“You’d be better off crying.”

“Please—someone just help me understand what’s happened.” Babe began sobbing.

Her mother hugged her. “You’ve understood enough for one day.”

As Lucia and Hadley Vanderwalk were leaving the hospital, an administrator by the name of Thelma T. Blauberg stopped them, introduced herself, and asked if they’d had a nice visit with their daughter.

Lucia stared for a moment at the woman’s inquiring blue eyes—a little too inquiring—and curly gray hair. “An excellent visit, thank you.”

“I’m so glad. Naturally, the hospital will say nothing about Mrs. Devens’s recovery to anyone. But there is a C-3 on her file. Police notification required if victim dies or recovers consciousness. Normally we try to comply within eight hours.”

2

“I LIKE IT VERY much,” the man said.

Melissa Hatfield caught something in the voice. There was a “but” there. Her eyes fixed on the short man, with a full head of gray hair. He was wearing designer slacks, a striped polo shirt.

The room was a thirty-by-fifty-foot cave of white light, shimmering like an image on a TV screen with the brightness set too high. Sun bounced off naked walls and inlaid floor.

“You can remodel,” Melissa Hatfield suggested.

Nothing about selling apartments in the more than ten years Melissa Hatfield had been selling them had ever been easy. Real estate in Manhattan was a buyer’s market and this man knew it.

“What does the maintenance run?” he asked.

“Seventeen fifty.”

He coughed—a hacking sound that came from his chest. “Cold in here,” he said.

Noon sun beat against the French doors, but an icy current was flowing through the air.

The man’s wife called him to the terrace. “We can put a garden there.”

She was pointing. Short and dark-haired, she was wearing battered blue clogs, a pullover, and a red sweater tied around her neck by its sleeves. The I’m-rich-and-I-don’t-need-to-impress-you look.

Melissa Hatfield wondered if this was their idea of how to spend Memorial Day weekend: Let’s go tour some upmarket co-ops and pretend we’re interested in buying. “We can arrange terms,” she said. “Ten percent down will hold it.”

The man was staring into her eyes so determinedly she felt an impulse to laugh. He was trying to do it all at once: come on to her, turn down the apartment, maintain his image as a high roller.

“You’re very kind,” he said.

His wife crossed toward the hall, looking over the cherrywood cabinets in the kitchen, swinging them open, flicking them shut with careless slams. “Could we see the rest of the apartment?” she said.

Oh well, Melissa Hatfield thought. It’s only a beautiful Sunday on Memorial Day weekend and they got me here for nothing.

She led them down the hallway. The bedroom door was shut.

Melissa Hatfield stopped. The door shouldn’t have been shut. She opened it. The room was in darkness, needles of sunlight jabbing in through the Levolor blinds. The blinds shouldn’t have been down.

She stood motionless, senses suddenly alert.

There was a faint pumping sound, like an animal catching its breath. The air smelled of something foreign, something vaguely sweet and unpleasant. Cold sweat came out on her body.

She crossed to the window. Shadows hovered like nets. The air conditioner was on full blast. She changed the setting and turned the plastic rod controlling the blinds.

In the brilliance of daylight Melissa Hatfield saw him.

He was lying on the floor, naked, hooded in black leather. A Vietnam peace symbol had been gashed into his chest. One of his legs had been taken off and the fresh stump of thigh looked like a cross section of beef carcass in a butcher shop showcase.

Melissa Hatfield’s throat froze up solid and then a cry tore itself out of her, rocketing through the silence.

Seven miles away, a man lay on the beach.

He was one of four thousand souls who had journeyed from city homes down to the Brooklyn shore that day, schlepping brave little pieces of portable comfort with them. He had stretched out on an orange beach blanket, and his head was resting on a rolled blue bath towel. His eyes were shut. A yellow umbrella shaded him. A Sony transistor radio was piping whispers of Little Richard into his ear. Little Richard was his twelve-year-old daughter’s choice, not his. He would have chosen Sinatra or Tony Bennett. But it was meant to be his daughter’s day, not his, one of those rare days that father and daughter actually got to share, so he’d let her choose the music.

His wallet was stuffed inside his shoe, rolled into the blue towel under his head. There was a shield in his wallet. A gold shield, New York City detective.

An off-duty cop was required to carry his gun with him at all times, but Vince Cardozo was in violation of regulations. He’d decided he wasn’t going to wear three pounds of nickel stuffed into his bathing trunks like an extra dick or wrap the gun in a towel and leave it on the beach when he got around to trying the water. He’d left his .38 Smith & Wesson at home.

He’d closed his eyes, telling himself it was just for two minutes. Three minutes tops. Almost immediately he’d sunk down into peacefulness, letting go of the world. Where he was, he wasn’t hearing Little Richard. Wasn’t hearing the waves. Wasn’t smelling ocean salt or beached kelp or wind-borne suntan oil or sand that had been broiled to a sparkle.

At that moment Lieutenant Vince Cardozo was happy. He didn’t know anything. Not who he was, not where he was. Didn’t know that the sun was glowing, didn’t know that the wind had a shine on it like twelve trumpets. Didn’t know that his daughter, Terri, who had been sitting beside him twiddling the dial of the radio, had got bored and wandered off along the beach.

Lieutenant Cardozo’s breathing became softer and softer. There was almost no movement in his chest. The coiled strength relaxed. The breeze stirred his hair, medium brown, beginning to gray at the temples.

White clouds sailed across the blue sky. Long swells tilted the sea up and down, sending out pinpoints of light. Out by the horizon the wind-driven whitecaps were edged in glinting gold. With a squawking cry gulls swooped in a great flock down toward the great bursts of leaves of the beachfront trees.

Something buzzed. It was a patterned buzz, a nagging seed of nightmare, two shorts and a long, pitched like a dentist’s drill.

Vince Cardozo’s hand awakened, located the page boy on the blanket beside him, swatted it dead.

He opened his eyes, pushed himself up on one elbow, forcing back his shoulders, opening wide. A stocky man, he prided himself on being well-built for someone of forty-odd summers. If his forehead was a bit high and smooth, he had thoughtfully balanced it with a devil-may-care moustache, giving himself, he hoped, a face sleek enough to detract from the blocky torso.

He squinted and saw Terri coming over the sand. She had dark hair and brown eyes like his and a turned-up nose, not like his. He waved at her. With the hand not holding a Diet Pepsi, she waved back.

God, he thought, she’s so damned beautiful in that yellow swimsuit. Only twelve, tall for her age, of course; she carried herself with a grace that was impossible not to watch.

She settled down onto the blanket, looking at him with a serene humorous interest.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“Not so far away as you.” She had faintly freckled skin and there was a challenging tilt to her chin. In back of her the sky looked like no sky he had ever seen.

The pager buzzed again.

Behind her eyes was a sudden flare-up of disappointment.

“Dad,” she said. “Answer it.” Like her mother. Same tone, same look of good-humored annoyance.

She poked through her little plastic change purse and a minute later he felt the soft pressure of her fingers pushing a quarter into his hand. She looked up at him for a moment out of those bottomless brown eyes.