Paris is almost out the door when the phone rings.

“Paris.”

“Jack, Tonya Grimes.”

“What do you have?”

“I have half. I have a listing of a homicide victim named Anthony C. del Blanco. The funny thing is, that’s all I have.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, all I have is a stat. There’s no paper.”

Paris’s heart sinks.

Mikey.

No.

“Nothing at all?” Paris asks.

“Not a shred. No interviews, no photos, no autopsy reports. Zip. I looked under other spellings, just in case it was misfiled, but nothing turned up. Just a computer entry listing him as a vic. Weird, huh?”

“Yeah,” Paris says, absently. “Thanks, Tonya.”

“Listen, I’m getting a fax right now. It may be about this Jeremiah Cross. Let me call you right back.”

“Okay.” Paris hangs up the phone, his mind beginning to connect the dots between Mike Ryan and Sarah Weiss. It is then that he notices the blinking message light on his answering machine. He pours a half-cup of coffee from his Thermos, glances at his watch. He has time. He hits Playback.

“Hi . . . it’s Mercedes . . . ’bout nine-thirty . . . I was wondering . . . what’s the penalty for killing a little brother in Ohio? . . . can’t be much . . . probably like a fine or something, right? . . . anyway . . . I know you’re not there . . . you’re off to the big raid I’m not allowed to attend and all . . . kidding . . . anyway . . . I just talked to my brother Julian and, after enduring much threat, he confessed that he never showed up to take your picture, so whoever you met that day was definitely not my brother . . . anyway, seeing as he’s only fifteen and can’t exactly drive over there tonight, especially with my foot up his ass, I’m going to get in my car right now and drive over myself and wait for you . . . sorry again . . . you can’t trust Puerto Rican/Irish people . . . what can I tell you . . . good luck . . . okay . . . bye . . . happy new year . . . bye.”

Fifteen, Paris thinks. What the hell is she talking about? Her brother Julian is only fifteen? Who the fuck was it at the Justice Center that day, then? And who the fuck was it in the parking lot at the Cleveland League party?

It hits him.

What was it that Mercedes had said the day she called him from Deadlines, the day she had told him that her brother might show up to take pictures?

“Well, at the moment, there is a fabulously handsome, ethnically diverse male sitting right next to me, trying to ply me with fruity cocktails. . . .”

Paris dives for the dining room table and the FedEx envelope that contains the photographs. He tears it open to find an eight by ten of himself standing by the window in the Justice Center lobby, a bright red hole drawn in the center of his forehead.

He has seen his face.

Before he can pick up the phone to call in the description, he notices something hanging from the inside of his apartment door. He tries to move toward it, cannot.

As the Amanita muscaria begins to rocket through his veins, he understands.

He understands why no one came out of the back room at Ronnie’s. He understands that every single move he has made in the past week or so has been watched, observed, noted. He understands that the psychopath the entire department is looking for had known he was heading to Ronnie’s for coffee and had made sure that Jack Paris had gotten a special brew, a brew of whatever was in Mike Ryan’s bloodstream the day he died, a brew intended for the entire stakeout team, and Jack Paris suddenly knows that, if the feeling beginning to surge through him now is any indication of where he is going, it will surely end in a dread that is deeper, and colder, than any he has ever known.

62

The boys are ten and eleven. They are supposed to be watching television in their grandmother’s basement, but, instead, they are standing at the corner of Fulton Road and Newark Avenue, across from the St. Rocco’s rectory, passing a Winston Light back and forth, cupping it in hand as they had seen the older kids do.

At a few minutes after ten they see a cop car trolling Fulton, so they work their way down the alley that runs behind the strip of stores that begins with Aldonsa’s Tailors and ends with that heebie-jeebie voodoo place on the corner.

The younger boy looks around the Dumpster for a piece of foil in which to wrap the sacred remains of their last smoke. There is foil all over the place, courtesy of the takeout, but it all seems to be covered in barbecue sauce or spilled Pepsi.

Too short to see inside the Dumpster, the younger boy reaches over the rim, feels around the debris, and feels something wet. Something thick and viscous and sticky.

More barbecue sauce?

“Shit,” the boy says, pulling back his hand. And realizes immediately that it doesn’t smell like barbecue sauce at all. In fact, it smells like shit. Actual shit.

The two boys hoist themselves up to the rim of the Dumpster.

The corpse inside was, at one time, a man. This much is obvious, due to the fact that the man is naked. But there is also a huge hole where the man’s middle used to be. The area from his throat to his groin is cut into a long, flayed crescent, the fat and skin and muscle pulled to the sides in a surprised rictus of a smile, the contents glistening beneath the overhead vapor lights like maroon slabs of liver at the West Side Market.

The boy had reached directly into the man’s lower intestine, into fully digested arroz con pollo.

Although the dead man has rings on every one of his fingers—huge shiny stones that shimmer like multicolored prisms—the boys do not take them. Instead, they run as fast as they can, wind-whipped and mind-shattered, and do not stop until they reach West Forty-first Street and the arms of Jesus in the close, blessed safety of their grandmother’s basement.

Light snow, bitter cold. Ten-fifteen P.M.

The Ochosi task force, eight officers strong, is deployed in two locations, neither more than a block from the Westwood Road house. One team of four SWAT officers is in an unmarked tech van at the corner of Edgerton and Fenwick Roads. The other is in an SUV down the street from the Westwood Road address, at the bottom of the hill, a distance of less than half a mile. Within ninety seconds, both teams could arrive at the scene.

Sergeant Carla Davis sits in an unmarked car a half-mile away, in the Kaufmann’s parking lot, dressed in civilian clothes. The raid is scheduled for midnight, now less than two hours away. The task force has established a scrambled command frequency, so even if someone in the house is monitoring the channels, they will not pick up the task force traffic.

The bad news, on Westwood Road, is that it appears as if every house on the street is having a party. Every few seconds another car passes the tech van’s position, brake lights aglow, looking for a parking space, a space that is becoming harder and harder to find. People seem to be coming and going from every house on the block.

A half-mile north, Carla Davis tries to reach Jack Paris.

Greg Ebersole’s cell phone rings at ten-twenty-one. He is on Cedar Road, heading to the Cain Manor apartments. Bobby Dietricht is in the car behind him.

“Greg Ebersole.”

“Detective, this is Tonya Grimes.”

“Yeah, what’s up, Tonya?”

“I can’t reach Jack Paris. I talked to him ten minutes ago and now I can’t find him. Is he with you?”

“No. I just left him, though. What do you have?”

“Got one Jeremiah David Cross, attorney at law.”

“I’m listening.”

“Mr. Cross is a Caucasian male, twenty-nine years old, six feet, one-eighty-five, brown over brown. Got his law degree from American University in Mexico City. No wife, no kids, no—”

“Address, Tonya. Address.”