“Hey,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

She tried to smile. She might as well not have bothered.

“Been better,” she said.

From the doorway, Worth looked her over. She wore a silky blouse that looked like it went with a stylish business suit, not sweatpants and muddy shoes. She’d taken off her thin fleece zip-up, just not in front of Sorensen.

Worth’s number came over the radio on a crackle of static. “Baker 52, Adam Double Zero.”

Lardner and Sanchez. He ignored the call out of experience.

When it came again, he squeezed the com set strapped to his shoulder. “Three Adam Zero.”

Crackle. Beep.

“Yeah, um, Double Zero, I need a price check.” Worth could hear Sanchez snickering in the passenger seat. “That’s Kotex with wings. Um, UltraThin. Advise, over.”

Goddamned children. He reached to his hip and cut the radio.

When the silence settled, he said, “Hey?”

She finally looked at him. The remains of her shiner stood in yellow smudges against her dishwater complexion. Her hair hung limp around her face. He’d noticed at times that her eyes almost seemed to absorb her mood, the color of the room around her. Tonight they seemed flat, pale, twin chips of dirty chalk. The tremble in her cigarette seemed to climb up her wrist.

“What happened?”

She said, “Can I show you something?”

Worth reached back and closed the door.

She took half a minute to stub out her cigarette. She moved slowly, keeping her arms close to her body. At last she straightened, turned her back to him, and began to undo the blouse.

By now he had a pretty good idea what was coming. He had an idea why she’d chosen a soft, loose-fitting top. Still, when she finally let the blouse slip from her shoulders, Worth’s heart sagged.

Gwen’s slim back was a boiling thunderhead. The worst of her bruises practically seeped blood. Around the edges, he saw knuckle marks like grubby fingerprints.

Somebody had been using her as an ashtray. Worth brushed aside a length of her hair and saw a burn mark, a crusted sore at the base of her neck. More between her shoulder blades.

He’d never gotten a true sense of her figure in the shapeless smocks she wore at work. Gwen was even thinner than he’d realized; he could count her ribs, each knob of her spine.

At the same time, from where he stood behind her, Worth saw the V of her waist, the top flare of her hips. The suprising outer swells of her breasts. Her previously concealed features seemed at odds with the willowy design of her frame; even under the horrid circumstances, Worth felt a slight spark of arousal. He hated himself for it.

With one hand, he carefully peeled down the waistband of her sweatpants on her left side, leaving an imprint of elastic in the soft flesh beneath. The contusions crawled over a filigree of tattoo ink at the small of her back. More bruising around the jut of her hipbone.

“I’ll take you to the hospital,” he said.

Gwen began to cry. Worth lifted her blouse up as gently as he could.

That was when she turned, and he saw the dry vacancy in her eyes, and realized that she wasn’t sobbing but shivering.

She said, “Can I show you something else?”

1.

PLASTIC

1

In retrospect, announcing himself in the hallway almost seemed funny. Police. I’m opening the door.

The small bedroom in the back of Gwen Mullen’s apartment felt like a meat locker. Worth understood when he reached down and felt cold iron: She’d valved off the radiator in here. She’d also opened the windows. Plastic blinds clattered on the chilly breeze.

He raised the Maglite to eye level.

Russell lay naked in a twist of sheets. In the beam of the flashlight, Worth caught glimpses of white amid ragged red pulp. He guessed he was looking at molars. Maybe jawbone. He wasn’t sure.

Moving the light around the room, his own breath foggy in the beam, he passed over the nightstand and noticed a dark square centered in a thin layer of dust. He found the lamp on the floor beside the bed, cord trailing, still plugged into the socket near the peeling baseboard.

The lamp came on when he flipped the switch by his elbow, throwing shadows up the cracked plaster wall. By some trick the bulb had remained intact; dark clots of stuff had congealed around the chunky glass base.

Worth automatically reached for the mike on his shoulder. The words sat in his throat, pushing their way up: Three Adam Zero, Three Adam Sixty. His sergeant’s car.

He wondered how long the guy had been here like this. He wondered how many times she’d hit him with the lamp.

At some point, he realized he’d released the call button without speaking.

Worth found Gwen sitting on the floor in the living room, staring at nothing, arms around her knees. A dime-store jack-o’-lantern the size of a Weber grill hulked in one corner, bathing the place in cheap orange light.

He slid a stack of magazines out of his way and sat on the edge of the low coffee table in front of her. There was a big ceramic ashtray shaped like Texas, heaped with butts. None of them looked like Gwen’s brand.

“In the bedroom.” She pointed. “Back there.”

“Gwen,” he said. “You showed me.”

No response.

“Can you look at me?”

If she could, she didn’t.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“Didn’t you see?”

She drifted again, and Worth let her go. In the reflection of a framed race car poster on the wall he could see the jack-o’-lantern standing sentry over his shoulder, jagged mouth leering. For some stupid reason, he found that he didn’t like having the thing at his back.

He stood and took a better look around.

Cracked woodwork, water stains on the ceiling. A fist-size hole in one wall, exposing slats like broken ribs. Between two tall windows, mismatched sheets tacked up for curtains, an enormous, expensive-looking flat-screen television sat on milk crates.

Back in the bedroom, standing over the fish-bellied body on the bed, Worth couldn’t decide what depressed him most: the bludgeoned corpse, the image of Gwen Mullen raising the lamp and pulling it down, or the thought that he could, conceivably, wind up playing officer-on-scene to that miserable prick Vargas in Homicide.

He keyed the radio. The beep made him think of the checkout scanners at the store.

Just then a soft gasp drifted in from the other room, toward him down the short dark hall. Worth followed it back.

Gwen had finally lost her grip. Fat tears squeezed beneath the heels of her hands, leaving slick trails; her cheeks glistened in the gaudy Halloween glow.

Worth got down beside her, cuffs rattling, silent radio digging into his side, not sure where he could touch her that wouldn’t hurt.

She covered her face and slouched against him. It was as if she had no weight. He felt her tears, her steamy breath.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she whispered.

He stroked her hair. “It’ll be okay.”

“How?”

Worth didn’t kid himself.

2

Eddie Tice was officially done fucking around.

“You’d better be dead in a ditch,” he said into the phone. It was the last message he intended to leave. “You hear what I’m saying, smart guy? Because if you’re walking around out there? Thinking you’re a smart guy? I’ll find you, is the first thing. Don’t even think I won’t find your stupid ass.”