The reception area, carpeted in gray, took up the entire front room, with a black leather couch beneath the bay window and a very modern coffee table made from a single slab of black glass in front of it. There were matching easy chairs at either side of the table, and the walls were decorated, if that was the right word, with the kind of art that suggested someone suffering from severe depression had stood in front of a blank canvas for a very long time, then made a random stroke with a black paintbrush before slapping a hefty price tag on the result and entering lifelong therapy. All things considered, minimalism seemed to be the order of the day. Even the secretary’s desk was untroubled by anything resembling a file or a piece of stray paper. Maybe Sekula wasn’t very busy, or perhaps he just spent his days staring dreamily at his secretary.

I showed her my license. She didn’t look impressed.

“I’d like a few minutes of Mr. Sekula’s time.”

“Mr. Sekula is busy.”

I thought I could hear the low drone of one side of a telephone conversation coming from behind a pair of black doors to my right.

“Hard to imagine,” I said, taking in the spotless reception area once again. “I hope he’s firing his decorator in there.”

“What is this about?” said the secretary. She didn’t deign to use my name.

“Mr. Sekula appears to be responsible for a property in Williamsburg. I wanted to ask him about it.”

“Mr. Sekula is involved with a lot of properties.”

“This one is pretty distinctive. It seems to have a lot of dead people in it.”

Sekula’s secretary didn’t even blink at the mention of what had occurred in Williamsburg.

“Mr. Sekula has been over that with the police,” she said.

“Then it should all be fresh in his mind. I’ll just take a seat and wait until he’s done in there.”

I sat down in one of the chairs. It was uncomfortable in the way that only very expensive furniture can be. After two minutes, the base of my spine was aching. After five minutes, the rest of my spine was aching too, and other parts of my body were crying out in sympathy. I was considering lying on the floor instead when the black doors opened and a man in a charcoal gray pinstripe suit stepped into the reception area. His hair was light brown and trimmed as carefully as potentially prizewinning topiary, so that not a single strand was out of place. He had the bland good looks of a part-time model, his features without a single flaw or hint of individuality that might have lent them character or distinction.

“Mr. Parker,” he said. “I’m David Sekula. I’m sorry you had to wait. We’re busier than we might appear.”

Clearly, Sekula had heard everything that was said in the reception room. Perhaps the secretary had simply left the room-to-room intercom open. Either way, it made me curious as to whom Sekula had been talking with on the phone. It might have been nothing to do with me, in which case I would have to face the possibility that the world didn’t revolve around me. I wasn’t sure that I was ready to take that step yet.

I shook Sekula’s hand. It was soft and dry, like an unused sponge.

“I hope you’ve recovered from your ordeal,” he said, ushering me toward his office. “What happened in that place was terrible.”

The cops had probably explained my involvement to Sekula when they interviewed him. Clearly, they’d forgotten to include his secretary in the loop, or maybe they’d tried to tell her, but she couldn’t understand them through their drool.

Sekula paused by his secretary’s desk.

“No calls, please, Hope,” he told her.

Hope? It was hard to believe.

“I understand, Mr. Sekula,” she replied.

“Nice name,” I told her. “It suits you.”

I smiled at her. We were all friends now. Maybe they’d invite me to go away with them on a trip. We could drink, laugh, reminisce about how awkward that first encounter between us had been before we all got to know one another and realized how swell each of us truly was.

Hope didn’t smile back. It looked like the trip was off.

Sekula closed the doors behind us and waved me to an upright chair in front of his desk. The chair faced the window, but the drapes were drawn, so I couldn’t see what lay beyond them. Compared to the reception area, his office looked like a bomb had hit it, but it was still neater than any lawyer’s office I had ever been in before. There were files on the desk, but they were neatly stacked and housed in nice clean folders, each marked with a printed label. The trash can was empty, and it looked like the filing cabinets were hidden behind the false oak fronts that lined two walls, or simply didn’t exist at all. The art on Sekula’s walls was also a lot less disturbing than the paintings in the reception area: there was a large Picasso print of a faun playing a lute, signed no less, and a big canvas that resembled a cave drawing of horses rendered in layered oils, the horses literally carved into the paint: the past re-created in the present. It too was signed by the artist, Alison Rieder. Sekula saw me looking at it.

“Do you collect?” he said.

I wondered if he was being funny, but he seemed serious. Sekula must have paid his investigators way above the going rate.

“I don’t know enough about it to collect,” I said.

“But you have art on your walls?”

I frowned. I wasn’t sure where this was going.

“Some, I guess.”

“Good,” he said. “A man should appreciate beauty, in all its forms.”

He inclined his chin toward the office door, behind which lay the increasingly less enticing form of his secretary, and grinned. I was pretty certain that if he did that in front of the lady in question, she’d cut off his head and stick it on a railing in Central Park.

Sekula offered me a drink from a cabinet against the wall, or coffee if I preferred. I told him I was fine as I was. He took his seat at his desk, steepled his fingers, and looked grave.

“You’re unhurt after the incident?” he said. “Apart from-”

He touched his fingers to his left cheek. I had some cuts on my face from the splinters, and there was blood in my left eye.

“You should see the other guy,” I said.

Sekula tried to figure out if I was joking. I didn’t tell him that the image of Garcia slumped against the wall was still fresh in my mind, his blood soaking the dusty, paint-spattered sheets, his lips moving in prayer to whatever deity permitted him to collude in the killing of women yet still offered hope and succor to those who prayed to it. I didn’t tell him of the metallic smell of the dying man’s blood, which had infected what little food I had consumed throughout the day. I didn’t tell him of the stench that rose from him as he died, or the way his eyes glazed over with his last breath.

And I did not mention the sound of that final breath, or the manner in which it was released from him: a long, slow exhalation, both reluctant and relieved. It had always seemed somehow apt that words connected with freedom and escape should be used to describe the moment when dullness replaced brightness, and life became death. To be close to another human being at that instant was enough to convince one, however briefly, that something beyond understanding passed from the body with that final sigh, that some essence began its journey from this world to another.

“I can’t imagine what it must be like to kill a man,” said Sekula, as though all that I had just considered had been revealed to him through my eyes.

“Why would you even want to imagine it?” I said.

He seemed to give the question some thought.

“I suppose there have been times when I’ve wanted to kill someone,” he said. “It was a fleeting thing, but it was there. I thought, though, that I could never live with the consequences; not just the legal consequences, but the moral and psychological ones. Then again, I have never been placed in the situation where I was seriously forced to consider taking the life of another. Perhaps, under such circumstances, it would be within my capabilities to kill.”