For the first time in many days, Angel allowed himself a smile, albeit a small one, and very short-lived. Since Martha’s appearance at the house, Louis had barely eaten or slept. Angel would awake in the darkness to find their shared bed empty, the pillows and sheets long cold on his partner’s side. On the first night, when they had brought Martha back to the city and transferred her to her new lodgings, he had padded softly to the bedroom door and watched in silence as Louis sat at a window, staring out over the city, scrutinizing every passing face in the hope that he might find Alice’s among them. Guilt emanated from his pores, so that the room seemed almost to smell of something bitter and old. Angel knew all about Alice. He had accompanied his partner on his searches for her, initially along Eighth Avenue, when they first learned that she had arrived in the city, and later at the Point, when Giuliani’s reforms really started to bite and Vice Enforcement began hitting the streets of Manhattan on a regular basis, NYPD “ghosts” mingling with the crowds below Forty-fourth, and monitoring teams waiting to pounce from unmarked vans. The Point was a little easier in the beginning: out of sight, out of mind, that was the Giuliani mantra. Once the tourists and conventioneers in Manhattan weren’t tripping over too many teenage hookers if they accidentally-or purposely-strayed from Times Square, then everything was better than it was before. Over at Hunts Point, the Ninetieth Precinct only had the manpower to operate a ten-person special operation maybe once a month, usually targeted at the men who patronized and involving just one undercover female officer. True, there were occasional sweeps, but those were relatively infrequent in the beginning until “zero tolerance” began to hit hard, the cops creating a virtual ticker-tape parade of summonses, which almost inevitably led to arrests, since the homeless and drug-addicted who formed the bulk of the city’s street prostitutes could not afford to pay their fines, and that was a ninety-day stint in Rikers right there. The almost continual harassment of the prostitutes by the cops forced the women to “stagger” their beats in order to avoid being seen in the same spot two nights running. It also forced them to frequent increasingly isolated places with the johns, which left them open to rape, abduction, and murder.

It was into this sucking hole that Alice was descending, and their interventions counted for nothing. In fact, Angel could see that the woman sometimes seemed almost to take a strange pleasure in taunting Louis with her immersion in the life, even as it inexorably led to her degradation and, ultimately, to her death. In the end, all Louis could do was make sure that whatever pimp was feeding off her knew the consequences if anything happened to her, and paid her fines to ensure that she didn’t do jail time. Finally, he could no longer bring himself to witness her decay, and it was perhaps unsurprising that she slipped through the net when Free Billy died, and came instead under the control of G-Mack.

And so Angel watched him that first night, not speaking for some time, until at last he said: “You tried.”

“Not hard enough.”

“She may still be out there, somewhere.”

Louis gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.

“No. She’s gone. I can feel it.”

“Listen to-”

“Go back to bed.”

And he did, because there was nothing more that could be said. There was no point in trying to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that people made their own choices, that you couldn’t save someone who didn’t want to be saved, didn’t matter how hard you tried. Louis would not, or could not, believe those things. This was his guilt, and Alice’s path was not entirely of her own choosing. The actions of others had set her upon it, and his were among them.

But there was more that Angel could not have guessed at, small, private moments between Louis and Alice that perhaps only Martha might have understood, for they found an echo in the phone calls and the occasional cards that she herself received. Louis could remember Alice as a child, how she would play at his feet or fall asleep curled up beside him, bathed in the glow of their first TV. She cried when he left home, although she was barely old enough to comprehend what was happening, and in the years that followed, as his visits grew fewer and fewer, she was always the first to greet him. Slowly, she recognized the changes that were coming over him, as the boy who had killed her father, believing him guilty of the murder of his own mother, matured into a man capable of taking the lives of others without exploring questions of innocence or guilt. Alice could not have put a name to these changes, or have precisely explained the nature of Louis’s ongoing metamorphosis, but the coldness that was spreading through him touched something inside of her, and half-formed suspicions and fears about her father’s death were given body and substance. Louis saw what was happening, and determined to put some distance between himself and his family, a decision made easier by the nature of his business and his reluctance to put those whom he loved at risk of reprisal. All of these tensions came to a head on the day that Louis left his childhood home for the last time, when Alice came to him as he sat in the shade of a cottonwood tree, the sun slowly setting behind him, his shadow spreading like dark blood across the short grass. By then, she was approaching her teenage years, although she looked older than she was, and her body was maturing more quickly than the bodies of her peers.

“Momma says you’re leaving today,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“The way she said it, it’s like you ain’t ever coming back.”

“Things change. People change. This ain’t no place for me now.”

She pursed her lips, then raised her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes as she stared into the redness of the sun.

“I seen the way people look at you.”

“What way is that?”

“Like they’s scared of you. Even Momma, she looks like that, sometimes.”

“She’s got no call to be scared of me. You neither.”

“Why are they scared?”

“I don’t know.”

“I heard stories.”

Louis stood and tried to pass her by, but she blocked his way, her hands splayed against his midriff.

“No,” she said. “You tell me. You tell me that the stories ain’t true.”

“I got no time for stories.”

He gripped her wrists and turned her, slipping by her and heading toward the house.

“They say my daddy was a bad man. They say he got what he deserved.”

She was shouting now. He heard her running after him, but he did not look back.

“They say you know what happened to him. Tell me! Tell me!”

And she struck him from behind with such force that he stumbled and fell to his knees. He tried to rise, and she slapped him. He saw that she was weeping.

“Tell me,” she said again, but this time her voice was soft, barely a whisper. “Tell me that it isn’t true.”

But he could not answer her, and he walked away and left them all. Only once, in the years of her descent, did Alice again bring up the subject of her father. It was fourteen months before her disappearance, when Louis still believed that she might yet be saved. She called him from the private clinic in Phoenicia, in the midst of the Catskills, and he drove up to see her that afternoon. He had placed her there after Jackie O called him and told him that Alice was with him, that a john had hurt her badly, and she had nearly overdosed in an effort to dull the pain. She was bruised and bleeding, her eyes slivers of white beneath heavy lids, her mouth agape. Louis took her to Phoenicia the following morning, once she was straight enough to understand what was happening. The beating had shocked her, and she appeared more willing than ever before to consider intervention. She spent six weeks isolated in Phoenicia, then the call came.