Until it had become clear that Danny Gordon was not going to die. Then the priest had acted in desperation to save his worthless guilty hide.

And then, in one night, the whole case had gone to hell. As a direct result of that, Renny had lost his rank. An indirect result of the whole mess had been the loss of his marriage.

Joanne had been gone three years now. When the Danny Gordon case fell apart and Renny's career took a dive, he took it out on everybody around him. Joanne had been around the most so she bore the brunt of his rage and frustration and growing obsession with bringing the killer to justice. She took as much as she could—two years worth. Then she folded. She packed up and left. Renny didn't blame her. He knew he'd been impossible to live with. Still was, he was sure. He blamed himself. And he blamed Danny Gordon's killer. He added the Augustino marriage to the list of the killer's victims.

One more thing I owe you for, you bastard.

But what was really going on here? Now. Today. Had the killer priest he'd been chasing the past five years finally surfaced, or was this just a coincidence? He couldn't tell for sure. And he wanted it so bad, he didn't trust his own judgment.

He decided on a second opinion.

He placed a call to Columbia University and arranged to meet Dr. Nicholas Quinn in half an hour. At Leon's, Midtown North's watering hole.

Dr. Nick arrived just as Renny was downing the last of his second Scotch. Not bad time, considering the guy had to come all the way from Morningside Heights. They shook hands—they didn't see each other often enough to forgo that formality—and moved to a table. Renny carried his third Scotch along, Nick brought an eight-ounce draft.

Renny savored the dark and the quiet, not minding the mixed odors of stale smoke and spilled beer. Not often you could have a quiet drink or three in Leon's; only when it was mid-shift, like now. But in forty-five minutes, when the first shift ended, look out. Most all .of Midtown North would be here, three deep at the bar.

"So, Nick," Renny said. "What're you up to?"

"Particle physics," the younger man said. "You really want to hear?"

"Not really. How's the love life?"

Nick sipped his beer. "I love my work."

"Don't worry," Renny said. "It's just a phase you're going through. You'll get over it."

Renny smiled and looked at his companion. Dr. Nick, as he called him—or Nicholas Quinn, Ph.D., as the people at Columbia called him—was an odd-looking duck. But weren't physicists supposed to be weird? Look at Einstein. There'd been a strange-looking guy if there ever was one. So maybe Nick had a right to look weird. From what Renny had been able to gather, Nick Quinn had an Einstein-league brain. And under all that unkempt hair, an Elephant Man-shaped skull. He also had bad skin, pale with lots of little scars, as if he'd had a severe case of acne as a teenager. And his eyes. He was wearing contacts these days, but Renny had a feeling from their wide stare and the flattened look of his eye sockets that he'd probably worn Coke bottle lenses most of his life. Thirtyish, thin, a little stooped, and developing a paunch. Not surprisingly, he was single. A true nerdo from the git-go. But who knew? Maybe someday he'd find himself the perfect nerdella, and together they'd raise a family of nerdettes.

"How's by you?" Nick said.

"Couldn't be better, kid. Took me five years, but I'm a detective sergeant again."

"Congratulations," Nick said, hoisting his beer.

Renny nodded but didn't drink. It was old news. And besides, he never should have been busted down in the first place.

"And Joanne found herself an insurance salesman out on the Island and got remarried."

Nick didn't seem to know how to take that.

"Don't worry, kid. That's good news too. No more alimony payments."

Renny did take a sip for that one, but there was no celebration inside. Joanne. Remarried. The finality of the news had taken a while to sink in: She'd nailed down the coffin lid on any hopes of a reconciliation.

"Speaking of news," Nick said, "why'd you want to see me?"

Renny smiled. "Anxious?"

"No. Curious. I've been calling you regularly since it happened, and for years now it's always the same answer: nothing new. Now you call me. I know you like to keep people dangling, Mr. Detective, and I've been dangling long enough. What've you got?"

Renny shrugged. "Maybe something, maybe nothing." He pulled the letter from Southern Bell from his pocket and slid it across the table. "This came today."

He watched Nick study it. They'd met five years ago, during the Danny Gordon case. But they'd stayed in touch since. That had been Nick's idea. After Renny had blown the Gordon case, Nick had shown up in the squad room—Renny had been working out of the 112th in Queens then—and offered to help in any way he could. Renny had told him thanks but no thanks. The last thing he needed was a nerdy citizen getting in the way. But Nick had persisted, pulling on the common thread that linked the three of them.

Orphans. Renny, Danny Gordon, and Nick Quinn—they'd all been orphans. And they'd all spent a good part of their childhood in the St. Francis Home for Boys in Queens. Renny had lived there in the forties until he was adopted by the Augustinos. Nick had spent most of the sixties there before being adopted by the Quinn family, and had known the killer-priest well. That alone made Nick an asset. But on top of that, Nick was brilliant. A mind like a computer. He'd sifted through all the evidence and run it all through his brain, and had come up with a theory that was hard to refute, one that made the suspect, Father Ryan, look clean… up to a point.

What Nick's scenario couldn't explain was the eyewitness accounts of Father Ryan carrying Danny Gordon from the hospital and driving off with him, never to be seen again.

In anybody's book, that was called kidnapping.

Renny felt his jaw muscles bunching even now as he thought about it. He'd liked that priest, had even thought they were friends. What a jerk he'd been. Allowed himself to be set up so the priest could pull an end run around him and leave him looking like a Grade-A asshole. An empty-handed asshole who'd let some sicko bastard snatch a child victim from right under his nose. The memory still sent icy fury howling through him like a hungry wind.

"North Carolina," Nick said, looking up from the letter. "Think it might be him?"

"I don't know what to think. It sort of came out of the blue."

"How—?"

"A long-term gain on a short-term investment, you might say."

Five years ago, when Father Ryan had taken off with the boy, and seemed to have got away clean, Renny had put out a man-and-a-boy description of the fugitive pair, but had added a new wrinkle. Through the FBI he'd asked the East Coast phone companies to be on the lookout for complaints about a certain kind of prank phone call that Renny had come to associate with the missing priest. There'd been a fair amount of returns on that at first, and for a while Renny had thought they were zeroing in on Ryan, but just when he'd been sure they were going to run him to ground, he disappeared. Suddenly, Father Ryan was gone, vanished from the face of the earth as if he'd never existed.

Nick dropped the letter onto the table and reached for his beer.

"I don't know. It's so vague. Isn't there some way you can talk to anyone down there?"

"Already have. Couldn't get anything firsthand, though. It happened on the street near a bus stop. The people who'd actually listened to the phone had boarded their bus and gone home by the time the police and emergency squads had arrived. But there seemed to be a definite consensus that the call was from a child in trouble."

Just like the other calls, Renny thought, his mind leaping back five years to the waiting area outside the children's ward at Downstate. He still had nightmares about that endless week in hell, the door to Danny's hospital room looming before him, drawing him forward, opening to reveal the horrors that lay behind it. And he remembered that phone call.