Blackwood. The Sollenburgs and the Woburns were both families of four; in each instance, the parents were shot; and the Woburns had one son and one daughter, just like the Sollenburgs.

He turned off the lights in the library and hurried upstairs to tell Nicky that he was going out on a case, which was not a lie even if it might not be strictly the truth. This case was not his, but it was Lionel’s case, according to the watch commander. And John had a legitimate—if personal—interest in it even if he had completed little more than half of his thirty-day leave, about which he had also managed to tell Nicky neither the truth nor a lie.

Her studio was dark, and in the master bedroom, John found her sound asleep in the soft light of her bedside lamp. On her nightstand stood an empty brandy snifter beside a copy of the complete poems of T. S. Eliot, which she had read often.

She failed to stir when he whispered her name. He wrote a note and placed it in the empty brandy glass.

Sleeping, Nicolette looked as innocent as a child, and if the only transgressions that counted were those done with the intent to transgress, then she was perhaps as blameless as the children she had brought into the world.

At half past midnight, when John arrived in the ICU visitors’ lounge at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Jack Woburn’s sister Lois was text-messaging a status report to relatives. The exhausted boy slept on a thinly padded three-seat couch.

The daughter stood at a window, gazing out at the night and the city. She turned to John, and he knew beyond doubt that the Woburns were meant to be the family with which the Sollenburg murders would be restaged. Blackwood was consecrated to the ritualistic destruction of what was both beautiful and innocent, two qualities of this girl, as they had been qualities also of John’s lost sisters, Marnie and Giselle.

As he introduced himself to Davinia, his voice trembled and broke, so that she must have wondered why the suffering of her family—strangers to him—should evoke such emotion. He could not tell her that he was thankful for her survival not only as anyone should be thankful that the life of another was spared, but also because her escape from their otherworldly enemy gave him hope that his family might likewise be saved.

When Lois completed her BlackBerry message, she shared with John the news she texted to relatives. Brenda Woburn had undergone a forty-five-minute surgery for her gunshot wound, had come through brilliantly, and had recovered from anesthesia. She was lying now in an ICU bed. They expected soon to be allowed to see her for a few minutes. Jack Woburn remained in surgery, his prognosis grave.

John sat with them, hopeful that after the children had been allowed to see their mother, he would be permitted a couple of minutes with her, as well.

The four uniformed officers, who are dealing with onlookers, return to the house one at a time to check on the progress of the techs or to use the half bath off the ground-floor hall. Patrolmen, technicians, crime-lab photographer, morgue-wagon jockeys all touch doorknobs, doors, and door casings not directly related to the crime scene. They touch the flush on the half-bath toilet, faucet handles, light switches. By these contacts, they are known and assessed.

All are more accessible than Lionel Timmins, two offer easy mounts, and the easier of these is Andy Tane, a uniformed patrolman. Andy sometimes uses the threat of arrest to receive free services from prostitutes, scouts teenage runaways for pimps, and takes a finder’s fee for each girl he conveys to them. When he was little, his mother called him Andy Candy. He likes the hookers to call him that, as well, when he uses them. He also accepts bribes from other criminal entrepreneurs either for pretending to be unaware of their activities or for actively assisting them.

Andy Candy Tane is known in full when he enters the house by the front door to use the half bath. When he flushes the toilet, he is taken, which in his case is by far the most appropriate moment. Andy is tall and strong, thirty-six, a worthy horse for the ride ahead.

After the morgue wagon departs with the body of Reese Salsetto, only one pair of uniforms is needed until the criminalists leave and Lionel Timmins locks the house. Andy Tane and his partner, Mickey Scriver, are the first unit released from the scene.

Andy and Mickey are on a four-day-a-week, forty-hour schedule—cruising the streets, on the lookout for bad guys, catching calls as they come—from 6:00 P.M. until 4:00 A.M. They usually take a dinner break at eight if they’re not in the middle of a collar or responding to a priority code.

They have been together only two weeks; and though Mickey is still trying to figure out if the partnership will work, Andy already prefers a change, a partner more flexible, more nuanced. Mickey is ex-army, his head full of self-limiting words like honor and duty. He’s ambitious, intending to make a rep in this rolling-blue work and then move up to plainclothes, possibly the narcotics bureau, not because the big bribes are there, which is why Andy might consider it if he were ambitious, but because that is where the action is. Mickey Scriver likes action. He wants to do work that “makes a difference in the community.” Andy loathes action as much as he loathes the community; and he would by now loathe Mickey if not for his sense of humor.

Andy’s previous partner, Vin Wasco, had been on the take, too, which made it a lot easier for Andy to conduct his own business. But Vin has gone under the knife for a benign brain tumor. Although doctors say he will make a complete recovery, Andy will be amazed and disappointed if Vin doesn’t fake himself into a full, lifetime disability pension.

At half past midnight, there are fewer places to catch dinner than at eight o’clock. Mickey suggests takeout from an Italian place that does good sandwiches, because if they eat in the car, they’re ready to take a priority-code call if they get one. Mickey of course is always happier swinging the hammer than polishing it. Mickey goes into the joint alone to place their orders because Andy doesn’t want any restaurant owner in his precinct to see him paying for a meal. He and Vin never paid. But Mickey acts like there’s no alternative to paying, as if the tight-assed sonofabitch not only has his lily-white heart set on promotion to plainclothes in Narcotics but also on sainthood.

When Mickey returns with two bags of takeout—a meatball-and-cheese sub with Sicilian slaw, a steak-and- cheese sub with regular slaw, two bags of potato chips, two large Cokes—Andy doesn’t want to be seen eating in the damn parking lot. Carpenters, plumbers, gardeners, and the like eat in their vehicles, and Andy strongly believes that it brings disrespect to the uniform when people see their law-enforcement officers chowing down in cars like common laborers.

Three blocks from the restaurant, at Lake Park, Andy pulls around the chain and stanchions that close the entry road until morning, drives on the grass far enough to reconnect with the pavement, parks on the sward near the shore, and leaves the engine running but kills the headlights. The lake isn’t so big that it’s a great blackness. Shore lights shimmer on dark water, and there’s a view if you’re into that kind of thing.

Andy claims he needs to take a leak, says he’ll be right back, and walks to the edge of the embankment. Dark grass slopes ten feet to a pale beach at which black water gently laps. The moon rocks in the cradle of the lake. At this hour and in this chill, the park is deserted. Andy pretends to start to piss, does a double take that maybe he oversells, takes two steps down the slope, and then hurries back to the patrol car, zipping up his fly as he goes, to Mickey’s window, which the saint is already cranking down.

“I think there’s a deader on the beach,” Andy says.

“Maybe it’s a drunk,” Mickey says around a mouthful of steak and cheese.

“You don’t see too many naked blondes sleeping off a bender on the beach. Gimme a flashlight.”

Mickey gets out of the car with two flashlights. Because he’s Mickey and hot to trade his shirt badge for a walleted one, he takes the lead, hurrying toward the spot where Andy had pretended to kill the grass with his bull stream.

Ridden as authoritatively as any horse in all of history before him, Andy Tane draws his pistol and squeezes off two rounds. Shot in the back, the dutiful and honorable Officer Scriver collapses facedown, his flashlight rolling on the close-cropped grass. Andy comes in fast behind him, the swivel holster on his utility belt slapping against his thigh, to pump a third round in the back of good Saint Mickey’s head, point-blank.

This will most likely be the last night of Andy Candy’s life; therefore, there’s no reason for him to dispose of the body or work out an alibi. He returns to the cruiser, throws the bags of takeout from the car, and drives out of the park.

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