"And do what, Joe? Why don't I take Mr. Frears and leave here for Gail's house?"

"Can you get out without being seen?"

"Sure. Through the carport and across the alley to the Dzwrjskys'. Mona will loan me her ex-husband's station wagon. Gail's at work, but I know where the extra key is. We'll leave Detective Myers sitting down the street all day."

Kurtz slowed the Boxster to below seventy. "I don't know…"

"Joe, there's something else. I checked our business e-mail from here and there's a message to you that was copied to my e-mail address. It was dated at one p.m., and it's signed just 'P. "

Pruno, thought Kurtz. Likely checking up on whether he'd met with Frears. "It's probably not important," said Kurtz.

"The message says that it's urgent, Joe. Let me read it to you— Joseph, absolutely imperative that you meet me as soon as possible at that place where the thing occurred on midsummer night's eve. This is urgent. P. "

"Oh, man," said Kurtz. "All right. Call me as soon as you get to Gail's place." He folded the phone away, took a high-speed exit onto Delavan Avenue, drove east a block, and accelerated south on Fillmore.

The main Buffalo train station was a dignified and imposing structure in its time; now, after being abandoned for a decade, it was a sad mess. The sprawling structure was dominated by a twenty-story tower built along the lines of one of the brooding, stepped-back skyscrapers in Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis. On the twelfth-story level of each corner of the tower, oversized clocks had stopped at different times. Some shards of glass remained in the hundreds of broken windows, which made the battered facade look all the more dismal. Besides the two main entrances on the tower building, four large, awninged and arched doorways that looked like entrances to blimp hangars had been situated along the five-story main structure to allow the thousands of passengers to enter and leave the huge complex without undue jostling.

There were no crowds jostling today. Even the hilly driveway to the expanse of the abandoned parking lot was drifted over with snow. Kurtz parked the Porsche Boxster on a side street and walked past the boulders placed in the drive to keep cars out of the lot. Trespassers and winos and kids intent on breaking the last of the windows had left a myriad of old and new footprints in the snow on the lot, so there was no way for Kurtz to tell who had passed here when. He followed some tracks across to the hurricane fence around the station itself and found a three-foot height of wire cut just under one of the yellow Keep out. No Trespassing signs. He passed under the massive overhang with its NEW YORK & BUFFALO RAILROAD legend just visible in the rusting metal and dimming light. The huge doors were firmly sealed with sheet metal and plywood, but the corner of one of the window coverings had been jimmied loose, and Kurtz squeezed his way in there.

It was much colder inside than out. And darker. The tall, high windows that had once sent down shafts of sunlight onto soldiers traveling off to World War II and onto the weeping families left behind were all dark and boarded up now. A few frightened pigeons took flight in the great, dim space as Kurtz crunched his way across the littered tile.

The old waiting areas and the ramps to the train platforms were empty. Kurtz climbed a short staircase to the tower building that had once housed the railroad offices, pried open a plywood barrier, and walked slowly through narrow corridors into the main hall. Rats scurried. Pigeons fluttered.

Kurtz slid his pistol out, racked a round into the chamber, and carried the gun by his side as he moved into the wide, dark space.

"Joseph." The whisper seemed to come from the far corner, forty feet from Kurtz, but there were only shadows and a tumble of old benches there.

He half-raised the gun.

"Up here, Joseph."

Kurtz stepped farther out into the hall and peered up at the mezzanines in the darkness. A shadow beckoned.

Kurtz found the staircase and climbed, leaving a trail through fallen plaster. The old man was waiting for him by the railing on the second mezzanine. He was carrying what looked to be a lumpy garment bag.

"Rather interesting acoustics," said Pruno. The old man's stubbled face seemed even more pale than usual in the dim light. "They accidentally constructed a whispering gallery when they built this hall. All sounds uttered up here seem to converge in that corner down there."

"Yeah," said Kurtz. "What's up, Pruno? You interested in Frears?"

"John?" said the old heroin addict. "Well, of course I'm interested in that, since I put you two in contact, but I assumed that you did not decide to help him. It's been almost a week. To be truthful, Joseph, I'd almost forgotten."

"What is it, then?" said Kurtz. "And why here?" He gestured at the dark hall and the darker mezzanines. "This is a long way from your usual haunts."

Pruno nodded. "It seems that there is a literal dead man in my usual haunt."

"A dead man. Who?"

"You wouldn't know him, Joseph. A homeless contemporary of mine. I believe his name was Clark Povitch, a former accountant, but the other addicts and street persons have known him as Typee for the last fifteen years or so."

"What did he die of?"

"A bullet," said Pruno. "Or two bullets, I believe, although I am no forensic expert."

"Someone shot your friend in your shack?"

"Not my friend, precisely, but in this inclement weather, Typee sometimes availed himself of my hospitality—specifically of my Sterno heater—when I was elsewhere."

"Do you know who killed him?"

"I do have a clue. But it does not seem to make any sense, Joseph."

"Tell me."

"An acquaintance of mine, a lady named Mrs. Tuella Dean—I believe you would refer to her as a bag lady—was on a grate today, under some newspapers and inadvertently concealed, on the corner of Elmwood and Market when she heard a patrolman outside his parked squad car speaking on either his radio telephone or a cell phone. The patrolman was giving directions to my domicile and mentioned my name… names, actually… and actually gave a description of me to his interlocutor. According to Mrs. Dean, the patrolman's tone was almost obsequious, as if speaking to a superior. She happened to mention this to me when I saw her near the HSBC arena just before I returned home and discovered Typee's body."

Kurtz took in a long, cold breath of air. "Did this Mrs. Dean catch the other guy's name?"

"She did, actually. A Captain Millworth. I would presume that this would mean a captain of police."

Kurtz let out the breath.

"There would seem to be no connection," said Pruno, "as police captains are not known for murdering the homeless, but it would be too much of a coincidence to think the events are unrelated. Also, there is another mild coincidence here that worries me."

"What's that?"

"To a stranger," said Pruno, "to someone who knew me only from another person's description, Typee might look a little bit like me. Quite a lot like me, actually."

Kurtz reached out and took his old friend's sharp elbow through the overcoat and other rags. "Come on," he said softly, hearing his whisper repeated in the darkness below. "We're getting out of here."