“Have you seen Tager lately?”

“Our paths don’t cross so much anymore, but I asked around. Looks like he’s gone to ground. It could be that he’s running scared. Maybe it got back to him that the girl had connections, and that certain people were going to take a dim view of his involvement once she didn’t reappear.”

Buncombe gave me directions to Tager’s office. He even offered to come along with me, but I declined. I didn’t believe that I’d need help making Eddie Tager talk. Right then, words were the only currency he had with which to buy his life.

Eddie Tager was so low-rent that he lived and worked out of the back of a fire-damaged bodega that had closed for renovations sometime during Watergate and never reopened. I found the place without too much trouble, but there was no answer when I tried the bell. I went around back and tried hammering on the rear door. It came ajar slightly under the impact of my fist.

“Hello?” I said.

I opened the door wider and stepped inside. I was in the kitchen area of a small apartment. A counter separated it from a living room furnished with brown carpet, a brown couch, and a brown TV. Even the wallpaper was light brown. There were newspapers and magazines scattered around. The most recent was dated two days earlier. Straight ahead was a hallway with an open door leading into the main office. To the right was a bedroom, and beside that a small bathroom with mold growing on the shower curtain. I checked each room before ending up in the office. It wasn’t exactly spotless, but there was at least an attempt at order. I went through the recent files but could find nothing relating to Alice. I sat down in Tager’s chair and searched the drawers of his desk, but nothing struck me as important. I found a box containing business cards in the top drawer, but none of the names was familiar to me.

There was a small pile of mail behind the door. It was all junk and bills, including one from Tager’s cell phone company. I opened it and flipped through the pages until I came to the date of Alice’s arrest. Like most bondsmen, Tager used his cell phone a lot in the course of his business. On that day alone he had made thirty or forty calls, the frequency of them increasing as the night drew on. I placed the bill back in its envelope and was about to put it in my jacket pocket so that I could take a closer look at it later when I saw a dark smear on the paper. I looked at my fingers and saw blood. I wiped them on the envelope, then tried to find the source, retracing my steps until I was back at Tager’s chair.

The blood was congealing on the underside and right-hand corner of the desk. There wasn’t a lot of it, but when I shined my flash-light on it I thought I could see some hairs mixed in, and there were stains on the carpet. The desk was big and heavy, but when I checked the area around the legs I saw marks on the fabric where the desk had shifted slightly. If the blood was Tager’s, then someone had hit the bondsman’s head pretty hard against the corner of the desk, probably when he was already sprawled on the floor.

I went back to the kitchen and soaked my handkerchief under the faucet, then cleaned down every surface that I had touched. When I was done, my handkerchief was covered in pink stains. I left the same way that I had entered, once I was certain that there was nobody around. I didn’t make any calls about the blood. If I did, I’d have to explain what I was doing there, and I’d need my own bail bondsman. I didn’t think Tager was coming back, though. Someone had asked him to post bail for Alice, which meant that he was complicit in the sequence of events that had led to her death. Garcia had not been acting alone, and now it looked like his confederates were taking care of the weak links in the chain. I patted the cell phone bill in my pocket. Somewhere in that list of numbers was, I hoped, another link that they might have overlooked.

It was now late, and dark. I decided that there was nothing more that I could do until the morning, when I would run the numbers from Tager’s cell phone bill. I went back to my hotel room and called Rachel. Her mother answered the phone and told me that Rachel was already in bed. Sam had slept badly the night before and spent most of the day crying until, exhausted at last, she had succumbed to rest. Rachel had fallen asleep immediately after. I told Joan not to disturb her but to let her know that I’d called.

“She’s worried about you,” said Joan.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Be sure to tell her that.”

I promised that I’d try to return to Maine by late the next day, then hung up the phone and ate at the Thai place beside the hotel, just because it was something to do other than sitting alone in my room with the fear that my relationship was disintegrating in my hands. I stuck to the vegetarian dishes. After my visit to Tager’s office, the coppery taste of spilled blood had returned to my mouth with a vengeance.

Charles Neddo sat in his office chair, his desk scattered with illustrations, all of them taken from books written after 1870, and most depicting variations on the Black Angel. He had never quite understood why there were no depictions prior to that date. No, that wasn’t true. Rather, the drawings and paintings became more uniform in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, less speculative and with a certain commonality to their lines, especially those originating with Bohemian artists. Depictions from earlier centuries were far more diverse, so that without a written indication of the source, imagined or otherwise, it would be impossible to tell that all were renderings of the same subject.

There was music playing in the background, a collection of Satie piano pieces. Neddo liked their air of melancholy. He removed his glasses, leaned away from his desk, and stretched. The wrinkled cuffs of his shirt rolled back on his thin arms, exposing a small mass of scar tissue above his left wrist, as though a mark of some kind had been inexpertly obscured in the relatively recent past. It was stinging slightly, and Neddo touched his left hand gently to the scarring, the tips of his fingers following the lines of the grapnel once branded upon his skin. One could turn away, he thought, and hide oneself among worthless antiques, but the old obsessions lingered. Otherwise, why would he have surrounded himself with bones?

He returned to the drawings, aware of a rising sense of excitement and anticipation. The private detective’s visit had revealed a great deal to him, and earlier that evening he had received another unexpected call. The two monks had been nervous and impatient, and Neddo understood that their presence in the city was a sign that events were moving quickly, and that a resolution of sorts would soon be achieved. Neddo told them all that he knew, then received absolution from the older one for his sins.

Satie came to an end, and the room fell into silence as Neddo put his papers away. He believed that he knew what Garcia had been creating and why it was being built. They were close, and now, as never before, Neddo was aware of the conflict raging within himself. It had taken him many years to break free of their influence, but like an alcoholic he feared that he would never really be free of the urge to fall. He touched his left hand to the cross around his neck, and felt the scar on his wrist begin to burn.

Rachel was deep in sleep when her mother woke her. She was startled and tried to say something, but her mother’s fingers pressed themselves to her lips.

“Shhh,” whispered Joan. “Listen.”

Rachel remained quiet and still. There was no sound for a moment, then she heard the scuffling noises coming from the roof of the house.

“There’s someone up there,” said Joan.

Rachel nodded, still listening. There was something odd about the sounds. They were not quite footsteps. Instead, it seemed to her that whoever was up there was crawling across the slates, and crawling quickly. She was reminded, unpleasantly, of the movements of a lizard. The noise came again, but this time it was echoed by a vibration against the wall behind her head. The bedroom occupied the entire width of the first floor, so that the bed rested against the wall of the house. A second heavy presence was now ascending the sheer wall toward the roof, and once again it sounded like it was moving on four legs.