“Tell Louis I’m sorry,” she said.

I called Rachel once I was back at my hotel. She answered on the fourth ring.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Everything’s fine,” she said.

Her voice was flat.

“Is Sam all right?”

“She’s good. She slept through till seven. I’ve just fed her. I’ll put her down again for an hour or two now.”

The line went quiet for about five seconds.

“How are you doing?” she said.

“There was some trouble earlier,” I said. “A man died.”

Again, there was only silence.

“And I think we found Alice,” I said, “or something of her.”

“Tell me.”

She sounded suddenly weary.

“There were human remains in a tub. Bones, mostly. I found more behind a wall. Her locket was with them.”

“And the man who died? Was he responsible?”

“I don’t know for sure. It looks like it.”

I waited for the next question, knowing that it had to come.

“Did you kill him?”

“Yes.”

She sighed. I could hear Sam starting to cry. Rachel hushed her.

“I have to go,” she said.

“I’ll be back soon.”

“It’s over, right?” she said. “You know what happened to Alice, and the man who killed her is dead. What more can you do? Come home. Just-come home, okay?”

“I will. I love you, Rachel.”

“I know.” I thought I could hear something catch in her voice as she prepared to hang up the phone. “I know you do.”

I slept until past midday, when I was awoken by the ringing of the telephone. It was Walter Cole.

“Seems like you had a busy night,” he said.

“How much do you know?”

“A little. You can fill me in on the rest. There’s a Starbucks over by Daffy’s. I’ll see you there in thirty minutes.”

I made it in forty-five, and even then I was pushing it. On my way across town, I thought about what I had done, and about what Rachel had said when we spoke. In one sense, it was over. I felt certain that dental records and DNA tests, if necessary using Martha’s DNA for comparison, would confirm that the remains found in Garcia’s apartment were those of Alice. So Garcia was involved, and may even have been directly responsible for her death. But that didn’t explain why Alice had gone missing to begin with, or why Eddie Tager had paid her bond. Then there was the antique dealer Neddo and his talk of “Believers,” and the FBI agent Philip Bosworth, who appeared to be engaged in an investigation that mirrored, at least in some way, my own. Finally, I was aware of a deep unease, the sense that there was something else moving beneath the surface details of the case, weaving through the hidden, hollow caverns of the past.

My hair was still wet from a hasty shower when I sat down across from Walter at a corner table. He wasn’t alone. Dunne, the detective from the coffee shop, was with him.

“Your partner know you’re seeing other people?” I asked him.

“We have an open relationship. As long as he doesn’t have to hear about it, he’s cool. He thinks you shot G-Mack, though.”

“So do the cops over at the Nine-Six. For what it’s worth, I didn’t pull the trigger on him.”

“Hey, it’s not like we really care so much. Mackey just doesn’t want it coming back to haunt him, someone hears we sicced you on him.”

“A couple of people pointed us in his direction. You can tell your partner he doesn’t have anything to worry about.”

“ ‘Us?’”, said Dunne.

Damn. I was tired.

“Walter and me.”

“Right. Sure.”

I didn’t want to get into this with Dunne. I didn’t even know why he was here.

“So,” I said, “what are we doing here: testing muffins?”

Dunne looked to Walter for an ally.

“He’s a hard guy to help,” he said.

“He’s very self-sufficient,” said Walter. “It’s a strongman pose. I think it hides a conflicted sexuality.”

“Walter, with all due respect, I’m not in the mood for this.”

Walter raised a placating hand. “Easy. Like Dunne said, we’re trying to help.”

“Sereta, the other girl-it looks like they’ve found her too,” said Dunne.

“Where?”

“Motel just outside of Yuma.”

“The Spyhole killings?” I had watched some of the news reports on TV.

“Yeah. They’ve identified her for certain as the girl found in the trunk of the car. They kind of figured that anyway, since the car was registered to her and a section of her license survived the fire, but they were waiting for confirmation. It looks like she was still alive, and conscious, when the flames got to her. She managed to kick in the backseat before she died.”

I tried to remember the details.

“Wasn’t there a second body in the car?”

“Male. He’s a John Doe. No ID, no wallet. They’re still trying to chase him down with what they have, but it’s not like they can put a picture on milk cartons. Maybe on barbecue charcoal come the summer, but not until then. He’d been shot in the shoulder and chest. Fatal bullet was still in him. It came from a thirty-eight, same gun as they found on the Mexican who died in one of the motel rooms. They were operating on the assumption that he might have been the target of a botched hit. Guy was tied up with some pretty bad people, and the Federales down in Mexico were real anxious to speak to him. Now, with this Alice thing up here, maybe there’s another angle.”

According to G-Mack, Alice and Sereta had been present when Winston and his assistant were killed, but they hadn’t seen anything. They had taken something, though, and apparently this item was sufficiently valuable that the individuals involved were prepared to kill to get it back. They found Alice, and perhaps from her they gained some knowledge of where Sereta was hiding. I didn’t like to think of how they had acquired that information.

“Your friend G-Mack should be released from the hospital in a couple of days,” said Dunne. “From what I hear, he says he still doesn’t know anything about what happened to his hookers, and he didn’t get a look at the guy who shot him. Whoever put the bullet in his leg knew what he was doing. The ankle joint and the heel were shattered to pieces. Guy is gonna be a gimp for the rest of his life.”

I thought of Alice’s skull resting in the alcove in Garcia’s apartment. I imagined Sereta’s final minutes of life, as the heat grew in intensity, slowly roasting her before the flames took hold. By selling Alice out, G-Mack had condemned them both to death.

“That’s tough,” I said.

Dunne shrugged. “It’s a tough world. Speaking of that, Walter says he tried to talk to Ellen, the young hooker.”

I remembered the young girl in the dark clothing.

“You get anywhere with her?”

Walter shook his head.

“Hard outside, and getting harder inside. I’m going to talk to Safe Horizon about her, and I have a buddy in the Juvenile Crime Special Projects Squad. I’ll keep trying.”

Dunne stood and picked up his jacket.

“Look,” he said to me, “if I can help you out, I will. I owe Walter, and if he wants to call in that debt for you, then I’m okay with that. But I like my job, and I plan on keeping it. I don’t know who put those fucking bullets in that piece of shit, but if you happen to meet him, you tell him to take it to Jersey next time. We clear?”

“Clear,” I said.

“Oh, and one last thing. They did find something else unusual in the Spyhole. The desk clerk’s blood was smeared on his face, and they pulled foreign DNA from the samples. Weird thing was, it was all degraded.”

“Degraded?”

“Old and debased. They think the samples might have been corrupted somehow. They contained toxins, and they’re still trying to identify most of them. It’s like somebody rubbed a piece of dead meat across the kid’s face.”

We gave him a five-minute start, then left.

“So what now?” asked Walter, as we tried to avoid getting run over by a bus.