The Blades sold two well-known brands of heroin. “Poison” was decorated with a scary black-and-white skull sticker, the brand name written in bloodred letters across its forehead. “Uzi” sported a realistic-looking decal of an Uzi, the brand name written in black letters along the silver gun barrel. Junkies had brand preferences like anybody else, and dealers came from as far away as Virginia and Ohio to buy these famous brands for their customers back home.

When a batch was ready, the mill manager summoned trusted junkies to test it. Too weak and it wouldn’t sell, too strong and the customers died like flies from ODs. If the batch passed muster, it was sent out to the Blades’ spots to be sold. The Blades ran retail spots all over New York City, most famously on Central and Troutman in Bushwick, where street pitchers sold dime bags to hordes of individual junkies. They also ran wholesale spots where out-of-town dealers could buy bundles of a hundred glassines at a time to sell at a markup back home. The Blades’ gross revenues from this enormous operation ran upwards of two hundred thousand dollars a day, 365 days a year. Where had all that money gone? Melanie wondered.

Dan and Randall had busted this huge operation wide open. They’d started with a single snitch, somebody they’d arrested one night with drugs and a gun. On the way to Central Booking, they’d told the guy he was looking at mandatory ten to life on the drugs alone, with a consecutive five years for the gun. His options were limited: either flip or rot in jail for the rest of his natural days. He flipped. They got him released on bail and back on the street in no time. The only difference was, now he was working for the feds.

With the snitch providing them key information, they’d applied for and gotten wiretaps on several telephones. The most important telephone was the one located at the most important heroin mill-an apartment on Evergreen Avenue in Bushwick rented in the name of Jasmine Cruz. Jasmine Cruz herself was a low-level figure, probably somebody’s girlfriend. Other than lending her name to the apartment and the telephone, she didn’t show up much in the documents. But Jasmine Cruz’s telephone served as the party line for the whole Blades hierarchy. Upper-level managers used it all day and all night to give orders to the Blades’ entire street organization. If Slice and Bigga were members of the C-Trout Blades four years ago, Melanie reckoned, they should have been intercepted talking on that phone.

Driven by that thought, she stood up and began searching through boxes for more on Jasmine Cruz’s telephone. She found a box labeled JASMINE CRUZ PHONE-SEARCH PHOTOS AND EVIDENCE and yanked the cover off. The first few folders held photographs taken by the search team after they raided the apartment. She leafed through the piles of eight-by-ten glossies. They all showed different views of a large living room, empty except for folding tables placed end to end to form a crude assembly line. The apartment itself looked dingy and run-down, with peeling paint and naked lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. In the photos, folding chairs sat askew or lay on the floor, telling the story. Their occupants had leaped up and tried to run when the feds kicked the door in. Close-ups showed piles of packing materials for heroin: tiny glassine bags, rolls of stickers, dispensers holding coveted “spoons”-the same long-handled white plastic McDonald’s coffee spoons Melanie recognized from her childhood. McDonald’s had discontinued their use years ago, but the black market for them remained strong; the spoons measured a perfect single dose and deposited it easily in a glassine. A table in the corner of the room held several digital scales and at least twenty kilo-size “bricks” of raw heroin, still wrapped in tape and waiting to be processed.

She pulled another folder, labeled SEIZED PHOTOS FROM JASMINE CRUZ APARTMENT, from the box. Different from the large, uniform glossies taken by the cops, these were snapshots of all different sizes and qualities, taken by the gang members themselves. Left lying around the apartment, they were seized as evidence during the raid. Melanie’s hopes rose at this typical sloppiness. Drug dealers and killers loved to record their exploits. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d shown a jury the defendant’s own pictures-posed holding his favorite gun or sitting in front of a big pile of cash. Her heart beat faster as she riffled through the contents of the folder, shuffling snapshots like playing cards. This might be something.

Most were pictures of young men she didn’t recognize, in baggy clothes, flashing gang hand signals and covered with home-drawn gang tattoos, some brandishing their guns. None of them was Slice, but she hadn’t expected to find him. From what she’d heard, he would never be careless enough to let himself be photographed. She leafed through these pictures hurriedly, impatient for something better.

Then, about halfway through, she came across several Polaroids of tortured animals. A cat and a chicken at first, their bodies mangled, torn to shreds. Something about the violence in the pictures seemed significant, although she couldn’t have said why.

The rabbit Polaroids were buried at the bottom of the folder, the very last pictures she found. In the first one, she couldn’t identify the animal. The copious blood threw her off, bits and pieces of fur awash in crimson muck, unrecognizable. But there was no mistaking the next one. The severed head of a rabbit, one ear ripped away, lying in a bloody pool on the floor of Jasmine Cruz’s apartment. The next Polaroid was even clearer-the rabbit’s decimated corpse, limbs missing. And in the bottom-right corner of that one, she finally saw it, what she’d stayed late to find. The blood-specked muzzle and large paws of a black dog, toying with the rabbit’s severed head. The same dog. It had to be. The same black dog that Rosario Sangrador had seen, that had mauled Jed Benson and ripped his throat open. That dog was in Jasmine Cruz’s apartment. Somebody there had taught it how to kill, and had snapped these pictures as souvenirs of the lessons. She turned the stiff Polaroid over. On the back the phrase NO JOKE was scrawled shakily in black marker, the capital letters lopsided, childishly formed. She took it as a message of evil intent, and it sent a chill of fear straight through her.

Or was the chill real? Leaning forward, hair spilling over her shoulders, Melanie felt a small draft kiss the exposed back of her neck. She heard no sound, saw no change in the light. But the stirring of the air told her that somebody stood silently in her open doorway, watching her. She knew this exact feeling. Knew it indelibly. Frozen, paralyzed, something dangerous behind her. Her father did what he could to warn her. “¡Corre, Melanie! ¡Él tiene pístola!” She tried to run, but the man was too fast. Legs kicked out from under her before she knew it, carpet rushing up to meet her face. The flash, the thunder of the report. “¡Papi, noooo!”

Here and now, she knew somebody was behind her. Whoever it was, he might have been standing there for a long time, so absorbed had she been in examining the photographs. She knew that the best option was to face him of her own accord. Why proclaim her fear by pretending to ignore him? Slowly and deliberately, she gathered her courage and turned around to see who stood behind her.