"I just thought…"

He didn't finish. He didn't know exactly what he thought or how to put it into words.

"You seem to think that what happened with us all happened so quickly," she said. "And that it can be fixed quickly."

She turned and headed back toward the door.

"And I'm wrong."

She looked back at him.

"Months, Henry, and you know it. Maybe longer. We hadn't been good together in a long, long time."

She went through the door to look for the doctor. Pierce sat on the bed and tried to remember the time they were on the Ferris wheel and everything seemed so perfect in the world.

Blood was everywhere. A trail of it across the beige rug, on the brand-new bed, on two of the walls and all over the telephone. Pierce stood in the doorway of his bedroom and looked at the mess. He could remember almost none of what had happened after Wentz and his sidekick monster had left.

He stepped into the room and bent down next to the phone. He gingerly lifted the receiver with two fingers and held it a good three inches from his head, just enough to hear the tone and determine if he had any messages.

There were none. He reached over and unplugged the phone and then carried it into the bathroom to attempt to clean it.

Dried blood was splashed across the sink. There were bloody fingerprints on the medicine cabinet door. Pierce had no memory of going into the bathroom after the attack.

But the place was a mess. The blood had dried hard and brown and it reminded him of the mattress he had seen the police remove from Lilly Quinlan's apartment.

As he used wet tissues to wipe off the phone as best he could, he had a memory of going to a movie called Curdled a few years earlier with Cody Zeller. It was about a woman whose job was to clean up bloody crime scenes after the police were finished with the onsite investigation. He now wondered if there was really such a job and a service he could call. The prospect of cleaning up the bedroom was not attractive to him in the least.

After the phone was reasonably clean he plugged it back into the wall in the bedroom and sat down with it on an unstained edge of the mattress. He checked for messages and again there were none. He thought it unusual. He had not been home for nearly seventy-two hours, yet there were no messages. He thought maybe Lilly Quinlan's page had finally been taken off the L.A. Darlings website. Then he remembered something else. He punched in his number at Amedeo Technologies and waited for the call to ring through to Monica Purl's desk.

"Monica, it's me. Did you change my phone number?"

"Henry? What are -"

"Did you change the number at my apartment?"

"Yes, you told me to. It was supposed to start yesterday."

"I think it did."

He knew that when he had been talking Monica into making the call to All American Mail on Saturday that he had told her to change the number on Monday. At the time he guessed he meant it. But now he felt strangely unsettled about losing the number. It was a connection to another world, to Lilly and Lucy.

"Henry? Are you still there?"

"Yes. What's my new number?"

"I have to look it up. Are you out of the hospital?"

"Yes, I'm out. Just look it up, please."

"I am, I am. I was going to give it to you yesterday but when I went in your room you had that visitor."

"I understand."

"Okay, here it is."

She gave him the number and he grabbed a pen off the bed table and wrote it on his wrist because he didn't have a notebook handy.

"Is there a forwarding on the last number?"

"No, because then I thought all of those guys would be still calling you."

"Exactly. Good work."

"Um, Henry, are you coming in today? Charlie was asking about your schedule."

He thought about this before answering. The day was already half shot. Charlie probably wanted to talk and then overtalk about the Proteus demonstration still scheduled for the next day with Maurice Goddard despite Pierce's urging to delay it.

"I don't know if I'm going to make it in," Pierce told Monica. "The doctor wants me to take it easy. If Charlie wants to talk, tell him I'm at home and give him the new number."

"Okay, Henry."

"Thank you, Monica. I'll see you later."

He waited for her to say good-bye but she didn't. He was about to hang up when she spoke.

"Henry, are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I just don't want to come in and scare everybody with this face. Like I scared you yesterday."

"I wasn't -"

"Yes, you were but that's okay. And thanks for asking how I'm doing, Monica. That was nice. I've gotta go now. Oh, listen, the man who was in my room when you came by?"

"Yes?"

"He's a detective named Renner. From the LAPD. He will probably be calling you to ask about me."

"About what?"

"About what I had you do for me. You know, making that call as Lilly Quinlan. Things like that."

There was a short silence and then Monica's voice sounded different, nervous.

"Henry, am I in trouble?"

"Not at all, Monica. He's investigating her disappearance. And he's investigating me. Not you. He's just backtracking on what I did. So if he calls you, just tell him the truth and everything will be fine."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. Don't worry about it. I should go now."

They hung up. Pierce got a fresh dial tone and called Lucy LaPorte's number, knowing it now by heart. Once again he got her voice mail but the greeting was now different. It was her voice but the message was that she was taking a vacation and would not be accepting clients until mid-November.

More than a month, Pierce thought. He felt his insides constrict as he thought about what Renner had intimated and about Wentz and his goon and what they could've done to her.

He left a message regardless of what she had said in her greeting.

"Lucy, it's Henry Pierce. It's important. Call me back. I don't care what happened or what they did to you, call me. I can help you. I've got a new number now, so write it down."

He read the number off his wrist and then hung up. He held the phone on his lap for a few moments, half expecting, half hoping she would immediately call back. She didn't. After a while he got up and left the bedroom.

In the kitchen Pierce found the empty laundry basket on the counter. He remembered he had been using it to carry grocery bags up from the car when he first encountered Wentz and Six-Eight by the elevator. He remembered dropping the laundry basket when he was pushed out of the elevator. Now the basket was here. He opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Everything he had been carrying up -except the eggs, which had probably broken -had been placed inside. He wondered who had done this. Nicole? The police? A neighbor he did not even know?

The question made him think of Detective Renner's statement about the Good Samaritan complex. If such a theory and complex were true, then Pierce felt sorry for all the true dogooders and volunteers out there in the world. The idea that their efforts might be viewed cynically by members of law enforcement depressed him.

Pierce remembered that he still had several bags of groceries in the trunk of his BMW.

He picked up the laundry basket and decided to go get them because he was hungry and the pretzels and sodas and other snacks he had bought were in the trunk.

Still feeling weak from the assault and surgery, he did not overload the basket once he went down to the garage. He decided on two trips and after he got back into the apartment with the second basketful he checked the phone again and learned he had missed a call. He had a message.

Pierce cursed himself for missing the call and then quickly went through the process of setting up a voice mail access code again. Soon he was listening to the message. It was from Lucy LaPorte.