“Who are you?” he said. He could barely speak. His voice sounded like the slow sweepings of a yard brush over dusty ground.

“We’ve come to talk about Larry Crane,” said Sekula. Hall tried to raise his head to look, but it hurt him to move.

“I haven’t seen him,” said Hall.

Sekula squatted before the old man. He had a clean, scrubbed face and good teeth. Hall didn’t like him one bit.

“What are you, police?” said Hall. “If you’re cops, show me some ID.”

“Why would you think we are police, Mr. Hall? Is there something you’d like to share with us? Have you been a bad boy?”

Hall dry-retched, the memory of Larry Crane’s death smell coming back to him.

“Mr. Hall, we’re in kind of a hurry,” said Sekula. “I think you know what we’ve come for.”

Dumb, greedy Larry Crane. Even in death he had found a way to ruin Mark Hall.

“It’s gone,” said Hall. “He took it with him.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“To hell with you. Get out of my house.”

Sekula rose and nodded to Miss Zahn. This time, he stayed in the room, just to make sure that she understood the urgency of the situation. It didn’t take long. The old man started talking as soon as the needle approached his eye, but Miss Zahn inserted it anyway, just to be sure that he wasn’t lying. By that time, Sekula had looked away. The stink of vomit was already getting to him.

When she was done, they took Hall, now blind in his left eye, and bundled him into the car, then drove him to where he had dumped the body of Larry Crane in a muddy hollow beside a filthy swamp. The box was cradled against Crane’s chest, where Hall had placed it before leaving his old war buddy to rot. After all, he figured that if Crane wanted it so badly, he should take it with him wherever he was going.

Carefully, Sekula removed the box from the old man’s grasp, and opened it. The fragment was inside, and undamaged. The box had been well designed, capable of protecting its contents from water, from snow, from anything that might damage the information it held.

“It’s intact,” said Sekula to the woman. “We’re so close now.”

Mark Hall, the Auto King, sat on the dirt in his old man pants, his left hand cupped to his gouged eye. When Miss Zahn took him by the hand and led him to the water, he did not struggle, not even when she forced him to kneel and held his head beneath the surface until he drowned. When he grew still, they dragged him to the hollow and laid him beside his former comrade, uniting the two old men in death as they had been united, however unwillingly, in life.

Walter Cole called me as I was driving from the city.

“I’ve got more news,” he said. “The ME has confirmed the identity of the remains found in Garcia’s apartment. It’s Alice. Toxicology tests also revealed the presence of DMT, dimethyltryptamine, in a small section of tissue that was found still adhering to the base of her skull.”

“I’ve never heard of it. What does it do?”

“Apparently it’s a hallucinogenic drug, but it has very particular symptoms. It causes feelings of paranoia and makes users hallucinate alien intelligences, or monsters. Sometimes it makes them think that they’re traveling through time, or onto other planes of existence. Want to hear something else that’s interesting? They found traces of DMT in Garcia’s body too. The ME thinks it might have been administered through the food in his kitchen, but they’re still running tests.”

It was possible that Alice had been given the drug in order to make her more cooperative, allowing her captors to masquerade as her saviors once the effects of the drug began to wear off. But Garcia had been fed DMT too, perhaps as a means of keeping him under some form of control by ensuring that he remained in a state of near-constant fear. The dosage wouldn’t have to be high: just enough to keep him on edge, so that his paranoia could be manipulated if required.

“I’ve got one more thing for you,” said Walter. “The building in Williamsburg had a basement. The entrance was hidden behind a false wall. It seems we now know what Garcia was doing with the bones…”

It was the NYPD’s Forensic Investigation Division that found the basement. They had taken their time, going through the building floor by floor, working from the top down, checking the plans for the building against what they saw around them, noting what was recent and what was old. The cops who broke down the wall found a new steel door in the floor, nearly forty square feet and secured with heavy-duty locks and bolts. It took them an hour to get it open, backed up by the same Emergency Service Unit that had responded on the night Garcia died. When the door was open, the ESU descended a set of temporary wooden stairs into the darkness.

The space beneath was of the same dimensions as the main steel door, and some twelve feet deep. Garcia had been hard at work in the hidden space. Garlands of sharpened bone hung from the corners of the basement, meeting in a cluster of skulls at each corner. The walls had been concreted and inset with pieces of blackened bone to the halfway mark, sections of jawbones, femurs, finger bones and rib jutting out as though discovered in the course of some ongoing archaeological dig. Four towers of candleholders created from marble and bone stood in a square at the center of the room, the candles held in skull-and-bone arrangements similar to those I had discovered in Garcia’s apartment, with four chains of bones linking them, as though sealing off access to some as yet unknown addition to the ossuary. There was also a small alcove two or three feet in height, empty but clearly also awaiting the arrival of another element of display, perhaps the small bone sculpture that now rested in the trunk of my car.

The ME’s office was going to have a difficult task identifying the remains, but I knew where they could start: with a list of dead or missing women from the region of Juarez, Mexico, and the unfortunates who had disappeared from the streets of New York since Garcia’s arrival in the city, Lucius Cope among them.

I drove north. I made good time once I cleared the boroughs, and arrived in Boston shortly before 5 P.M. The House of Stern was situated in a side street almost within the shadow of the Fleet Center. It was an unusual location for such a business, audibly close to a strip of bars that included the local outpost of Hooters. The windows were smoked glass, with the company’s name written in discreet gold lettering across the bottom. To the right was a wood door, painted black, with an ornate gold knocker in the shape of a gaping mouth, and a gold mailbox filigreed with dragons chasing their tails. In a slightly less adult neighborhood, the door of House of Stern would have been a compulsory stop for Halloween trick-or-treaters.

I pressed the doorbell and waited. The door was opened by a young woman with bright red hair and purple nail polish that was chipped at the ends.

“I’m afraid we’re closed,” she said. “We open to the public from ten until four, Monday to Friday.”

“I’m not a customer,” I said. “My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. I’d like to see Claudia Stern.”

“Is she expecting you?”

“No, but I think she’ll want to see me. Perhaps you might show her this.”

I handed over the box in my arms. The young woman looked at it a little dubiously, carefully removing the layers of newspaper so that she could see what was inside. She revealed a section of the bone statue, considered it silently for a moment, then opened the door wider to admit me. She told me to take a seat in a small reception area, then vanished through a half-open green door.

The room in which I sat was relatively unadorned, and a little down-at-the-heels. The carpet was worn and frayed and the wallpaper was wearing thin at the corners, heavily marked by the passage of people and the bumps and scrapes it had received during the movement of awkward objects. Two desks stood to my right, covered in papers and topped by a pair of sleeping computers. To my left were four packing crates from which piles of curly wood shavings poked like un-ruly clown hair. A series of lithographs hung on the wall behind them, depicting scenes of angelic conflict. I walked over to take a closer look at them. They were reminiscent of the work of Gustave Doré, the illustrator of The Divine Comedy, but the lithographs were tinted and appeared to be based on some other work unfamiliar to me.