CLAIRE WAS SITTING UP IN BED when I walked through the door of her hospital room. She stretched out her arms, and I hugged her until she said, "Take it easy, sugar. I've got a hole in my chest, remember?"

I pulled back, kissed her on both cheeks, and sat down beside her.

"What's the latest from your doctor?"

"He said I'm a big, strong girl…" And then Claire started coughing. She held up the hand that wasn't covering her mouth, managing to finally say, "It hurts only when I cough."

"You're a big, strong girl and… what?" I pressed her.

"And I'm going to be fine. Getting out of this joint Wednesday. Then some time at home in bed. After that I should be good to go."

"Thank God."

"I've been thanking God since that asshole shot me, whenever that was. You lose track of time when you don't have an office job."

"It happened two weeks ago, Butterfly. Two weeks and two days."

Claire pushed a box of chocolates toward me, and I took the first one my hand fell on.

"You been sleeping in the trunk of your car?" she asked me. "Or did you trade Joe in for an eighteen-year-old boyfriend?"

I poured water for both of us, put a straw in Claire's glass, handed it to her, said, "I didn't trade him in. I just kinda let him go."

Claire's eyebrows shot up. "No, you didn't."

I explained what happened, aching as I talked. Claire watched me warily but kindly. She asked a few questions but mostly let me spill.

I sipped some water. Then I cleared my throat and told Claire about my new rank with the SFPD.

Shock registered in her eyes. Again. "You got yourself bumped down to the street and you told Joe to hit the bricks – at the same time? I'm worried about you, Lindsay. Are you sleeping? Taking vitamins? Eating right?"

No. No. No.

I threw myself back into the armchair as a nurse came in, bearing a tray with Claire's medication and dinner.

"Here you go, Dr. Washburn. Down the hatch."

Claire slugged down the pills, pushed her tray away once the nurse had gone. "Slop du jour," she said.

Had I eaten today? I didn't think so. I appropriated Claire's meal, mashing the overcooked peas and meatloaf together on the fork, getting to the ice-cream course before telling her that we had identified Paola Ricci's body.

"The kidnappers shot the nanny within a minute of taking her and the child. Couldn't get rid of her fast enough. But that's all I've got, Butterfly. We don't know who did it, why, or where they've taken Madison."

"Why haven't those shits called the parents?"

"That's the million-dollar question. Way too long without a ransom request. I don't think they want the Tylers' money."

"Damn."

"Yeah." I dropped the plastic spoon onto the tray and leaned back in the chair again, staring out at nothing.

"Lindsay?"

"I've been thinking that they'd shot Paola because she'd witnessed Madison's kidnapping."

"Makes sense."

"But if Madison witnessed Paola's murder… they're not going to let the child live after that."

CINDY THOMAS LEFT her Blakely Arms apartment, crossed the street at the corner, and began her five-block walk to her office at the Chronicle.

Two floors above Cindy's apartment, facing the back of the building, a man named Garry Tenning was having a bad morning. Tenning gripped the edges of the desk in his workroom and tried to stifle his anger. Down in the courtyard, five floors below, a dog was barking incessantly, each shrill note stabbing Tenning's eardrums like a skewer.

He knew the dog.

It was Barnaby, a rat terrier who belonged to Margery Glynn, a lumpen, dishwater-blond single mother of god-awful Baby Oliver, all of them living on the ground floor, usurping the back courtyard as if it were theirs.

Again, Tenning pressed on his special Mack's earplugs, soft wax that conformed exactly to the shape of his ear holes. And still he could hear Barnaby yappa-yappa-yipping through his Mack's.

Tenning rubbed the flat of his hand across the front of his T-shirt as the dog's brainless yapping ripped the fabric of his repose. The tingling was starting now in his lips and fingers, and his heart was palpitating.

Goddamn it.

Was a little quiet too much to ask?

On the computer screen in front of him, neat rows of type marched down the screen – chapter six of his book, The Accounting: A Statistical Compendium of the Twentieth Century.

The book was more than a conceit or a pet project. The Accounting was his raison d'être and his legacy. He even cherished the rejection letters from publishers turning down his book proposal. He lovingly logged these rejections into a ledger, filing the originals in a folder inside his lockbox.

He'd get his laugh when The Accounting was published, when it became a critical reference work for scholars all over the world – and for generations to come.

Nobody would be able to take that away from him.

As Tenning willed Barnaby to shut the hell up, he ran his eyes down the line of numbers – the fatal lightning strikes since 1900, the inches of snowfall in Vermont, the verified sightings of cows sucked into the air by tornadoes – when a garbage truck began its halting clamor up the block.

He thought his fricking skull would crack open.

He wasn't crazy, either.

He was having a perfectly reasoned response to a horrific assault on the senses. He clapped his hands over his ears, but the squeals, screeches, galvanized shimmies, came through – and they set off Oliver!

The goddamned baby.

How many times had he been interrupted by that baby?

How many times had his thoughts been derailed by that shitty-ass rat dog?

The pressure in Tenning's chest and head was building. If he didn't do something, he would explode.

Garry Tenning had had it.

EVEN WITH QUIVERING FINGERS, Tenning quickly tied the laces of his bald-treaded Adidas, stepped out into the hallway, and locked the apartment door behind him, pocketing his big bunch of keys.

He used the fire stairs to get down to the basement level – he never took the elevator.

He passed the laundry room and entered the boiler room, where the senior furnace mumbled in its pipes and the hateful new furnace roared with freshly minted enthusiasm.

An eighteen-inch length of pipe with a rusted ball joint affixed to one end leaned against the concrete-block wall. Tenning hefted it, socked the ball joint into the cupped palm of his hand.

He turned right, walking down the incline toward the blinking light of the EXIT sign, murderous ideas igniting in his mind like a chain of firecrackers.

The lock bar on the exit door opened against his forearm. He stood for a minute in the sunshine, getting his bearings. Then he turned the brick corner of the building, heading toward the patio of keystones and the planters that were added since the building's conversion.

Seeing Tenning coming toward him, Barnaby started yapping. He lunged at the leash connecting his collar to the chain-link fence.

Beside him was the baby carriage, where Oliver Glynn fretted in the dappled shade. He was howling, too.

Tenning felt a flame of hope rush through him.

Two birds with one stone.

Clutching the valve-capped pipe, he edged along the side of the building toward the shrieks and howls of the Nasty Little Animals.

Just then, Margery Glynn, her bland blond hair knotted up and stabbed into place with a pencil, stepped out of her apartment. She bent low, displaying several square feet of milky-white thigh, and lifted Oliver out of his carriage.