By then Jay was pretty sure that he wouldn't be finding either Sascha or Ezili at home. At least not alive. He moved quietly to the bedroom door, opened it a crack, listened for any sounds, heard none, and moved out into the hallway.

The subdivided loft was a lot bigger than he'd supposed. There was the living room, the lavish kitchen, two baths, and six bedrooms. The closer he got to the back, the worse it smelled. When he opened the door to the back bathroom, he gagged and retreated.

The dressing table in the adjoining bedroom offered a dozen different perfumes. Jay found a lace handkerchief in a drawer, doused it liberally, and held it over his mouth and nose. Then he went back to the bathroom to see who'd died. Streetlight poured wanly through a small frosted-glass window onto the tiled floor. Jay could see the tiny pale shapes of the maggots swarming over the corpse. Even through the handkerchief, the smell was overwhelming. Jay forced himself to turn on the lights.

It was a child. A boy, he guessed, though there was barely enough left to tell. Bigger than the weird little monkey thing he'd chased through the Dime Museum, but way too small to be Sascha or Ezili. Jay remembered seeing someone small and somehow misshapen run for the bedroom when Sascha had burst in on him and Ezili. Maybe it was her kid… But would a mother just go off and leave her dead child's corpse to rot on the bathroom floor?

The body was too far gone in putrefaction for close inspection, and the maggots reminded him unpleasantly of the white cone-faced thing in his dream. But he made himself stare at the decaying flesh. Definitely a joker. He was naked, and at first he seemed to have too many limbs, but Jay finally decided that the long swollen thing between his legs was a tail. The body lay facedown, and Jay couldn't make out his features, but there was a huge open sore on the side of his neck, writhing with maggots.

Jay had seen enough. He turned off the light, shut the door, and stood in the darkened hallway, considering his options. He could call the cops. Only this time he wasn't there by invitation. This time he'd done a little breaking and entering. Jay decided he'd let somebody else claim the prize for once. He jammed the handkerchief back into his pocket and began to search the apartment.

No one was home. No one had been home for some time. Except for the dead boy in the john, the tenants had cleared out in a hurry. Jay found open drawers where clothing had been pulled out and packed in a big rush. The furniture had been left behind, along with the strange Haitian shit that he'd noticed on his last visit, but most of the personal effects had been removed.

But not all. Enough remained to make Jay pretty damn certain that Ezili, Sascha, and the dead kid hadn't lived here alone. In one bedroom, he found a stack of weight-lifting magazines beside the bare mattress on the floor, along with a set of barbells that showed signs of hard use. Somehow he couldn't imagine Sascha pumping iron.

Another room had been sealed, its windows bricked shut, then fixed up like some kind of medieval torture chamber. Iron manacles hung from soundproofed walls, and a long dissection table stood in the center of the room, with deep grooves for the runoff of blood. Behind the closet doors, Jay found a rolling instrument cart, carefully hung with knives, pliers, thumbscrews, and other toys, even an antique dentist's drill, its bit still crusted with dried blood.

There were used syringes and scattered pills on the floor of a third bedroom, among bean-bag chairs and throw pillows that reminded him of a hippie crash pad in the sixties. The linen closet had been turned into a wine cellar. Even Jay knew enough about wine to realize that Chateau Lafitte Rothschild cost a few bucks, and some of the other labels looked kind of pricey, too.

In the fridge Jay found bottles of Dom Perignon, a can of beluga caviar, and other imported delicacies. Everything looked scumptious, but somehow he wasn't very hungry.

The hall closet was full of winter clothing that the tenants had forgotten in their haste. A linen jacket dangled from a hook inside the door, and the rack was crammed. There were women's coats in mink and Russian sable and something spotted that was probably an endangered species, plus a leather aviator's jacket and some very expensivelooking items in cashmere, suede, and camel's hair, mixed right in with denim and polyester, men's stuff and women's stuff together, in a range of sizes that went all the way to the extremes. No gray-checked sport jackets with bullet tears in the shoulder, though; Jay looked. He was standing there contemplating the coats when the phone rang.

A chill went through him. He remembered the funeral home, the strange call from the woman who spoke with Chrysalis's voice. No, he thought, not this time. No one knows I'm here. Wrapping the damp, perfumed handkerchief around his hand, he picked up the receiver and held it to hisf ear.

"I been calling all day, where the hell you been?" a man's voice said. "I got to have the kiss, you hear me? I need it. You don't know the kind of pressure I'm under here." It all came out in one long breathless rush; only then did the speaker seem to realize that he hadn't heard a hello yet. "Ezili, is it you?"

Jay spoke through the handkerchief and tried to disguise his voice. "She's not here," he said. "Who's this?"

There was a moment of silence. "Who am I talking to?" the caller asked, in a sharp voice that was eerily familiar. "Sascha," Jay said, trying to talk like Sascha.

"You're not Sascha," the man said.

So much for that plan. Jay decided his best policy was to shut up and listen.

"Who is this?" the caller demanded. "You play games with me, you're in big trouble."

That did it. He knew the voice. And all of a sudden Jay was deeply grateful that he hadn't phoned the police. He dropped the receiver back into its cradle and got up fast.

Kant could have a cruiser here in minutes. Jay had to move. He'd taken two steps when he noticed the message pad beside the phone. He went back. The top sheet had been ripped off, but he could still see the impressions on the sheet below. Two columns of numbers marched down the sheet in parallel. Times.

Jay pocketed the pad and retreated back to the fire escape. You didn't need to graduate with honors from detective school to figure this one out. Flight times. Sascha wasn't going to be coming to work anytime soon, and Jay had a funny hunch he knew what city the bartender had fled to.

Thursday July 21, 1988

1:00 A.M.

"You're taller," Jay said to Digger. Only a little, but when you start at three inches, an inch or two makes a difference. "Yeah, yeah," Downs said, from where he was perched in Oral Amy's lap. "The brat had to come in every morning before school and reshrink the ones needed it most. Otherwise you grow"

"Slowly," Jay said, locking the office door behind him. "Slowly," Digger admitted gloomily. "Where the hell you been? I figured Hartmann had gotten to you for sure."

"Hartmann's in Atlanta," Jay pointed out. "I doubt he even knows I'm alive."

"Don't bet on it," the reporter said, his tone gloomy. "So what's going on? You blow the whistle?"

"No," Jay said. He went on into the back room, turned on the lights and the fan, sat down at his desk.

Digger jumped down off Oral Amy and came trotting after him, his little feet pitter-pattering on the hardwood floor. "What the hell you waiting for, an engraved invitation from the White House?" he said in an aggrieved voice. "They've started balloting down in Atlanta, Hartmann could win the nomination while you're shuffling around picking your nose. You going to let the guy who had Chrysalis killed become president?"