Where are you, Luther?

I could do with a little help.

He got out of the car, locked it. He knew he should go home, but somehow, this place filled him with the sense of purpose he needed at the moment, the peace he used to feel when he was sitting in the living room on some crisp fall day, watching an Eagles game, Donna on the couch next to him, reading a book, Colleen in her room, studying.

Maybe he should go home.

But go home to what? His empty two-room apartment? He would drink another pint of bourbon, watch the talk shows,

probably a movie. At three o’clock he would slip into bed, waiting for a sleep that would not come. At six he would concede to the pre-alarm dawn, and get up.

He glanced at the glow of light from the basement window, saw the shadows moving purposefully about, felt the pull.

These were his brothers, his sisters, his family.

He crossed the street to the death house.

This was his home.

18

MONDAY, 11:08 PM

Simon had been aware of the two vehicles. The blue-and-white Crime Scene Unit van nestled against the side of the row house, and the Taurus parked down the street, the Taurus containing his nemesis, as it were: Detective Kevin Francis Byrne.

When Simon had broken the story on Morris Blanchard’s suicide, Kevin Byrne had waited for him one night outside Downey’s, a raucous Irish pub on Front and South Streets. Byrne had cornered him and had thrown him around like a rag doll, finally picking him up by the collar of his jacket and slamming him up against a wall. Simon was no bruiser, but he did go six feet tall, eleven stone, and Byrne had lifted him clean off the ground with a single hand. Byrne had smelled like a distillery after a flood, and Simon had prepared himself for a serious donnybrook. Okay, a serious beating. Who was he kidding?

But luckily, instead of punching him flat—which, Simon had to admit, he might have had coming—Byrne just stopped, looked at the sky, and dropped him like a spent tissue, letting him off with sore ribs, a banged up shoulder, and a knit shirt stretched beyond all attempts at resizing.

For his penance Byrne had gotten another half a dozen scathing articles out of Simon. For a year Simon had traveled with a Louisville Slugger in his car and an eye over his shoulder. Still did.

But all of that was ancient history.

There was a new wrinkle.

Simon had a pair of stringers he used from time to time, Temple University students who had the same notions about journalism that Simon had once held. They did research and the occasional stakeout, all for a pittance, usually just enough to keep them in iTunes downloads and X.

The one who had some potential, the one who could actually write, was Benedict Tsu. He called at ten after eleven.

“Simon Close.”

“It is Tsu.”

Simon wasn’t sure if it was an Asian thing or a college thing, but Benedict always called himself by his last name. “What’s up?”

“That place you asked about, the place on the waterfront?”

Tsu was talking about the dilapidated building under the Walt Whitman Bridge into which Kevin Byrne had mysteriously disappeared for a few hours earlier in the night. Simon had followed Byrne, but had to keep a discreet distance. When Simon had to leave to get to the Blue Horizon, he called Tsu and asked him to look into it. “What about it?”

“It’s called Deuces.”

“What’s Deuces?”

“It’s a crack house.”

Simon’s world began to spin. “A crack house?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Simon let the possibilities wash over him. The excitement was overwhelming.

“Thanks, Ben,” Simon said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Bukeqi.”

Simon clicked off, considered his good fortune.

Kevin Byrne was on the pipe.

Which meant that what had become a casual endeavor—following Byrne to get a story—would now become a grand obsession. Because, from time to time, Kevin Byrne had to score his drugs. Which meant that Kevin Byrne had a brand-new partner. Not a tall, sexy goddess with smoldering dark eyes and a freight-train right cross, but rather a skinny white boy from Northumberland.

A skinny white boy with a Nikon D100 camera and a Sigma 55-200mm DC zoom lens.

19

TUESDAY, 5:40 A M

Jessica huddled in the corner of a dank cellar, watching a young woman kneeling in prayer. The girl was about seventeen, blond, freckled, blue-eyed, and innocent.

The moonlight streaming through the small window cast brusque shadows across the rubble in the cellar, creating buttes and chasms amid the gloom.

When the girl was done praying, she sat down on the damp floor and produced a hypodermic needle and, without ceremony or preparation, stuck the needle in her arm.

“Wait!” Jessica screamed. She made her way quickly across the debris-strewn basement with relative ease, considering the shadow and the clutter. No barked shins, no stubbed toes. It was as if she floated. But by the time she reached the young woman, the young woman was already depressing the plunger.

You don’t have to do that, Jessica said.

Yes I do, the girl dream-replied. You don’t understand.

I do understand.You don’t need it.

But I do.There is a monster after me.

Jessica stood a few feet away from the girl. She saw that the girl was

barefoot; her feet were red and raw and blistered. When Jessica looked back up—

The girl was Sophie. Or, more accurately, the young woman Sophie would become. Gone were her daughter’s roly-poly little body and chubby cheeks, replaced instead by a young woman’s curves: long legs, slender waist, a discernible bust beneath the ragged V-neck sweater with the Nazarene crest.

But it was the girl’s face that horrified Jessica. Sophie’s face was drawn and haggard, with dark violet smudges beneath her eyes.

Don’t, sweetie, Jessica implored. God, no.

She looked again and saw that the girl’s hands were now bolted together and bleeding. Jessica tried to take a step forward but her feet seemed frozen to the ground, her legs leaden. She felt something at her breastbone. She looked down to see an angel pendant hanging around her neck.

Then, suddenly, a bell sounded. Loud and intrusive and insistent. It seemed to come from above. Jessica looked at the Sophie-girl. The drug was just taking hold of the girl’s nervous system, and as her eyes rolled back, her head tilted upward. Suddenly, there was no ceiling above them, no roof. Just the black sky. Jessica followed her gaze as the bell pounded through the firmament again. A sword of golden sunlight split the night clouds, catching the sterling silver of the pendant, blinding Jessica for a moment, until—