“This is ridiculous!” Adrienne complained.

“Get some help,” Petrescu replied. “And a lawyer. You’re definitely gonna need a lawyer.”

Her apartment was about two blocks from the police station, and they covered the distance in a fog of disbelief. “What are you going to do?” Adrienne asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t go back to your apartment.”

“I’m not so sure you should go back to yours,” Duran replied.

A hapless shrug. “I live there.”

They crossed Mount Pleasant Avenue together, heading for the alley behind Lamont Street. It was 6:30, and just about dark. “Y’know,” Duran said, “after a while, Bonilla’s going to turn up missing. And when he does, the police are going to look… bad.”

Adrienne nodded. “I know,” she said. “I just hope we’re around to see it.”

A smile flickered in the gloom on Duran’s face. We… ? Then they were in the alley, crunching their way toward the garage across cobblestones and broken glass. “You don’t have a front door?”

She shook her head. “It’s an English basement. I have to go through the garage.” They walked a little farther until she turned to him, and said, “This is it.” They were standing in front of a garage door, the kind that rolled up into the ceiling. Adrienne pressed a remote and the door rattled up. They walked through the garage, crossed a small yard, and arrived at a short flight of steps that led down to her apartment.

“Ta daa!”

Wait a minute, Adrienne thought, what I am doing? Inviting him in? Well, after all, he had saved her life—and where else did he have to go? Certainly not to his own place.

He sensed her indecision, and understood it. “I’ll get a hotel,” he told her. “There’s a lot to think about.”

She looked relieved. “Well… stay in touch. Once they realize Eddie’s missing…”

“I’ll let you know where I am,” he promised, and turned to leave.

Adrienne inserted the key in the lock, and pushed at the door. When it didn’t budge, she gave it a second shove, tsking with annoyance.

Hearing her, Duran turned. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s just the door,” she explained, and tried the lock again. This time, the latch turned, and the door swung wide. Adrienne frowned at her key, thinking about it. “It must have been unlocked…”

They went in together, and found what looked like a landfill where an apartment was supposed to have been. The contents of every drawer were scattered across the floor. The mattress was overturned, and clothes lay in heaps amid lightbulbs and books, boxes of cereal and shoes.

Adrienne took it in as if she were at the scene of an accident, staring in horror and amazement at the disaster in front of her. She took a few, tentative steps deeper into the apartment, wading through the detritus of her daily life. Slowly, her amazement began to dwindle, replaced by a rising tide of anger. She stood beside the bookcase and started picking things up, stupidly, setting the books back onto the shelves. She lifted up a copy of The God of Small Things and in doing so revealed her sister’s urn, lying on its side, its top off, its contents partially tumbled out. Sinking to her knees, she began to scoop the spilled ashes back into their container.

“What are you doing?” Duran asked.

She looked up at him, furious with tears. “It’s Nikki…”

Duran looked away, then took a deep breath. “I think we ought to get out of here,” he said. Adrienne nodded, then got to her feet without a word, looking at something in the palm of her hand.

“What’s that?” he asked.

She shook her head, and showed him what she’d found: a piece of glass, barely a centimeter long, with what looked like bits of wire in it. “It was in the urn.”

Duran glanced at the object, but it meant nothing to him. “I really think we ought to leave,” he told her. “We could get a hotel for the night—somewhere obscure. The suburbs, maybe.”

“Look at this,” Adrienne went on, staring at the little piece of glass. “Do you believe it?”

“Believe what?”

“This must be part of the… I don’t know… cremation machinery or something. That’s gross—that they get other stuff mixed in with someone’s final remains.”

“Right,” Duran said. “I really think we ought to get out of here. They might come back, you know?”

Adrienne nodded, quick little jerks of her head, and tossed the piece of glass onto the floor. Then she stepped carefully among the debris, and retrieved the telephone from where it lay. Replacing the receiver in its cradle, she looked at Duran. “I can’t call the police, can I?” she asked.

He shook his head. “They think we’re nuts.”

“I know,” she said. Then she walked into the kitchen and, turning on the taps in the sink, rinsed her sister’s ashes from her hands.

They spent the night in the most obscure hotel they could find, which was the Springfield Comfort Inn, about ten miles from Washington.

It wasn’t a bad room, really, but it was a box, a box with matching queensize beds, a television, a table, and a desk with a lamp that didn’t work.

Adrienne threw open the drapes above the air-conditioning unit, revealing a panoramic view of the parking lot and the malls beyond. The air in the room made her think of a bell jar. It was so still and stale that she wanted to throw open the windows, but no: they were sealed shut, probably on the recommendation of someone’s attorney. This left the air-conditioning unit itself, which rattled into action on command, blowing a stream of warm air across the two beds.

“Now what?” she asked, her voice dull, eyes on the parking lot.

Duran looked at her. “You’re asking me?”

She turned, and found him sprawled, loose limbed, on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. She felt a momentary flourish of annoyance. “Yes, I am!”

“Well, I’m not the Answerman,” he replied. “I don’t know what to do.” She glared. He went on. “Maybe a pizza,” he suggested.

“A pizza?”

“Yeah. And a shower. I—”

She burst into tears.

Seeing Duran like that, she realized for the first time—it hit her all at once—that their predicament was not going to end any time soon. And when it did end, the ending might not be a happy one. Until now, she’d been nurturing the naive belief that things would somehow sort themselves out and, when they did, she’d be back where she’d started—in her real life, with her real job.

But now she knew this wasn’t going to happen. This wasn’t something that she could organize her way out of. She was stuck—indefinitely—with a madman in a cheap hotel in the suburban wilderness. Her apartment was trashed. Her sister was dead. The man who’d helped her was dead. The police thought she was nuts. And people were trying to kill her.

That was the situation, and there was no room in it that she could see for picking up her little black suit at the cleaner’s, or prioritizing her to-do list on the Amalgamated case. Her life was in ruins. And so she cried, which so startled and embarrassed Duran that he rushed into the bath room, emerging seconds later with a handful of Kleenex. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her, offering her a tissue. “Don’t cry.” Which only made it worse, because that’s what her mother used to say.

And her real mother—“DeeDee”—had been a disaster.

Pregnant at fifteen. On welfare at sixteen. On heroin at eighteen. Autopsied at twenty-four. Too much of a good thing, according to the medical examiner.

Nikki had been old enough to remember her mother’s last overdose and she’d told Adrienne about it many times—how she, Nikki, had been hysterical at finding her mother lying in a pool of vomit. How she’d run through the house, screaming and crying, while three-year-old Adrienne (and here Nikki would play Adrienne’s role, her face a mask of innocence, eyes round and solemn), three-year-old Adrienne had knocked on the neighbor’s door and said, We need help. My mommy is sick. It’s a ‘mergency.