He longed to slam a phone down and hear its guts jingle like you used to be able to do. Instead, he thumbed the button and threw the Wi-Fi handset against the wall. Batteries and shards of cracked plastic were still hitting the carpet when Troy Mather stuck his head around the door.

“Um…hey?”

“What?”

“Okay to come in?”

Tice took a deep breath. “Come in, Troy. Please. Let me extend a personal invitation.”

Troy pushed the door the rest of the way open and came inside. Derek Price followed, hung a left, and fell into the sofa sectional in the far corner. Price grabbed the remote and punched on the wide-screen Eddie had taken off the showroom floor and put in the office. Last year’s model.

“By all means,” Tice told him. “Be comfortable.”

Derek held up a thumb, flipping through channels until he landed on SportsCenter.

Troy had plopped himself into the discontinued leather glider on the other side of Eddie’s antique desk.

“Well,” he said.

“Well what?”

“He ain’t anywhere.”

“He’s somewhere,” Eddie said.

From the sectional: “Maybe he just forgot to charge his phone.”

Tice folded his arms and leaned back in the tall chair. He’d already checked with the state cops between here and Chicago. No reports involving the GTO so far.

He’d check again tomorrow. Benefit of the doubt. Possibly a whole different set of problems to worry about.

Troy nodded along with the whole cell-phone idea, then said, “But just to be, like, devil’s aggregate?”

Eddie Tice sighed. “I’m listening.”

“Okay, me and Derek got the idea to check his girl,” Troy said. He sounded proud of himself. “Right? So I remember she got the Modells a job where she works. The SaveMore there on Saddle Creek. Curtis and Ricky. Remember those guys?”

“No,” Eddie said.

“Big beefy dudes? Kinda stupid? They worked for me, I dunno, couple months. I think they might be those kind of twins that don’t look like each other.”

Worked for me. Troy liked to feel as though he had a little authority at Tice Is Nice Quality Used and Discount Furniture. At least in the warehouse. Eddie Tice let him feel as though he had a little. “Keep telling your story, Troy.”

“Anyway, we go there,” Troy said. “I already know she works Fridays, being Russ normally comes to poker night, but she ain’t nowhere around there tonight. Talked to Curtis and Ricky, nothin’ outta them. Talked to some other dude pushin’ a mop on the way out. He said the girl hasn’t been to work in, like, a couple days.”

While Troy Mather rambled, Eddie’s mood about the situation began to darken. He realized he still hadn’t taken off the thermal FootJoy Windshirt he’d been wearing on the thirteenth green at Tiburon twelve hours ago. Now his back ran with sweat.

“Does she have any other jobs?”

Troy opened his mouth, then shut it.

Eddie moved on. “But she definitely wasn’t home.”

“Um…” Troy said. He glanced over toward the corner. Derek wasn’t even paying attention. “We didn’t know what kind of car she drove.”

“What happened when you knocked on the door?”

“Well, it’s Friday night, man, so we figured…”

“Didn’t go to the apartment, did you?”

Troy’s face darkened. He was blushing. “Shit, Eddie. I mean, like, why the fuck would he be at the apartment, right?”

“It’s okay,” Eddie said. Thinking: Holy Lord. Troy was dependable if you didn’t give him too much to think about; Derek Price didn’t weigh more than a buck twenty, tattoos included, but he had some street sense and knew how to keep his mouth shut. The two of them together didn’t quite equal a Russell—who, until tonight, Eddie Tice had always looked at as a candidate for bigger and better things. “I’ll call Tony.”

“Aww, come on.” Troy hopped up out of the chair. “Let us handle it. Seriously. We’ll go back there right now.”

“I said it’s okay,” Eddie told him. “You guys did fine.”

“Eddie—”

“Quiet,” Tice barked. When he saw the wounded look on Troy’s face, he softened. “Look. Do you want to help?”

“You name it, boss.” Troy cracked his knuckles. “We’re on it.”

Eddie Tice pulled off the Windshirt and tossed it aside. He leaned forward, opened the middle left drawer of his desk, took out a bottle of Eagle Rare and a rocks glass, grabbed his BlackBerry from its charging cradle, and said, “Go down to Electronics and bring me back a new phone.”

3

Tiffany Pine had led the news for a sad string of days in December his first year sworn.

Worth had been fresh out of the academy, still rolling with his FTO. She’d been twenty-two, a Metro student, working her way toward a two-year associate’s degree in early childhood education. It was Christmastime.

No one who knew her claimed to understand why she’d stayed with the guy so long. By all accounts, he was a hothead with tendencies, nonviolent coping skills not prominent among them.

Pretty girl. Ugly situation. For too long she did everything people did, and then she did everything you were supposed to do. None of it mattered in the end.

They’d found her on the front steps at Helena House, throat slit, pregnant belly hacked apart. To Worth had fallen the task of setting up a tape line around their remains: adult female, infant male, two young bodies slowly freezing in a slushy pool of blood-melted snow.

He still remembered what it felt like to be a cop in the weeks after Tiffany Pine. It didn’t feel very much like he’d thought it would.

Problem number one: supplies.

Gwen had a roll of cheap garbage bags in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. Russell’s toolbox, same cupboard. Worth cracked the lid and found a roll of silver duct tape in the bottom.

Problem number two: Russell T. James.

There was a mangy area rug in the living room. Worth moved the coffee table and took the rug up. The fake pumpkin watched.

Back in the bedroom, he stopped what he was doing long enough to think, one last time, of the camera kit in the trunk of the cruiser. He could get digitals of Gwen before the Henry units arrived; he’d take the photos in good hard light. Call it in.

Russell James probably had been considered a good-looking guy. T for Thomas, according to the driver’s license he found in the wallet on the nightstand by the bed. Twenty-five years old. He’d given the DMV a cocky grin.

Good hair, nice straight teeth. The kind of face that made you try to think which young movie actor he resembled. Worth remembered something Sondra once told him about how women couldn’t help being drawn to men with dark eyes.

Bloody meat.

That’s what good-looking Russell looked like now. Scraps of meat, pieces of bone, a slick cap of dark tangled hair.

The prosecutor’s office would secure photographs of their own. Worth tried to see the big picture, all the angles, the possible outs, but all he could think of was that he and Sondra had lived in an old building like this early on. No air-conditioning, no thermostat, finicky heat. Once, in the dead of winter, the power had gone off for nearly thirty-six hours. But they’d been fine, huddled together under heavy blankets, finding ways to pass the time. That was one thing about these old iron radiators: They’d stay warm for at least a couple of days.

The radiator in Gwen’s bedroom was cold as a morgue tray.

No matter how he played it out, standing there, looking at the mess in front of him, Worth kept running up against the unavoidable fact:

She’d beaten a guy to death with a lamp. While he slept. She’d crept out of bed so she wouldn’t wake him, and then she’d hit him until his face was gone.