“Okay, time to go,” Will said to the two in cuffs. He began to lead Huntingdon from the apartment, Jimmy behind him with the boy, whose name was Howard Mason, but suddenly something seemed to flare in Huntingdon’s brain, cutting through the drug fog.

“My baby,” she said. “I can’t leave my baby!”

“What baby?” asked Will.

“My little girl. She’s two. I can’t leave her alone.”

“Miss, there’s no child in this apartment. I searched it myself.”

But she struggled against him. “I’m telling you, my baby is here,” she shouted, and he could tell that she wasn’t faking or deluded. Her concern was very real.

One of the group in the living room, a black man in his twenties with a beginner’s Afro, said, “She ain’t lyin’, man. She do have a baby.”

Jimmy looked at Will. “You sure you searched the place?”

“It’s not Central Park.”

“Hell.” He turned Mason back toward the living room. “You, sit on the couch and don’t move,” he told him. “Okay, Sandra, you say you have a kid. Let’s find her. What’s her name?”

“Melanie.”

“Melanie, right. You’re sure you didn’t ask someone to look after her for the evening?”

“No, she’s here.” Huntingdon was crying now. “I’m not lying.”

“Well, we’ll soon find out.”

There weren’t very many places to search, but they called the girl’s name just the same. The two cops searched behind the couches, in the bathtub, and in the kitchen closets.

It was Will who found her. She was under the pile of coats on the bed. He could tell that the child was dead from the moment that his hand touched her leg.

Jimmy took a sip of wine.

“The kid must have wanted to lie on her mother’s bed,” he said. “Maybe she crawled under the first coat for warmth, then fell asleep. The other coats were just piled on top of her, and she suffocated under them. I can still remember the sound her mother made when we found her. It came from someplace deep and old. It was like an animal dying. And then she just folded to the floor, her arms still cuffed behind her. She crawled to the bed on her knees and started to burrow under the coats with her head, trying to get close to her little girl. We didn’t stop her. We just stood there, watching her.

“She wasn’t a bad mother. She worked two jobs, and her aunt looked after her kid while she was at work. Maybe she was doing a little dealing on the side, but the autopsy found that her daughter was healthy and well cared for. Apart from the night of the party, nobody ever had any cause to complain about her. What I’m saying is that it could have happened to anyone. It was a tragedy, that’s all. It was nobody’s fault.

“Your old man, though, he took it bad. He went on a bender the next day. Back then, your father could drink some. When you knew him, he’d cut all that stuff out, apart from the occasional night out with the boys. But in the old days, he liked a drink. We all did.

“That day was different, though. I’d never seen him drink the way he did after he found Melanie Huntingdon. I think it was because of his own circumstances. He and your mother wanted a child real bad, but it didn’t look like it was going to happen for them. Then he sees this little kid lying dead under a pile of coats, and something breaks inside him. He believed in God. He went to church. He prayed. That night, it must have seemed as if God was mocking him just for the hell of it, forcing a man who had seen his wife miscarry again and again to uncover the body of a dead child. Worse than that, maybe he stopped believing in any kind of God for a time, as if someone had just pulled up a corner of the world and revealed black, empty space behind it. I don’t know. Anyway, finding the Huntingdon kid changed him, that’s all I can say. After it, he and your mother went through a real rough patch. I think she was going to leave him, or he was going to leave her, I don’t recall which. Wouldn’t have mattered, I suppose. The end result would still have been the same.”

He put the glass down and let the candlelight play upon the wine, spreading red fractals upon the tabletop like the ghosts of rubies.

“And that was when he met the girl,” he sai R adquo; he d.

Her name was Caroline Carr, or that was what she said her name was. They had responded to an attempted B and E call at her apartment. It was the smallest apartment they had ever seen, barely large enough to contain a single bed, a closet, and a table and chair. The kitchen area consisted of two gas rings in one corner, and the bathroom was so tiny that it didn’t even have a door, just lengths of beaded string for privacy. It was hard to see why anyone might have considered it worth breaking into. One look around told them that the girl didn’t have anything worth stealing. If she had, she would have sold it to rent a bigger place.

But, in a strange way, the space suited her. She was tiny, just a shade over five feet tall, and thin with it. Her hair was long and dark and very fine, and her skin was translucently pale. It seemed to Jimmy that she might expire at any minute, but when he looked in her eyes he saw a real strength and ferocity at her core. She might have appeared fragile, but so did spider silk until you tried to break it.

She was frightened, though, of that he was certain. At the time, he put it down to the attempted burglary. Someone had clearly tried to jimmy the lock on the window from the fire escape outside. She had woken to the noise, and had immediately run to the phone in the hallway outside to call the cops. One of her neighbors, an elderly woman named Mrs. Roth, had heard her screaming and offered her safe haven in her apartment until the police came. As it happened, Jimmy and Will had been only a block away when the call from Central came through. Whoever had tried to break in was probably still at the window when the sirens began to sound. They filled out a 61, but there wasn’t much more that they could do. The perps were gone, and no harm had been done. Will suggested talking to the landlord about getting a better lock for the window, or maybe a security grille of some kind, but Carr just shook her head.

“I won’t be staying here,” she said. “I’m going to leave.”

“It’s the big city,” said Will. “These things happen.”

“I understand. I have to move, though.”

Her fear was palpable, but it didn’t seem to be controlling her. It wasn’t unreasoning, and it wasn’t merely an overreaction to a disturbing, if commonplace, incident. Whatever was frightening her, it was related only in part to the events of that night.

“Your father must have felt it too,” said Jimmy. “He was quiet as we drove away. We stopped to pick up a couple of coffees, and as we sat drinking them, he said: ‘What do you suppose that was about?’

“‘It’s going down as a 10-31. That’s all there is to it.’

“‘But that woman was scared.’

“‘She lives alone in a shoebox. Someone tries to break in, she hasn’t got too many places to run.’

“‘No, it’s more than that. She didn’t tell us everything.’

“‘What are you now, psychic?’ R a?’<

“Then he turned to me. He didn’t say anything. He just stared me down.

“‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You’re right. I felt it too. You want to go back?’

“‘No, not now. Maybe later.’

“But we never did go back. At least, I didn’t. Your father did, though. He went back. He might even have gone back that night, after the tour ended.

“And that was how it began.”

Will told Jimmy that he didn’t sleep with Caroline until the third time they met. He claimed that it had never been his intention to get involved with her in that way, but there was something about her, something that made him want to help her and protect her. Jimmy didn’t know whether to believe him or not, and he didn’t suppose it mattered much one way or another. There had always been a sentimental streak to Will Parker and, as Jimmy liked to say, quoting Oscar Wilde, “sentimentality is the bank holiday of cynicism.” Will was having problems at home and he was still troubled by the death of Melanie Huntingdon, so maybe he saw the possibility of some kind of escape in the form of Caroline Carr. He helped her to move. He found her a place on the Upper East Side, with more space and better security. He put her in a motel for two nights while he negotiated the rent down on her behalf, then drove into the city one morning instead of taking the train and put all of her belongings, which didn’t amount to much, in the back of his car and took her to her new apartment. The affair didn’t last longer than six or seven weeks.