A now-familiar chill fell over Keith as he walked through the doors of Manhattan House. Manhattan House, he said silently to himself. What were they trying to do, make people think it was a hotel instead of a jail?

The first time he'd come to the building nearly half a year ago-and the first time he'd felt the strange chill to which he'd never become inured-it seemed part of a world he could barely comprehend. Except for a smattering of well-dressed people he assumed were lawyers, the people milling in the lobby were the kind that he'd seen only on television.

People who would have been arrested in Bridgehampton for no other reason than the way they were dressed-if they'd ever appeared there at all.

The young ones all looked angry. Angry, and poor. The eyes that weren't glazed with drugs smoldered with fury, and when they glanced at him-which they rarely did-Keith knew that he looked as foreign to them as they did to him.

The older people-those his own age who were coming to see their children, just as he was coming to see his-looked only defeated. Most of them seemed as familiar with the jail and its procedures as he was with the building permit process in Suffolk County.

By his third visit, Keith had paid as little attention to the people in the lobby as they paid to him.

Today he didn't even have to think about the procedures- like any other habitue of the building, he automatically emptied his pockets, stepped through the metal detectors, and exchanged his driver's license for a visitor's badge. The officer who escorted him to Captain Mark Ralston's tiny office wore an expression as studiedly calm as Ralston's voice had been on the phone three hours ago. The office was painted the same sickly shade of greenish yellow that covered most of the walls in the building.

Ignoring the hand Ralston offered as he rose to his feet, Keith's angry gaze bored into the other man's eyes. "I want to know what happened."

Ralston's hand dropped to his side, and even though Keith Converse was still on his feet, he lowered himself back into the chair behind his desk. "I can tell you what happened," he said. "What I can't tell you is why it happened." He paused, and finally Keith sank onto the wooden chair that was the only piece of furniture in the room not covered with files or papers. He listened in silence as Ralston told him what he knew. "Two of our officers were on the way up to Rikers with your son when a car rammed their van. The van went over and caught on fire." Keith flinched, and Ralston's hands clenched into fists. "There was nothing that could be done, Mr. Converse. Two correction officers were trapped in the van, too. No one survived."

No one survived.

The words seemed to hang in the air, echoing and reechoing off the walls of the room, battering at Keith's mind like a jackhammer. As the words sank in, the hope he'd been clinging to ever since Ralston called him faded away. "I want to see him," he said quietly. His eyes fixed on Ralston once again, but this time the captain saw only pain in them. "I want to see my son."

Ralston hesitated. He'd already seen the bodies of the two officers who had died in the burning van, and he wondered if Keith Converse would be strong enough to deal with what he would see when he looked at his son. But he knew that Keith Converse had no more choice than he himself had a few hours ago. Looking at the bodies-actually gazing upon the countenance of death-had been the only way Ralston could accept the reality of what had happened to his two men, and he knew it was no different for Keith Converse.

"He's at the Medical Examiner's office," Ralston finally said. He started to write down the address on the back of one of his cards, then changed his mind. "I'll take you there."

Twenty minutes later, Keith Converse steeled himself as the attendant pulled open the drawer containing his son's body. As the young man started to pull back the sheet, Keith almost changed his mind, almost turned away. Perhaps sensing his hesitation, the attendant looked at him, as if to ask whether he truly wanted to do this. Keith nodded. The attendant drew the sheet back.

A face-or what had once been a face-lay exposed to the bright fluorescent glare. The skin was burned away, the eyes nothing more than charred sockets.

The nose had been smashed flat, and broken teeth showed through a lipless grimace.

What remnants of clothing hadn't burned had been carefully picked away. To Keith, there was something obscene about the nakedness of the body, and he had to fight an urge to turn away from it. But he couldn't. He had to look at Jeff, had to see him one last time.

As the attendant finally dropped the sheet back over the inert form, Keith found himself making the sign of the cross for the first time in years, and uttering a silent prayer for his son's soul.

"I'm very sorry, Mr. Converse," Mark Ralston said softly as they started out of the morgue.

Keith didn't speak until they left the building. "I can't believe it," he said then. He sucked air deep into his lungs and blew it out hard, as if trying to expel not only the foul scent of formaldehyde that had hung in the air, but also the terrible image that was the last memory he would ever have of his son.

"I wish there was something I could say…" Ralston began. He groped for the right words for a moment, then gave up, knowing there was nothing he could say that would give Keith Converse any comfort.

Keith shook his head. "I'll be okay-I just need to get used to it." He took another deep breath, and this time a shudder shook his body. "And I gotta figure out how I'm gonna tell his mother."

"It's hard," Ralston said. "I just wish there was something I could do…"

Keith looked up and fixed his gaze on the other man. "There was," he said. "There was something all of you could've done. You could've found out who really attacked Cynthia Allen." He jerked his head back toward the morgue. "Then my son would still be alive, wouldn't he?" His eyes locked onto Mark Ralston's. "Well, fuck you, Ralston. Fuck all of you." Turning around, he walked quickly away down the street.

Something had been gnawing at Keith, nibbling at the edge of his consciousness ever since he'd gotten back in the truck and started the long drive back out to Bridgehampton. Something about what he'd seen in the morgue.

About Jeff's body.

He hadn't wanted to remember that terrible sight at all, had hoped to blot it out of his consciousness. But no matter how hard he tried, it kept coming back. Coming back, jabbing at him.

Then, just as he was leaving the expressway, it came to him.

It wasn't something he'd seen at all-it was something he hadn't seen!

It was a tattoo-a small figure of a sun rising above a pyramid, which Jeff had let three of his friends talk him into getting during a spring break trip to the Caribbean two years ago. It had been etched into his skin, just inside his hip. "I wasn't really sure I wanted to do it at all," he'd explained when he finally showed it to his father. "So at least here no one can see it if I don't want them to. And if I really start hating it-or Heather hates it-I can have it removed with a laser."

Heather hadn't hated it, and as far as Keith knew, Jeff hadn't started hating it, either.

But the body he'd seen in the morgue hadn't had a tattoo.

Keith's heart was racing now, and he gripped the steering wheel tightly, his knuckles turning white as he slowed to a stop at the red light at the foot of the off ramp. He reached back into his memory, reluctantly pulling the image of Jeff's body into the forefront of his mind.

One of the only parts that hadn't been scorched was the groin. Like a tan line, he remembered thinking when the sheet had first been lifted and he'd seen horrible contrast between the badly burned skin above the waist and the less damaged skin lower down, where it had been protected by the heavy denim of his jeans.