“Understood.”

“And I’ll have to station two officers outside to watch the front and rear exits. That means just four of us to search the interior.”

“Five of us,” Jennifer said. “I’m going too.”

Casey turned to her. “Like hell you are.”

“I may need to talk to him. If he tries to resist, I may be able to talk him down.”

“You think this is a movie? In real life we don’t bring in the suspect’s sister to get through to him. You’re staying here. End of discussion.”

He motioned to one of the patrolmen, a lanky kid with P2 stripes.

“Sullivan. You and Hanes are posted outside. One in front, one in back. Watch the exits. Anybody tries getting out through a window, grab him. We’ll give you periodic updates on tac five. Otherwise we’ll stay off the air as much as possible, and you do the same. And keep an eye on Miss Silence here. She is not to enter the hotel.”

Jennifer bristled. “You don’t need to treat me like a child.”

Casey ignored her. “Cox, Jorgensen, we’re going in.”

Sullivan sent his partner around to the rear and took up a position where he could watch the lobby door. Casey and Draper led the other two patrol officers up the steps.

“We don’t know what this mope is carrying,” Casey said to the uniforms. “If he resists, light him up.” He indicated the taser carried by one of the men, who nodded.

“Lot of trouble just to roust a bum,” one of the cops groused.

Jennifer felt a flash of anger that anyone would refer to Richard that way. Then she remembered that he was something much worse.

Casey produced a set of keys, one of which unlocked the hotel’s front door. It wasn’t unusual for cops to have master keys to buildings in a high-crime district.

“Watch your six,” Casey said.

The men entered, the door closing behind them. Jennifer moved close to Sullivan, listening to updates on the tactical frequency. In the ground-floor windows she saw movement. The police were checking one room at a time.

Casey’s voice crackled over Sullivan’s radio. “First floor clear. Heading up.”

She surveyed the scene. Maura and other civic boosters might talk about Venice’s comeback, but there was no sign of it here. Shopping-card people and zoned-out addicts wandered the street and adjacent alleys, scrounging in trash cans. Rap music throbbed from the coffee shop in a steady stream of expletives. Next door to the café was a tattoo parlor, and beyond it was an S & M shop, its storefront windows displaying nude mannequins in bondage poses. An abandoned movie theater completed the row of buildings, the letters on its marquee spelling out Goodbye Cruel World.

The concrete promenade called Ocean Front Walk was bustling with even more activity than usual for a warm Friday evening. The overflow from the boardwalk was swelling the crowd of lookie-loos. She wished no one were watching. She didn’t want Richard’s arrest to be a public spectacle. But of course everything in his life would soon be public knowledge, fodder for the 24-hour news channels and the tabloids.

“We’re on the second floor,” Casey reported. “Found a squatter. Not our guy. We’re sending him down to the lobby and proceeding to the third floor.”

She couldn’t endure just waiting. To distract herself, she scanned the crowd. She saw a drag queen in a feather boa, a shirtless guy with a swastika tattoo on his chest, a pair of tourists with fidgety children. A stoner grooving to his iPod. An obese woman with a faded T-shirt stretched taut across her boobs, bearing the slogan Meat is Murder. At the back of the crowd, a nervous figure in a hooded gray sweatshirt, swaying rhythmically.

“Hotel’s clear.” Casey’s voice on the radio. “I want Officer Sullivan to bring Jennifer Silence to meet us on the fourth floor. We think we found the room the suspect was using. Maybe she can confirm that the items in the room belong to him.”

Sullivan escorted her inside the Fortezza. The lobby was dark except for Sullivan’s flashlight. The beam passed over a ragged man clutching a backpack and looking lost. The squatter from the second floor.

At the foot of the staircase, Jennifer saw an old poster captured in the wavering circle of light. Hot salt water in every room as a therapeutic bonus, the sign boasted. Every amenity available in Venice-of-America, birthplace of the American Renaissance.

That was a long time ago.

They climbed the stairs. The banisters were grimed with filth, and there was a bad smell coming from the carpeted treads.

“You shouldn’t have to be in here,” Sullivan said with quiet solicitude.

“I’ve been in worse places.” She was thinking of the utility room in San Francisco.

The odor was worse in the fourth floor hallway, a potpourri of mildew and urine. They passed a row of doors, the room numbers written in black Magic Marker. Halfway down the corridor they found Draper and Casey in one of the rooms. The door had been forced—no great trick, given the cheap lock and wobbly frame.

Jennifer stopped just inside the doorway. She’d thought the Dogtown apartment was bad, but it was a luxury suite compared to this nasty hole. The bed lay against a wall, near a window looking out on a fire escape. A glance into the bathroom revealed an unflushed toilet and a shower stall without a curtain or shower head. The room reeked of trapped body odor.

This was what he’d been reduced to. She wanted to cry.

“Is the stuff his?” Casey asked, reminding her why she was here.

Sullivan handed over his flashlight. She examined the items left behind in the room. On a rickety chair lay a library book about the Illuminati and Freemasons. Conspiracy theories. She flipped through it and found copious underlining and spidery marginal notes. Richard’s handwriting, she thought.

On the bureau, a dilapidated antique that listed drunkenly, she found a few other items. Some candy bars. One of the wanted posters put out by C.A.S.T., ripped off a utility pole or fence, the suspect’s computer-generated face slashed out.

And heartbreakingly, or perhaps ominously, a Polaroid of their father, the colors long ago faded to purple. In the picture, Aldrich Silence was smiling, but there was something strange about his eyes, something indefinable but wrong.

“They’re his things,” she said.

Draper seemed unsurprised. “This was the only room that showed signs of occupancy, other than the one the squatter was using.”

She looked around her. “It’s so awful,” she said softly, speaking mostly to herself.

 ***

The daylight was nearly gone by the time she left the hotel with Draper and Casey. The crowd of onlookers had thinned. But the drag queen was still there, and the stoner with the iPod, and the person in the hooded sweatshirt, almost lost to sight in the gathering dusk.

She paused, focusing on that sweatshirt. She had seen it before.

Sandra Price’s rally, in the gymnasium. The nervous figure rocking in a distant corner of the bleachers.

Richard had attended that event. In disguise. He’d told her so.

Casey was saying something, possibly to her, possibly to Draper. She didn’t hear it. His voice was far away, and all around her was an unnatural quiet, like the stillness in the streets after the earthquake.

She took a step toward the onlookers, walking slowly, her arms at her sides, her head lowered, sending every body-language signal of disinterest. The hooded figure didn’t move, didn’t react.

She remembered Sandra Price saying that an unknown person in a hood had been spotted near one of the crime scenes. It must be the disguise Richard used when he went trolling for victims, or when he spied on her.

As he was doing now.

She entered the crowd, slipping past a large man with a porn-star mustache and a skinny kid fingering a GameBoy. Still the hooded figure hadn’t stirred. She threaded among the spectators, closing in. The face beneath the hood was invisible, a shadow face. She thought of Abberline’s avatar, the faceless man.