"Look, you know what you've got on this new case," Nicole said. "Maybe there's no connection. But do me a favor, okay? Don't let this drop. I mean, maybe you can still find something in Kansas City. Or you can track down this girl in Chicago again."

"Yeah, I spend a lot of time in heavy metal chat rooms," Abel said. "I'll fit right in."

"These fans are die-hard. If she was into Aerosmith in 1997, she's still into them now."

"So how did you find this girl six years ago?"

"I talked to my shrink," Nicole said.

Abel stared at her. "What?"

"You know Tony Wells, don't you? He's the ultimate Aerosmith fan. He gave me a bunch of Web sites. That was how I found this girl."

"You were seeing Tony," Abel repeated.

"Yeah, so? I was messed up. You know that."

It was probably nothing. Abel knew that. Nothing at all. Tony Wells saw half the detectives on the force. That was his job.

Except he knew it was everything. For a man who didn't trust anything he couldn't see, touch, and smell, Abel suddenly found himself taking a leap of faith. Seeing the big picture. He stared at Nicole and felt a well of regret so deep that he could drop into the hole for a mile and never splash into the cold water.

"Did Tony know why you wanted the information?" he asked her.

"Not at first. I told him later, when I found the lead about Teena."

"What exactly did you tell him?"

Nicole studied his furrowed face, and her eyes grew curious and hard. "Just what I told you, that I thought I had made a break in the Enger Park case. He became a consultant for us on that case, you know. He did the profile."

"Yeah," Abel said. "I remember."

"Lieutenant, you better see this," Guppo called.

Stride popped the top on a red can of Coke, which opened with a fizzy hiss. "I'm coming."

They were in the basement of City Hall at seven o'clock at night. Half the overhead fluorescent lights were dark. Guppo was in a tiny cubicle with walls that looked like gray burlap, with three computers glowing in front of him. One was a standard city-issue unit belonging to the Detective Bureau; the other two were computers taken from Eric's home and office.

Stride waited in the doorway of the cube, looking down at Guppo, who overflowed out of a small rolling chair. He didn't get any closer. Guppo was munching guacamole chips and salsa, which for him constituted a lethal weapon.

"You got something?" Stride asked.

"Oh, yeah."

Stride rubbed his eyes and watched Guppo's fat fingers tap the keyboard on the high-end laptop they had taken from Eric's company headquarters. The musty smell of the basement was in his nose. He felt strangely at home among the evening shadows.

"I was looking for 'The Lady in Me,' " Guppo said. "That was pretty much a dead end. She wiped her blog clean, and I couldn't find any cached pages that told us a thing. But the tattoo clued me in, and I went back over the sites that Eric had been visiting, looking for the TLIM acronym."

"And?"

"Voy-la," Guppo said. He clicked on a blog entry and maximized the window on the screen.

"Is this Helen's site?" Stride asked.

Guppo shook his head and crunched a handful of chips in his mouth. "It's a recovery site for Midwest rape victims," he said, spitting out mushy emerald crumbs as he talked. "You need a password to get in."

"So how did you access it?"

"I found Eric's password," Guppo said.

"How did Eric get in?"

"Looks like he joined. Family members of victims can be part of the community. His handle was Swimmer. Not tough to figure out."

"So what did you find?"

"A thread from about eighteen months ago. A college student was date raped at the University of Minnesota, and she talked about it online. Then a woman chimed in with a response and told her own story from the early 1990s."

"TLIM?"

Guppo nodded. "Right. Helen Danning."

"What did she say?" Stride asked.

"See for yourself."

Stride leaned in next to Guppo and smelled onions and peppers on the detective's warm breath. He read the blog posting on the screen:

Same date rape thing happened to me at the U in the early '90s. I went out with a grad student, and I had way too much to drink. It didn't seem like a lot at the time, and it wasn't until much, much later that I realized he probably put something in my drink. Girls, you HAVE to watch out for that kind of crap. There are PREDATORS out there. This guy was going to KILL ME, but thank God, a security guard found us in the park. The police told me it was my fault (!!!!) because of the alcohol. They never even charged this animal. TLIM.

"The time line fits," Stride said, "but there's no way that was enough for Eric to make a connection."

"There's more," Guppo went on. "This is just the beginning of the thread. Helen talks about dropping out, how she bounced around in dead-end jobs. She never got over it. Then the other girl asks her about counseling. Check this out."

He clicked through several more entries and leaned back for Stride to see.

Counseling? Yeah, right. The real kicker is that the bastard who did this to me is now in the business of counseling rape victims! He's some shrink up in Duluth! TLIM.

"Damn it to hell," Stride murmured. "Abel was right about Tony. All this time, he's been advising us about sexual pathology."

"Yeah, he's an expert," Guppo said sourly.

"Can we prove that Eric ever saw this?"

"Oh, he saw it," Guppo said. He clicked on a new posting.

TLIM. I think this guy may still be at it. I think he raped my wife. What's his name? Swimmer.

"What was Helen's reply?" Stride asked.

Guppo shook his head. "There was no reply. TLIM didn't post anything else."

"So Eric went to find her," Stride said.

At which point, he knew, all the dominoes began to fall.

Tony hadn't changed.

Maggie hadn't seen him in almost two months, but his routines were always the same, no matter how much time passed. He was always in the leather armchair when she arrived, with his head down in his notes, his double chin bulging like a blowfish under his beard. He always had his black mug of coffee in one hand and a silver Cross pen in the other, which he rubbed nervously between his fingers. His eyes brooded like a sleepy dog's stare, and his trimmed eyebrows were the only part of his face that ever moved. He was so predictably bland that he had no personality of his own. He was a watcher. A mask.

Except for Aerosmith.

That was the only clue she ever had as to who Tony was. He was always playing heavy metal when she arrived, and they usually spent the first few minutes of their hour together talking about music and bands. Sometimes Mötley Crüe. Sometimes Guns N' Roses. Mostly Aerosmith. She knew it was a way to relax her enough to share the wolves that were in her brain. Today, he was playing their last big single, "Jaded," and something about the song felt nostalgic to her, as if Tony were taking a rare walk down memory lane. It was about yesterday's child. Things that were lost and not coming back.

He clicked the song off as she sat down on the sofa, and the silence felt loud. It was night, and the wall of glass overlooking the wilderness behind him was a dark mirror. The office looked like the end of the world, and where the carpet ended at the windows, you could step off and fall into the sucking gravity of a black hole.

Maggie squirmed to get comfortable. Her feet dangled above the floor, making her feel like a teenager. Tony didn't look up. He never looked up until she spoke. He just sat there, sipping his coffee, sometimes stirring it up in his mug as if there might be grounds resting on the bottom that could float around and flavor it.

"Long time," Maggie said.