“What is it honey?”

Charlotte said nothing. Instead, she began to hum a song. Michael didn’t recognize it. It sounded like a classical theme.

“Charlotte,” Michael said. “Tell Daddy.”

His daughter continued to stare off into the distance, a void into which Michael could not see. She stopped humming.

“Anna is sad,” she said.

Anna, Michael thought. The nightmare fable of his youth came flooding back. The girl in the story.

Michael scanned the piece of paper in his hand, the numbers. It was the same two numbers on the refrigerator door at home. Familiar numbers.

That’s what Emily meant when she pretended to be cold, he thought. She wanted him to look at the refrigerator. She was trying to tell him something, and Michael now knew what it was.

FORTY-EIGHT

He moved through the farmhouse, the kinzbal on point. He had taken the dagger off a dead Chechen, a young soldier no more than eighteen. The smell of decomposing flesh filled his head, his remembrance.

The house had many rooms, each filled with a different light.

For the past few years he had slipped in and out of time, a place unfettered by memory, a place that had, at first, both frightened and unnerved him, but one that had now become his world. He saw the walls of the stone house rise and fall, in one moment constructed of raw timber and mortar, at other moments open to the elements, the trees and sky, the rolling hills that sloped gently to the river. He felt the floor beneath his feet transform from hard-packed dirt to fine quarry tile, back to soft grass. All around him he heard hundreds scream as they fled the heat and blood and insanity of war, the madness soon giving way to the serenity of the graveyard, all of it subsumed in time present, time past, time yet to unfold.

He looked at the old woman dying on the kitchen floor, the taste of her blood fresh and metallic on his tongue. All at once he felt the earth tremble beneath his feet, saw the shadow of enormous things move in the gray miasma, then clear, revealing a pastoral scene of rich and painful splendor.

He saw a young woman sitting by the river. She had a long, slender neck, delicate arms. Even from behind he knew so many things about her. He knew that she, like himself, was ageless. Next to her were two other rocks, unoccupied.

As he approached he realized he could no longer smell the stench of the dead and dying. The air was now suffused with the scent of honeysuckle and grape hyacinth. The young woman turned and looked at him. She was a heart-stopping beauty.

“Mis su nimi on?” Aleks asked. He wasn’t sure if she spoke Estonian.

She answered his question. “Anna.”

“What’s wrong?”

Anna looked at the river, then back. “Marya is sad.”

Nearby, Aleks heard the rumble of a vehicle, the sound of a blaring horn. When he looked at the woman he discovered that she was now a little girl, no more than four. She looked up at him with pride, with longing, her blue eyes shining, her soul an unpainted canvas.

He smelled flour and sugar and blood, the hunger within him rising. He sensed someone near.

An intruder.

They were no longer alone.

Aleks raised his knife, and stepped into the shadows.

FORTY-NINE

Michael stood in the alley behind the building at 64 Ditmars Boulevard. In his mind he saw the numbers on the drawing Charlotte made, the numbers on the refrigerator.

The last time he stood in this place, a time when his heart had been whole and he felt safe in this world, he was nine years old. That day he had played stickball with four of his friends from the neighborhood. Later that night, the night two men walked in the front door and murdered his parents, his whole world fell apart. He had been piecing it back together ever since.

Michael put his ear to the door, listened. Nothing.

Since Abby had bought the building, they’d had all the locks changed and upgraded, putting deadbolts on every door, bars on all the basement and first-story windows.

Michael turned the knob, bumped the door with his shoulder. Solid. He would not be breaking down the door, nor would he be defeating the new lock. He scanned the area for something with which he could break the window pane, saw a broken umbrella sticking out a trashcan. He took it out, fed it through the narrow bars on the door, tapped the pane twice. On three he hit the glass. It smashed. Michael listened to the interior of the space. He was met with a thick brown silence. After a few moments he reached in, scraping his hand on the too-narrow opening, cutting his palm on the broken glass. He turned the lock.

Michael looked both ways and, seeing he was alone, pushed open the door. He stepped into the abandoned bakery, into the dark dominion of his past.

FIFTY

For Detective Desiree Powell it was a long shot. She hated long shots. If all her players were still in New York City, it would only leave five boroughs, hundreds of neighborhoods, tens of thousands of streets, and a hundred thousand buildings to search. Not to mention the world that existed underground – subways, basements, tunnels, catacombs. So she made a command decision. She had to put herself and her team somewhere.

This was why she made the big money, just enough to keep her in subway tokens and Jimmy Choo knock-offs.

She parked at the corner of Steinway Street and 21st Avenue, scanned the block, the long row of red-brick row houses, the small stores interspersed between, each with a colorful sign trumpeting their wares and services. There was a drama unfolding in each one of them, she thought, life-altering comedies and tragedies and farces that, to the outside world, would proceed unexamined, unknown. Until some unexpected horror descended, and they called the police.

Was the theater of Michael Roman’s tragedy unfolding in one of these buildings? Or had the curtain already fallen?

She shifted in her seat. Her ribs were getting worse. She had taken six Tylenol already. She would need the hard stuff before the day was over.

When she looked in her side-mirror she saw Fontova come running up, out of breath. Bracing herself against a fresh sword of agony, Powell opened the door, gently slid out of the car.

“You hear about the two cops on Roosevelt?” Fontova asked.

An “officer needs assistance” call had gone out over the radio twenty minutes ago. Powell had not heard the details. “What about them?”

Fontova bent over, catching his wind. Sufficiently recovered, he continued. “Uniformed officer was directing traffic around an accident on 98th Street. A car stalled, and when they were just about to push it, a guy jumped out a car behind the stalled car. He pulled a knife and cut two cops.”

“Jesus Christ. How bad?”

“Both are on the way to the hospital. One of the officers got a shot off, but he missed.”

“They have the cutter?”

Fontova shook his head. “Took off. There’s a BOLO on the vehicle and the doer. White male, thirties, tall. Driving a black H2.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard to spot.”

“It gets better.”

“Doesn’t it always?”

Fontova reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat, took out the composite sketch of the man who had broken into the Arsenault house.

“You’re shitting me,” Powell said.

“Not,” Fontova said. “And two witnesses put a woman and a little blond girl in the H2 with the cutter. And dig this.”

Powell just listened.

“The stalled car was a blue Ford Contour.”

Powell’s head began to spin. “Our BOLO? The one Michael Roman drove away from that motel?”

“Yep. Other wits said they saw another man and another little girl running from the scene.”

“Did we get a description on the man?”