Except for Rebecca D’Angelo, Paris thinks, crazily. Then instantly boots the thought from his mind.

They reach the far end of the room, where there is a green leather pit couch. Sitting on the couch are three couples in their forties, chatting softly, drinks in hand. They glance up as Carla and Paris approach them.

“Everyone,” Herb says. “I’d like you to meet Cleopatra and John.”

Paris surveys the men. No one even promising.

“This is Maggie and Mort,” Herb says, gesturing to the couple on the left. They are a handsome couple—she is platinum blond, busty; he is tall, indoor tanned.

“This is Jake and Alicia.”

Jake is older than Paris thought initially. He looks closer to sixty at this range, wearing a very expensive rug and a tailored suit. Alicia, on the other hand, is a bombshell. Petite and Asian, toned, forties. She is wearing a tight fuchsia cocktail dress and the most painful-looking stiletto heels Paris has ever seen.

“And last but not least, Ed and Gilda.”

There clearly was a reason to leave Ed and Gilda to the end. Straight out of the late seventies, Ed wears a navy blue leisure suit; Gilda, a red-sequined tank top and hot pants. Paris isn’t sure if they are in costume, or simply unstuck in time.

“What can I get you to drink?” Herb asks Carla, rubbing his hands together like a Borgian alchemist.

“I’ll have a Pellegrino,” she says.

Herb appears crestfallen, as if just now realizing—and rightfully so—that the only way he would stand a snowball in a microwave’s chance of getting anywhere near Cleopatra is for her to be so shitface drunk she couldn’t see what he looked like. He asks: “Is Poland Spring okay? We, uh, ran out of Pellegrino.”

“That’s fine, Dante,” she says.

The saying of his nom de boudoir reenergizes Herb, who scoots off to the bar.

The next twenty minutes of conversation is a bizarre mix of politics, suburban woes, and thinly veiled sexual innuendo. Paris takes every opportunity to covertly examine rings and pendants and earrings and bracelets—anything that might bear a symbol remotely resembling the Ochosi sign. Or even anything looking vaguely Mexican in motif.

But he finds nothing.

The next hour and a half yields even less. Everyone seems to behave like people would behave at a regular cocktail party. No more sex talk than usual.

At ten o’clock, having gathered what Paris believes to have been zero evidence, they find themselves in the kitchen with Herb again.

“We want you to come back for our New Year’s Eve party,” Herb says.

“Both of us, right?” Carla asks, slipping on her coat, arching her back in such way as to bring her breasts to within inches of Herb’s face.

Herb zones for a moment, then, clearly meaning precisely the opposite, says: “Of course. I asked around. You were both a big hit tonight.”

“You noticed the door, too?” Carla asks. They are sitting at a red light on Silsby Road, having just gotten off the radio with the University Heights PD, standing down the operation.

“Yeah. I leaned against it for a minute while Gilda was telling me about her love for maraschino cherries and highballs mixed with Vernors, not regular ginger ale. It was locked.”

“But you heard the music, right?”

“Oh yeah. It was faint, but it was definitely coming from another room.”

At the Macy’s parking lot, Paris’s pager goes off. He holds it up to the streetlight. “It’s Reuben,” he says. “And he’s tagged it urgent.”

Paris looks at Carla; she at him.

He doesn’t have to ask.

Carla edges out into the intersection, looks both ways, throws a blue light onto the roof of her car, and heads west on Cedar Road at a high rate of speed, toward the morgue on Adelbert Road.

The old man is laid out on a table, naked, his genitals covered by a powder blue towel, his bony, hairless skull so flowered with liver spots that at first Paris thinks he is looking at mummified remains of some sort.

“Hey Jacquito,” Reuben says. Reuben is wearing a bloodied apron, no mask. “And hello Sergeant Davis. How ya doin’? You look great.”

Reuben Ocasio is middle-aged, overweight, and, by any community standard, has the face of a bulldog with mumps, yet he is still willing to tread where younger, fitter, better-looking men fear to go. Over a dead body, in the morgue, he is trying to sweet-talk Carla Davis.

“I’m well, Dr. Ocasio,” Carla replies, all business, wisely leaving her coat on. The white dress would all but incapacitate Reuben. “What do we have?”

“Call me Reuben. Please.”

“Reuben,” Carla says, getting it over with.

Reuben smiles at her, as if he had scored some kind of point, then looks at his clipboard. “We have Isaac Levertov, seventy-nine years of age. My preliminary findings are that Mr. Levertov died by strangulation.” Reuben points to the deep purple welt at the base of the old man’s neck. “His wife reported him missing a few days ago. Found him on the roof of his building. She said he ran a hot dog cart in the neighborhood. Right up until the day he turned up missing.”

“Why are we here, Reuben?” Paris asks. “Who’s the primary detective on this case?”

“Ivan Kral is the primary. But I found something I know you’ll be interested in.”

Reuben picks up a nine-by-twelve envelope, opens the clasp.

And Paris knows. “You found more of the purple cardboard.”

“Yep.”

“Damn it,” Paris shouts. He walks across the room, back, hands on hips. He calms. “How much?”

“Not much.” Reuben places five or six eight-by-ten black-and-white photos in front of Paris and Carla. The top photo is of the first strip of cardboard they had found in Fayette Martin’s shoe. The second photo is of an almost identical strip, this time containing other parts of the letters.

“Where was it?” Paris asks.

“Underneath the old man’s upper plate. Not enough surface area for prints. Saliva belongs to only the deceased. SIU is going through all of Willis Walker’s effects now. If our boy is planting one puzzle piece per corpse, there might be something there.”

Paris looks at the final few photographs. Composites of the pieces of cardboard put together in a variety of ways.

“I still don’t see anything,” Paris says.

“The middle word is is, definitely,” Carla says. “And it looks like it ends in g.”

“Yeah,” Reuben says. “That’s about as far as I got.”

“Did you send it out?” Paris asks.

“Yeah. I brought it over myself about a half hour ago. Clay Patterson says it just might be enough to extrapolate the rest of the letters. Waiting for the fax right now.”

“Who is the guy on the table?” Carla asks. “Where did he live?”

Reuben looks at the chart again. “Let’s see . . . he lived at 3204-A Fulton Road.”

The address trips a switch in Paris. He removes his notebook from his pocket, flips back a number of pages. “Say that address again.”

Reuben does.

“Holy shit,” Paris says.

“What?”

“La Botanica Macumba is at 3204 Fulton,” he says. “This guy lived upstairs. What the hell is going on here, Reuben?”

“I don’t know, amigo. I just sort through blood and guts.”

“Have you found anything on him like the Ochosi symbol?”

“Nothing like that,” Reuben says. “But I haven’t been everywhere on him. I’m by myself here tonight. As soon as I get the fax I’ll—”

No sooner does Reuben say the words than the fax machine in his cubicle at the other side of the autopsy theater hums to life. The three of them cross the room, crowd around the fax machine.

First comes a cover page with a hand-scrawled note on a DigiData letterhead.

Reuben. These cardboard strips were cut from the back of a DVD box. The UPC code is 786936297256. Unfortunately, it is a commercial release available just about everywhere DVDs are sold—amazon.com, eBay, etc. Maybe that’s why it took all of ten minutes to nail it down. The full graphic follows.