“What can we do for the city?” Sanchez asks.

Carla explains, in minimal detail, the need for Cleveland Heights assistance.

Sanchez buys half the loaf, says: “I think the chief will want a little bit more.”

Carla glances at her watch. A little bit more puts Paris in the middle. “That’s classified for the time being.”

“Then so are the Cain Manor apartments,” Sanchez says. “Just give me a name. I won’t take it.”

Carla hesitates for a moment. “Cross.”

The skinny cop barks a laugh.

“Something funny?” Carla says, leaning in, towering over him.

“No,” he says. “No ma’am.”

Sanchez asks: “Is there somewhere we can call you?”

Carla holds the skinny cop’s stare until he looks away, then says, “I can wait right here if you’ve got to talk to someone, Denny.”

“Well, we have to clear this from high on high. You understand. It’s New Year’s Eve, for God’s sake. Let me talk to Chief Blake. I’ll call you right back.”

“Like tonight?”

“Like in ten minutes,” Sanchez says.

Carla flips him a card, holds up her phone. “Ten minutes.”

66

An unknown room. Beyond dark. Black walls, ceiling, floor. A large round object in front of him, like a kettle or an old gas grill. He is surrounded by candles, but the light is instantly devoured by the gloom, immediately digested into the air, thick with death. Thumping music comes from somewhere.

He had traveled, definitely. He had been in a car. He looks at the object on his lap.

It is a gun. His gun.

The smell is coming from the huge bowl in front of him. He leans forward and, as he does, in the scant light, he sees the putrefacted flesh, the blackened organs, the shimmer of a thousand maggots, fat with marrow. He bolts to the corner of the room and, like the inevitability of vomit itself, gives in to the nausea and retches on the floor, near the corner. His vision vibrates with colors around the edges.

He wipes his mouth, tries to steady himself, a deep paranoia rummaging inside him. He hallucinates wildly, thoughts and sounds and emotions whirling. He finds the chair, pulls it back to the wall, sits heavily.

One minute of black silence passes, then:

“Son?”

Paris raises his head. He sees a chair on the other side of the big kettle. A figure is sitting on it. Sitting? No. More like floating just an inch or so off the surface, a weightless, matterless being.

It is Frank Paris.

“Dad?”

The figure on the chair shimmers, disappears, returns, like a pixilated image coming and going from clear focus. His father is robust and healthy again. His hands look huge and nicked and dad-grimy.

For some reason, the sight of his father, dead these many years, does not scare him. What scares him is his father’s scrutiny. After all this time his father can now assess him as a full-grown man, instantly, as he might a too-young doctor holding onto a clipboard that would chronicle the end of his life.

Jack Paris wonders: Am I tall enough? Am I smart enough? Am I man enough?

Am I father enough?

Frank Paris will say no to that one. No, son, you are not father enough. You couldn’t make your marriage work, and you will never be father enough to my granddaughter.

Shimmer.

His father is suddenly thinner, young-old again, his face is drawn downward in a sallow avalanche of skin. In his hands, a battered Etch-A-Sketch.

Happy Birthday, Daddy!

“Do a trick for me, Jackie,” his father says.

“What, Dad?”

Silence.

You’ve got to know what breaks his heart.

“Dad?”

Again, silence. The definition of empty.

His father is gone.

Then, suddenly, all the lights of hell explode in Jack Paris’s eyes.

67

At first, to the 617 people tuned to Cable99 on New Year’s Eve, it looks to be a scaled-down version of Hollywood Squares. Or The Brady Bunch. Four windows dividing the TV screen into four equal sections.

Closer examination, to those in the know, would yield the understanding that these are four separate webcam feeds, the sort of cybercast videos that jump and lurch and produce, overall, a rather vertiginous effect in the viewer.

Still, anything can happen on Cable99, and often did.

In the upper-left-hand frame is a disheveled man, early forties, maybe. He is sitting in a chair, staring blankly at the camera. But not moving. The room he is in looks to have very dark walls, and the bright lights cast harsh shadows across his face.

In the upper-right-hand corner is a still photo of a very exotic-looking young woman, a fashion model head shot, a real dark-eyed beauty. The lower two squares are blank.

In the control booth at Cable99, Furnell Braxton, the unlucky low man on the totem pole who drew New Year’s Eve tech duty, casts a disinterested eye toward the monitor as he eats his Tony Roma’s.

At eleven-thirty-one, a DVD begins to play in the lower-right-hand frame. It looks like a video of a man standing in front of the Justice Center, a place Furnell Braxton tries to avoid at all costs. The video is pretty jerky, as always, but Furnell is not a big believer in streaming video anyway — half the time it lagged way behind the audio — and truly hopes all concerned here understand.

Still, the audio seems to be running smoothly.

“This was a cold-blooded killing of a police officer in the line of duty,” the smeary video image of the guy in front of the Justice Center says. “I think the evidence will show that the defendant, Sarah Weiss, pulled the trigger.”

Performance artists, Furnell thinks. What a bunch. Still, anything’s better than the woman who dresses her dogs up for tea once a month, then tapes the whole damn thing.

The tape continues: “Mike Ryan was a good cop. . . . Mike Ryan was a family man . . . a man who woke up every day and chose—chose—to strap on a gun and jump into the fray. . . . Mike Ryan died in the line of duty protecting the people of this city.”

Furnell pops open his diet Dr Pepper.

“So the next time you find yourself picking through a pile of garbage, or hiding in the bushes like some pervert, or running down the street with a forty-pound video camera just so you can invade the privacy of a heartbroken ten-year-old girl in a wheelchair, I want you to stop, take a deep breath, and ask yourself what the hell it is you do for a living. . . .”

“Damn straight,” Furnell says as he unwraps his dessert.

“Sometimes, the monster is real, people,” the man says. “Sometimes, the monster has a pretty face and a perfectly ordinary name. This time, the monster is called Sarah Weiss.”

There is a break in the video, then, a new video image.

A young man, wearing Ray-Bans, sitting in a wing chair, in a brightly lit room.

Furnell nearly chokes on his soft drink when the man in the sunglasses says the words.

Within sixty seconds he is talking to his cousin Wallace. Wallace Braxton works the night shift at WKYC, the Cleveland affiliate station of NBC.

“Are you sure?” Wallace asks for the second time, already punching in his boss’s speed-dial number.

“Absolutely,” Furnell says. “Absolutely sure. He said, ‘Here, tonight, live, a police officer is going to commit suicide.’”

68

The house is dark.

Bobby Dietricht had rung the bell, knocked on the front door, knocked on the back door, listened for a dog, listened for footsteps, peered in the windows. He had even tossed a few pebbles at the upstairs windows before hiding behind the huge maple tree on the front lawn.

Nothing.

Then he had repeated everything, just to be sure.

The house is unoccupied, he concluded.

Or else someone inside sleeps the sleep of the dead.

Carla rolls up in front of Jeremiah Cross’s house, headlights off. She meets Bobby around back and apprises him of her meeting with Denny Sanchez. Together they climb the small back porch, position themselves on either side of the door. Bobby pulls open the storm door and knocks one last time. He presses the doorbell and, in the stillness of the night, they can both hear the bell, loud and clear.