“Parachute—” Miriam’s eyes widened. “I’ll need to go check if they’ve invented them. I know Leonardo drew one, but it wouldn’t have been stable. Okay!” She emptied the coffeepot into her and Paulette’s mugs, stirred in some sugar. “That’s great. How long until the cable guy is done?”

“Oh, he’s already gone,” Paulette said. “I get to plug the box in myself, don’t you know?”

“Excellent.” Miriam picked up her mug. “Then I can check my voice mail in peace.”

She wandered into the front office as Brill was leaving the shower, wrapped in towels and steaming slightly. A new socket clung rawly to the wall just under the window. Miriam dropped heavily into the chair behind the desk, noticing the aches of sleeping on a hard surface for the first time. She picked up her phone and punched in her code. Paulette intercepted Brill, asking her something as she led her into the large back office they’d begun converting into a living room.

“You have two messages,” said the phone.

“Yeah, yeah.” Miriam punched a couple more buttons.

“First message, received yesterday at eleven-forty two: Miriam? Oh, Sky Father! Listen, are you alright? Phone me, please.” It was Roland, and he didn’t sound happy. Anguish rose in her chest. Roland—she didn’t let the thought reach her tongue. “It’s urgent,” he added, before the click of the call ending.

“Second message, received yesterday at nine-twelve: Miriam, dear? It’s me.” Iris, she realized. There was a pause. “I know I haven’t been entirely candid with you, and I want you to know that I bitterly regret it.” Another, much longer pause and the sound of labored breathing. Miriam clutched the phone to her ear like a drowning woman. “I’ve … something unexpected has come up. I’ve got to go on a long journey. Miriam, I want you to understand that I am going to be alright. I know exactly what I’m doing, and it’s something I should have done years ago. But it’s not fair to burden you with it. I’ll try to call you or leave messages, but you are not to come around or try to follow me. I love you.” Click.

“Shit!” Miriam threw the mobile phone across the room in a combination of blind rage and panic. She burst out of her chair and ran for the back room, grabbed her jacket and was halfway into her shoes by the time Paulette stuck a curious head out of the day room door. “What’s going on?”

“Something’s happened to Iris. I’m going to check on her.”

“You can’t!” Paulette stood up, alarmed.

“Watch me,” Miriam warned.

“But it’s under—”

“Fuck the surveillance!” She fumbled in her bag for the revolver. “If the Clan has decided to go after my mother I am going to kill someone.”

“Miriam—” it was Brill—“Paulie and I can’t get away the way you can.”

“So you’d better be discreet about the murder business,” said Paulette. She fixed Miriam with a worried stare. “Can you wait two minutes? I’ll drive.”

“I—yes.” Miriam forced herself to unclench her fists and take deep, steady breaths.

“Good. Because if it is the Clan, rushing in is exactly what they’ll expect you to do. And if it isn’t, if it’s the other guys, that’s what they’ll want you to do, too.” She swallowed. “Bombs and all. Which is why I’m going with you. Got it?”

“I—” Miriam forced herself to think. “Okay.” She stood up. “Let’s go.”

They went.

Paulette cruised down Iris’s residential street twice, leaving a good five-minute interval before turning the rental car into the parking space at the side of her house. “Nothing obvious,” she murmured. “You see anything, kid?”

“Nothing,” said Miriam.

Brill shook her head. “Autos all look alike to me,” she admitted.

“Great … Miriam, if you want to take the front door, I’m going to sit here with the engine running until you give the all-clear. Brill—”

“I’ll be good.” She clutched a borrowed handbag to her chest, right hand buried in it, looking like a furtive sorority girl about to drop an unexpected present on a friend.

Miriam bailed out of the car and walked swiftly to Iris’s front door, noticing nothing wrong. There was no damage around the lock, no broken windows, nothing at all out of the usual for the area. No lurking Dodge vans, either, when she glanced over her shoulder as she slipped the key into the front door and turned it left-handed, her other hand full.

The door bounced open and Miriam ducked inside rapidly, with Brill right behind her. The house was empty and cold—not freezing with the chill of a dead furnace, but as if the thermostat had been turned down. Miriam’s feet scuffed on the carpet as she rapidly scanned each ground floor room through their open doors, finishing in Iris’s living room—

No wheelchair. The side table neatly folded and put away. Dead flowers on the mantlepiece.

Back in the hall Miriam held up a finger, then dashed up the stairs, kicking open door after door—the master bedroom, spare bedroom, box room, and bathroom.

“Nothing,” she snarled, panting. In the spare bedroom she pulled down the hatch into the attic, yanked the ladder down-but there was no way Iris could have gotten up there under her own power. She scrambled up the ladder all the same, casting about desperately in the dusty twilight. “She’s not here.”

Down in the ground floor hallway she caught up with Paulette, looking grave. “Brill said Iris is gone?”

Miriam nodded, unable to speak. It felt like an act of desecration, too monstrous to talk about. She leaned against the side of the staircase, taking shallow breaths. “I’ve lost her.” She shut her eyes.

“Over here!” It was Brill, in the kitchen.

“What is it—”

They found Brill inspecting a patch of floor, just inside the back door. “Look,” she said, pointing.

The floor was wooden, varnished and worn smooth in places. The stains, however, were new. Something dark had spilled across the back doorstep. Someone had mopped it up but they hadn’t done a very good job, and the stain had worked into the grain of the wood.

“Outside. Check the garbage.” Miriam fumbled with the lock then got the door open. “Come on!” She threw herself at the Dumpsters in the backyard, terrified of what she might find in them. The bins were huge, shared with the houses to either side, and probably not emptied since the last snowfall. The snow was almost a foot deep on top of the nearest Dumpster. It took her half a minute to clear enough away to lift the lid and look inside.

A dead man stared back at her, his face blue and his eyes frozen in an expression of surprise. She dropped the lid.

“What is it?” asked Paulette.

“Not Iris.” Miriam leaned against the wall, taking deep breaths, her head spinning. Who can he be? “Check. The other bins.”

“Other bins, okay.” Paulette gingerly lifted the lids, one by one—but none of them contained anything worse than a pile of full garbage bags which, when torn, proved to contain kitchen refuse. “She’s not here, Miriam.”

“Oh thank god.”

“What now?” asked Paulie, head cocked as if listening for the sound of sirens.

“I take another look while you and Brill keep an eye open for strangers.” Steeling herself, Miriam lifted the lid on the bin’s gruesome contents. “Hmm.” She reached out and touched her hand to an icy cold cheek. “He’s been dead for at least twelve hours, more likely over twenty-four.” A mass of icy black stuff in front of the body proved to be Iris’s dish towels, bulked up by more frozen blood than Miriam could have imagined. She gingerly shoved them aside, until she saw where the blood had come from. “There’s massive trauma to the upper thorax, about six inches below the neck. Jesus, it looks like a shotgun wound. Saw a couple in the ER, way back when. Um … sawed-off, by the size of the entry wound, either that or he was shot from more than twenty yards away, which would have had to happen outdoors, meaning witnesses. His chest is really torn up, he’d have died instantly.” She dropped the wadding back in front of the body. He was, she noted distantly, wearing black overalls and a black ski mask pulled up over his scalp like a cap. Clean-shaven, about twenty years old, of military appearance. Like a cop or a soldier—or a Clan enforcer.