Rossetti blew out another long stream of smoke. "Don't get me wrong. I know you can take care of yourself, Franko. But you haven't been up against anything like Darwin Bishop. If you think you have, that's just another advantage he's got over you."

I took a deep breath. "I'll keep looking over my shoulder," I said. After a year away from forensics, just forty-eight hours back in it had put me in harm's way again. But I wasn't about to raise any white flag. "If this kid isn't guilty, he's not going away for life," I said. "I'm not going to let it happen."

"This one's important to you," Rossetti said. "Personally."

"Yes," I said.

"You want a hint where to look for the real Darwin Bishop?" Rossetti asked.

"Shoot."

" Russia. It's the Wild West over there. If this guy successfully adopted a kid out of that country, then he's connected to some very tough people."

"He built and sold two companies in Russia," I said.

"Then he's got loads of dirty laundry hanging out over there. I could put in a call to my buddy Viktor Golov. He runs an oil refinery outside St. Petersburg. He's got his finger on the pulse of business across Russia."

"I'd owe you one." I finished my coffee and put down a ten to cover Rossetti's as well. "I'll take care of us this time," I said. I turned to leave.

Rossetti caught my arm. "Thanks for the round," he said. "Just promise you'll take care of yourself." His face lost every trace of humor. "I mean it. Be careful."

I nodded. "I'll talk to you soon," I said. "Call me with anything from your friend Viktor."

I drove back over the Meridian Street bridge and took the left onto Spruce. I was planning to turn onto Winnisimmet and head home, but I knew home just meant more tossing and turning-at least I convinced myself that it did. I kept going straight, through the Chelsea Produce Market, headed for the Sir Galahad Motel and Lounge.

The Sir Galahad is a down-and-out strip club with cinder-block walls, surrounded by wholesale fruit and vegetable warehouses. The girls don't wear fancy costumes. They don't even bother to lie about being college students. And no one pretends it's a gentleman's club.

I had gone to the Sir Galahad religiously when forensics had been my full-time occupation. I had needed to stay close to the naked truth about human beings, to keep resonating with lust and envy and hatred and all the other emotions that can drive violence.

I had also gone there to drink. And that fact kept me behind the wheel of my F-150 after I parked alongside the building. I sat and watched the pink neon dancer on the Sir Galahad sign as she flickered in the night. And I remembered how living so close to the raw edge of humanity had made me feel the need to take the edge off with scotch or cocaine or, more often, a combination of the two. I remembered how it was a sucker's strategy-letting the interest on my pain compound daily.

I can't be certain what made me get out of the truck. Maybe it was having seen Billy Bishop's scarred back, or having tried to imagine what it might be like for an infant to struggle for air and find none, or having revisited feelings I had once felt for Kathy. Or maybe it wasn't any of those things. Maybe I was just having my old trouble walking a straight line through a world with emotional minefields buried haphazardly all the way to the horizon.

Whatever the reason, I walked inside the Sir Galahad. Music blared from speakers that would have sufficed for a rock concert. Red and blue and purple lights doused the walls and ceiling with color. I took a seat up front, at the runway. A dancer with blond hair who might have been nineteen had stripped down to white panties. She hitched her thumbs inside the waistband, pulling them down a few inches, teasing the twenty or so truckers and bikers scattered around the room. They nodded and winked and smiled at her. Then she pulled them back up, all the way into her crotch. The men burst into applause.

"What are you drinking?" a waitress about fifty-five, wearing skin-tight jeans and a tube top over a stick figure, asked me.

I thought about ordering a Diet Coke-for about one second. "Scotch," I said. "Rocks."

"You got it," she said. She turned around and headed back to the bar.

The dancer peeled her panties to her ankles. She stepped out of them and stepped over to the man two seats from me, who had folded five one-dollar bills over the brass rail. She bent over backwards, spreading her legs and holding herself on all fours, like a crab, opening herself up to him.

My scotch arrived. I paid for it, held the amber liquid up to the colored lights. It glowed rust blue, rust red, rust purple. A magic rainbow of calm. I brought the glass to my lips, smelling the aroma of my father, tasting his warm, alcoholic breath. Then, tilting my head back, I glanced at the dancer and noticed that the lowest part of her abdomen was scarred from a Cesarean delivery.

Part of me truly wanted to be numb, wanted to scramble the chemical messengers in my brain, to blur the images of cruelty floating through it. Because they were too sharp. Sharp enough to do serious damage. But another part of me had started to wonder where the dancer's child might be at that moment. With a grandfather? A boyfriend? Home alone? Dead? I stared at her as she grabbed her knees to spread herself wider, head turned to the side, eyes closed.

I put the drink down without swallowing a drop.

"Ain't she a fucking gem?" the man with the five-dollar bills called over to me. He was about forty, built like a weight lifter, wearing a New England Patriots football jersey and a black nylon skullcap.

"She's all of that," I said.

"What an ass on her," he said.

"What an ass."

"You're a spot welder, aren't you?" he asked.

In a certain way, I guessed I was, but I didn't think he was floating an elegant metaphor for piecing people back together. "No," I said. "Why do you ask?"

"You didn't do no work on the new Chelsea High School? Welding?"

"No," I said. "I'm a psychiatrist."

He burst out laughing. "Right on," he said. "Me, too." He reached into his pocket and pulled out more five-dollar bills for the rail.

I held my glass in both hands and looked into its depths, still smelling my father, hearing the clink of his belt buckle coming loose. I thought about the countless times I had wanted to kill him. And I wondered what had stopped me. Why couldn't I bring myself to do him in? What makes a person finally cross the line? Was that the question that had drawn me to forensics in the first place? Was it the question-and not North Anderson 's plea-that had brought me back into the company of murder?

I pushed the scotch away, caught the eye of the waitress, and ordered a coffee and a Diet Coke. It was going to be a long night.

I finally climbed into bed just after 3:00 a.m. I could sense the expanse of the king-sized mattress all around me. I felt dangerously alone.

Of course, I always had been alone. Isolated. At risk. But now the danger felt especially real. Because I couldn't dismiss what Carl Rossetti had told me; Darwin Bishop could be big trouble-bigger than anything I had faced before. A person with enough appetite and aptitude to accumulate a billion dollars can devour many things. I moved to one side of the mattress and dropped my hand to the Browning Baby semiautomatic tucked next to the bed frame. And with a fistful of cold steel as my pacifier, I fell into a restless slumber.

It didn't last. Not two hours later, the phone woke me. I fumbled for the receiver, dropped it once, then said, "Clevenger."

"Frank. It's North."

I squinted at my bedside clock. "It's four-fifty."

"I know that," he said. "I wouldn't call if it wasn't an emergency."