search of the rooms. Louis and Angel had been through the apartment again, but I wanted to be sure that nothing had been missed. When I was done with the occupied areas, I went to the white-tiled room that Louis had discovered. Its purpose was clear. While it had been thoroughly cleaned, I wondered how much work had gone into removing evidence from the pipes. They were probably new, since the room was a recent addition. If someone had bled into the drain, traces might remain.

Tins of paint, and old paintbrushes, their bristles now entirely hardened, stood on a trestle table by the far wall, alongside a pile of old paint-spattered sheets. I pulled at the pile, raising a little cloud of red dust. I examined the residue, then swept the sheets from the table. There was more brick dust on the wood, and on the floor below. I tested the wall with my hand and felt brick scrape against brick. I looked more closely and saw the brickwork was not quite even around the edges of a section perhaps eighteen inches in height. Using my fingers, I gripped the exposed edge and began moving it from left to right, shifting it until I was able to pull it forward entirely. It fell to the table, still in one piece, leaving a hole exposed. I could make out a shape inside. I knelt down and shined the flashlight upon it.

It was a human skull, mounted upon a pillar of bones around which a red velvet cloth had been partially tied. A gold-sequinned scarf covered the head, leaving only the eye sockets, the nasal cavity, and the mouth exposed. At the base of the pillar, finger bones had been placed in an approximation of the pattern of two hands, the bones adorned with cheap rings. Beside them, offerings had been placed: chocolate, and cigarettes, and a shot glass containing an amber liquid that smelled like whiskey.

A locket gleamed in the flashlight’s beam, silver against the white of the bone pillar. I used a rag to take it in my hand, then flipped open the catch. Inside there were pictures of two women. The first I did not recognize. The second was the woman named Martha, who had come to my house in search of hope for her child.

Suddenly, there was an explosion of light and sound. Wood and stone splintered close to my right arm, shards of it striking my face and blinding me in my right eye. I dropped the flashlight and fell to the floor as a small, bulky figure was briefly silhouetted in the doorless entrance before ducking back out of sight. I heard the terrible twin clicks as another round was jacked into the shotgun’s chamber and the man’s voice uttering the same words over and over again. It sounded like a prayer.

“Santa Muerte, reza por mi. Santa Muerte, reza por mi…”

Faintly, just above his words, I caught the sound of footsteps on the stairs below as Angel and Louis ascended, closing the trap. The gunman heard them too, because the volume of his prayers increased. I heard Louis’s voice shout, “Don’t kill him!” And then the gunman appeared again, and the shotgun roared. I was already moving when the trestle table disintegrated, one of its legs collapsing as the shooter entered the room, screaming his prayer over and over again as he came, jacking, firing, jacking, firing, the noise and the dust filling the room, clouding my nose and my eyes, creating a filthy mist that obscured details, leaving only indistinct shapes. Through my blurred vision, I saw a squat, dark form. A cloud of light and metal ignited before it, and I fired.

The Mexican lay amid the ruins of the trestle table, the discarded sheets tangled around his feet like the remains of a shroud. One of the paint cans had opened, showering his lower body with white. Blood pumped rhythmically from the hole in his chest and into the paint, propelled by the beating of his slowly failing heart. His right hand clutched at the wall, crawling spiderlike across the brickwork as he tried to touch the skull on the altar.

“Muertecita,” he said once more, but now the words were whispered. “Reza por mi.”

Louis and Angel appeared in the doorway.

“Shit,” said Louis. “I told you not to kill him.”

Dust still clouded the room, and the contents of the hole in the wall were not yet visible to him. He knelt beside the dying man. His right hand clasped the Mexican’s face, turning it toward him.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me where she is.”

The Mexican’s eyes remained fixed upon a distant spot. His lips continued to move, repeating his mantra. He smiled, as though he had glimpsed something that was invisible to the rest of us, a rip in the fabric of existence that permitted him to see at last the reward, or the punishment, that was his and his alone. I thought I saw wonder in his gaze, and fear, even as his eyes began to lose their brightness, his eyelids drooping.

Louis slapped him hard on the cheek. He held a small photograph of Alice in his right hand. I had not seen it before. I wondered if his aunt had given it to him, or if it were his own possession, a relic of a life left behind but not forgotten.

“Where is she?” said Louis.

The dying man coughed up blood. His teeth were red as his lips tried to form the imprecation one final time, then he shuddered, and his hand fell and splashed in the paint as he died.

Louis lowered his head and covered his face with his hand, the picture of Alice now pressed to his skin.

“Louis,” I said.

He looked up, and for a second I didn’t know how to continue.

“I think I’ve found her.”

The Emergency Service Unit was the first on the scene, responding to the “shots fired” alert from the dispatcher. Soon, I was looking down the barrels of Ruger Mini-14s and H amp;K nine-millimeter submachine guns, trying to identify surnames and serial numbers in the confusion of lights and shouts that accompanied their arrival. The ESU cops took in the killing room, the dead Mexican, the bones arrayed in the apartment, then, once they realized that the action was over for the evening, retreated and let their colleagues from the Nine-Six take control. I tried to answer their questions as best I could at the start, but soon lapsed into silence. It was, in part, to protect both me and my friends-I did not want to give away too much until I had a chance to compose my thoughts and get my story straight-but it was also a consequence of the image that I could not shake. I saw, over and over, Louis standing before the gap in the bricks, staring into the skeletal face of a girl that he had once known, his hands poised before her, wanting to touch all that remained but unable to do so. I watched him as he drifted back to another time and another place: a houseful of women, his days among them drawing to a close, even as another was added to their number.