“Don’t worry,” she added, as Will and Jimmy resigned themselves to a long wait, “she’s got company. Her friend, the older lady, she arrived with her, and her sister went in just a few minutes ago.”

Both men stopped.

“Sister?” said Will.

“Yeah, her sister.” The nurse spotted the look on Will’s face and instantly became defensive. “She had ID, a driver’s license. Same name. Carr.”

But Will and Jimmy were already moving, heading right, not left.

“Hey, I told you, you can’t go down there,” shouted the receptionist. When they ignored her, she reached for a phone and called security.

The door to room 8 was closed when they reached it, and the corridor was empty. They knocked, but there was no reply. As Jimmy reached for the handle, his mother appeared from around the corner.

“What are you doing?” she said.

Then she saw the guns.

“No! I just went to the bathroom. I-”

The door was locked from the inside. Jimmy stepped back and kicked at it twice before the lock shattered and the door flew open, exposing them to a blast of cool air. Caroline Carr lay on a raised gurney, her he R qrney, herad and back supported by pillows. The front of her gown was drenched with red, but she was still alive. The room was cold because the window was open.

“Get a doctor!” said Will, but Jimmy was already shouting for help.

Will went to Caroline and tried to hold her, but she was starting to spasm. He saw the wounds to her stomach and chest. A blade, he thought; someone used a blade on her, and on the child. No, not just someone: the woman, the one who had watched her lover die beneath the wheels of a truck. Caroline’s eyes turned to him. Her hand gripped his shirt, staining it with her blood.

And then there were doctors, and nurses. He was pulled away from her, forced out of the room, and as the door closed he saw her fall back against the pillows and lie still, and he knew that she was dying.

But the child survived. They cut it from her as she died. The blade had missed its head by a quarter of an inch.

And while they delivered it, Will and Jimmy went hunting for the woman who had killed Caroline Carr.

They heard the sound of the car as soon as they exited the clinic, and seconds later a black Buick shot from the lot to their left and prepared to turn onto Gerritsen Avenue. A streetlight caught the face of the woman as she glanced toward them. It was Will who reacted first, firing three shots as the woman responded to their presence, turning left instead of right so that she would not have to cross in front of them. The first shot took out the driver’s window, and the second and third hit the door. The Buick sped away as Will fired a fourth time, running behind it as Jimmy raced for their own car. Then, as Will watched, the Buick seemed to wobble on its axles, then began to drift to the right. It struck the curb outside the Lutheran church, then mounted it and came to a rest against the railings of the churchyard.

Will continued running. Now Jimmy was at his side, all thoughts of their own vehicle abandoned when the other car had come to a stop. As they drew nearer, the driver’s door opened and the woman stumbled out, clearly injured. She glanced back at them, a knife in her hand. Will didn’t hesitate. He wanted her dead. He fired again. The bullet struck the door, but by then the woman was already moving, abandoning the car, her left foot dragging. She dived left onto Bartlett, her pursuers closing the distance rapidly. As they turned the corner, she seemed frozen beneath a streetlight, her head turned, her mouth open. Will aimed, but even injured she was too fast. She stumbled to her right, down a narrow alley called Canton Court.

“We have her,” said Jimmy. “That’s a dead end. There’s just the creek down there.”

They paused as they reached Canton, then exchanged a look and nodded. Their weapons held high, they entered the dark space between two cottages that led to the creek.

The woman was standing with her back to the creek bank, caught in the moonlight. The knife was still held in her hand. Her coat was slightly too long for her, and the sleeves hung over the second knuckles of her fingers, but not so far as to obscure the blade.

“Put it down,” said Jimmy, but he was not talki R qas not tang to her, not yet. Instead, while his eyes remained fixed on the woman, he laid the palm of his hand on the warm barrel of Will’s revolver, gently forcing it down. “Don’t do it, Will. Just don’t.”

The woman twisted the blade, and Jimmy thought that he could still see traces of Caroline Carr’s blood on it.

“It’s over,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly soft and sweet, but her eyes were twin shards of obsidian in the pallor of her face.

“That’s right,” said Jimmy. “Now drop the knife.”

“It doesn’t matter what you do to me,” said the woman. “I am beyond your law.”

She dropped the knife, but at the same time, her left hand moved, the sleeve of her coat pulling back to reveal the little pistol concealed by its folds.

It was Jimmy who killed her. He hit her twice before she could get a shot off. She remained standing for a second, then tumbled backward into the cold waters of the Shell Bank Creek.

She was never identified. The receptionist at the hospital confirmed that she was the same woman who had claimed to be Caroline Carr’s sister. A false Virginia driver’s license in the name of Ann Carr was found in her coat pocket, along with a small quantity of cash. Her fingerprints were not on file anywhere, and nobody came forward to identify her even after her picture appeared on news shows and in the papers.

But that came later. For now, there were questions to be asked, and to be answered. More cops came. They flooded the clinic. They sealed off Bartlett. They dealt with reporters, with curious onlookers, with distressed patients and their relatives.

While they did so, a group of people met in a room at the back of the hospital. They included the hospital director; the doctor and midwife who had been monitoring Caroline Carr; the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal affairs; and a small, quiet man in his early forties, Rabbi Epstein. Will Parker and Jimmy Gallagher had been instructed to wait outside, and they sat together on hard plastic chairs, not speaking. Only one person, except for Jimmy, had expressed her sorrow to Will at what had occurred. It was the receptionist. She knelt before him while he waited, and took his hand.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “We all are.”

He nodded dumbly.

“I don’t know if-,” she began, then stopped. “No, I know it won’t help, but maybe you might like to see your son?”

She led him to a glass-walled room, and she pointed out the tiny child who lay sleeping between two others.

“That’s him,” she said. “That’s your boy.”

They were called into the meeting room minutes later. Those present were introduced to them, all except for one man in a su R q man in ait who had followed the two cops into the room, and was now watching Will carefully. Epstein leaned toward Will and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Will did not reply.

It was the deputy commissioner, Frank Mancuso, who formally broke the silence.

“They tell me you’re the father,” he said to Will.

“I am.”

“What a mess,” said Mancuso, with feeling. “We need to get the story straight,” said Mancuso. “Are you two listening?”

Will and Jimmy nodded in unison.

“The child died,” said Mancuso.