After a few moments she says: “Thank you.”

“I had nothing to do with it. Believe me.”

“I am so sorry.”

Paris turns around, surprised at how much older she looks. “What are you sorry about again?”

“Everything. For making it personal for you. For putting you in danger.”

“I’m in danger by my second cup of coffee every day. You made a fool of me.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Look, if the prosecutor’s office didn’t consider you a victim in all this, they might think you were trying to frame me for a capital crime. Maybe they need a little prodding in that direction. A little character reference.” He drops a pair of black-and-white photos on the bed. Blurry photos of a woman running from the Dream-A-Dream Motel. “Maybe these would help.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand plenty. I understand there’s an active file in Robbery called the Kissing Bandit file. Romantic, huh? I understand how your prints led me right to a partial print in that file, a series of robberies about which no detective can ever seem to get a victim to stay on the record. It’s all about a woman who dumps a couple roofies in the Cuervo and shakes down horny middle-aged businessmen.”

Mary is silent for a moment, her heart quickening. “Everything I did, I did for my daughter. You have a little girl. Draw the line for me. What wouldn’t you do?”

Paris has no answer to this question.

But it is just one of many he is certain will never be answered, especially about the Ochosi murders. And he knows why. The fact that such a high-profile monster as Christian del Blanco is now behind bars, and the fact that the Comeback City can now begin to pave over the nightmare, means that a lot of the loose ends are never going to be tied up.

Paris buttons his coat, pulls on his gloves.

“Is this where you tell me to leave town?” she asks, her eyes riveted on the photos on the bed.

Paris walks to the door. He glances at the picture of the beautiful, dark-haired little girl on the nightstand. “If you were anyone else, I’d probably have to.”

“I understand.”

Paris holds her gaze, recalling the last time he had looked so deeply into her eyes. He told himself he wouldn’t, but does anyway. “Let me ask you something.”

“Anything.”

“None of it was real, right?”

Her face softens. She is young again. “All of it was real. We just met in hell.”

Paris doesn’t bother to respond.

Mary stands, takes a tentative step toward him, stops. “How do I prove it to you?”

Paris lingers for a moment, burnishing her silhouette deep into his memory, then turns and walks down the hall.

The packed courtroom is suffused with a jungle silence. Judge Eileen J. Corrigan presides. She finishes her decree. “You are to serve these terms consecutively, without the possibility of parole.”

In the demeaning light of a room where justice is done, Christian del Blanco looks broken, small. Although Paris had aimed dead-center at his chest, fully prepared to blast him to hell, when Christian had leapt up from the floor the bullet tore into his right hip instead. The unfortunate prognosis is that he will one day walk again.

“Is there anything you wish to say to the court at this time?” Judge Corrigan asks.

“No, your honor,” Christian says, head down, the perfect penitent.

“May God have mercy on your soul.” Judge Corrigan bangs her gavel. She pauses, briefly, then exits in a flurry of polished black cotton, an air of shunted revulsion.

Amid the melee of reporters leaving the courtroom, Jack Paris and Carla Davis wind their way to the defense table. Paris glances down at Christian del Blanco sitting in his wheelchair. He studies the man’s sharp hewn looks, thinking: He’s going to have a great time in prison.

Suddenly, Christian looks up, acknowledging Paris’s presence. The sheer blackness of his eyes chills Paris’s blood. Paris had looked into these eyes once before.

Except, that time, they belonged to Sarah Weiss.

Christian says: “I have to know.”

“Know?” Paris replies. “Know what?”

“How?”

Paris understands what Christian is talking about, just as he realizes that something like this would eat at a person like him. Christian the trickster, the man who had recruited a woman named Celeste Conroy to do his dirty work; Celeste who looked so much like Sarah Weiss that Paris had no trouble believing it really was her that night in his apartment. The magic mushroom helped a little, of course.

“You mean my little misdirection with the computer camera?” Paris asks.

“Yes.”

Paris leans forward, close enough to see the humiliation and defeat in the man’s eyes. “Well, the blood on my forehead and the door locks were the easy parts.” Paris reaches into his pocket, drops a packet of ketchup and a paper clip on the table. “Old magician tricks.”

Christian absently touches a finger to his own forehead.

Paris opens his briefcase. “The hard part, at least for someone like me, was learning about the video lag. That I got out of a book. A hell of a good book. I think even you might get something out of it.” Paris reaches into his briefcase, drops a thin, soft cover book on the table in front of Christian.

Web Cam for Dummies.

Paris leans close to Christian’s ear, and adds: “No offense.”

79

A week after Christian del Blanco’s sentencing, a January heat wave descends upon Cleveland. It is fifty degrees and portends an early spring, a lie that Clevelanders have bought into forever. It is Bobby Dietricht’s third day back on the job; Greg Ebersole’s first.

At noon, while looking out his window at the shirtsleeved men and the coatless women on the street, Paris hears Greg’s knock on his doorjamb.

“Hey, Greg.”

“Look at this. I can’t believe it,” Greg says, entering. “I was just going through the backlog of mail and I got this.”

He hands Paris a letter on a Mount Sinai Hospital letterhead.

“It’s gotta be a joke, right?” Greg asks. “It’s either a joke or a mistake, right?”

Paris reads:

Dear Mr. Ebersole: Please let the enclosed invoice serve as your paid-in-full statement regarding all medical bills for Maxim A. Ebersole, in the amount of forty-four thousand eight hundred sixty dollars, forwarded to us by The Becky’s Angel Foundation, a nonprofit organization.

“Wow,” Paris says, reading it a second time, then handing the letter back. “And you didn’t know anything about this?”

“Not a thing,” Greg says.

“Amazing.”

“Do you think I’ll be allowed to keep it? I mean, jobwise?”

“I’m not sure,” Paris says. “But if it’s a foundation, I’m pretty sure you can.”

Greg reads the letter again. “Have you ever heard of The Becky’s Angel Foundation?”

Paris has to smile.

Rebecca D’Angelo.

“I may have run across the name,” he says, his mind drifting to the old police report sitting on his dining room table, the one he had kept for so many years like a dirty secret, the one detailing how a then-assistant prosecutor was caught with a young girl in an alley behind the Hanna Theatre. An assistant prosecutor who now sits as a juvenile court judge.

Maybe I’ve found a use for that report after all, Paris thinks.

Greg shakes his head, smiles. “What a world, huh?”

“Yep,” Paris says, clapping his friend on the shoulder. “Crazier by the minute.”

“A fine specimen of dog,” Paris says. “Beautiful boy, Declan.” The Jack Russell terrier responds to Paris’s encomium, its muscular haunches propelling him from the ground up to Paris’s chest with one supple leap. “Is he a good ratter?”

“Oh yeah,” Mercedes replies. “He’s terrorized every squirrel for five blocks in every direction from my house. You’d think they’d have a contract out on him by now.”