Hawthorne squinted. Seated under a tree and faintly illuminated by a light at the corner of Adams Hall was a boy in a sweater smoking a cigarette. The boy held it very precisely between his thumb and index finger, inserted it slowly into his pursed lips, and inhaled deeply. Then he slowly exhaled one, two, three smoke rings.

“Is that a Gauloise?” Hawthorne called out.

The boy leapt to his feet, sprinted away several yards, and then stopped. “Yes, it is,” he said.

“I thought I recognized the smell. I used to smoke them in Paris, even though the first several made me dizzy.”

“Would you like one?” asked the boy, turning. He appeared about thirteen, slight and with long red hair. He was trying to keep his voice calm but it squeaked nonetheless.

“No, thanks. I quit when my daughter was born.” Hawthorne’s voice faltered.

“You going to report me?”

“Not tonight. It’s too late for reporting. Have you seen anyone else out here?”

The boy leaned against a tree and smoked his cigarette. “No, nobody. Why?”

“I thought I saw someone leaving Adams Hall. You’re positive?”

“Absolutely . . .” The boy paused. “You’re the new boss.”

“Headmaster, yes.”

“I heard you speak this morning.”

“Oh? How did I seem?”

“Okay, I guess. I wasn’t sure if you were serious. You know how it is—you hear a guy’s scam, then you just wait and see. You going to let students smoke?”

“That’s not in my hands. There are laws against it, insurance regulations.”

“So I’m going to keep getting caught.”

“I expect so. Do you really need to smoke?”

“I’m an addict,” said the boy with some pride. He stood with his hands on his hips and the cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. His hair fell across his forehead in a wave.

“If you get desperate for a cigarette and you can’t have one without getting caught, then come to me. We’ll go for a drive and you can smoke. I like the smell of Gauloises.”

“I don’t always smoke Gauloises. I just got lucky.”

“Well, whatever you’re smoking. If I’m not too busy, we’ll go for a spin.”

“I bet you won’t.”

“Try me,” said Hawthorne. “How come you’re out so late?”

“I don’t sleep much and I like to see what’s going on. I don’t mean I’m a Peeping Tom but I hate just lying there staring at the ceiling.”

“What about the night watchman?”

“He’s usually drunk and asleep. You’d have to step on him to get him up.”

“What’s your name?”

The boy hesitated, then said, “Scott.”

“I’m Jim Hawthorne.”

“I figured that.”

“What do you see when you wander around?”

“All kinds of stuff. Tonight I found a dead cat. D’you want to see it?”

“A dead cat?”

“Yeah, it’s been hung. It’s Mrs. Grayson’s cat, the housekeeper. It’s always poking around. Not anymore, I guess. You see that pile of firewood? It’s past that, over by those trees.”

Hawthorne followed the boy across the grass toward a clump of pines. Scott was small for his age, barely over five feet tall. As he led the way, he lit another Gauloise and the strong smell drifted back to Hawthorne, who had an immediate recollection of sitting with Meg in Les Deux Magots and spending a great deal of money for a small cup of coffee.

The cat was fat, gray, and very furry. It had been hung from a low branch with a piece of yellow twine. Its pink tongue protruded from between its gray lips. Hawthorne touched it. The cat was stiff and must have been dead for quite a while. It swung slowly in a circle.

“Pretty fucked up to hang a cat,” said Scott.

Hawthorne didn’t disagree. He took out his Swiss Army knife to cut it down. “You have any idea who did it?”

“Nope, but I bet I’ll find out.”

Three

Detective Leo Flynn had a cold. He had woken up with it that Monday morning and when his wife, Junie, had heard him snuffling she had been unsympathetic. “How many times do I have to tell you that you’ve got to quit the smoking.” As if smoking caused colds, and not the hanging around with the lowlifes he came across working for the Boston homicide unit. Still, September was not yet over and this was his second cold of the month. He’d also had a cold in August, and in July he’d had two colds, though one was a holdover from June. He figured if he retired next year like Junie wanted, then he could make his money doing ads for Kleenex, because when Leo Flynn blew his nose there was nothing secret about it. The walls shook.

Despite the cold, Flynn was feeling more optimistic than usual—darkly optimistic. The sort of optimism that in a normal person would lead to severe depression. At the moment he was driving up to Revere, which he saw as a door leading out of a nightmare case he had been assigned to a week earlier, one of those jobs that could drag on and on and stay open in the files for years. He was hardly over the Tobin Bridge and already he had a small mountain of wet tissues on the seat beside him. It was hard to blow his nose while driving and hard to smoke while blowing his nose. Even worse, the cold made his cigarettes taste like garbage. Like, it had become work just to smoke them. Flynn had a heavy, meal-sack figure and was bald except for some tufts of reddish hair on the sides and back of his head. Back in the early fifties, while still in his teens, he’d been a lightweight Golden Gloves champion in Boston for two years running, but now at sixty-three he was more than twice the size, though he still had that bantam rooster way about him, quick and cocky. His ears looked like a baby’s closed fists—tin ears, he called them—and they were the last remaining evidence of his years in the ring.

Flynn’s professional problems had begun when his team had been given a new homicide, and he’d known when they got it that it would bust his balls. A guy had been ice-picked outside a dance club, the Avalon on Lansdowne, and it had happened so fast that the lady he was with had thought he was bending over to whoop his cookies. Then he kept bending and tumbled flat on his belly. And he hadn’t gotten up again no matter how much the lady yelled.

All Flynn knew at first was that the corpse had a little bead of blood at the base of his skull. But Flynn had expected the worst. Maybe his twenty-five years in homicide had given him that kind of thinking. The autopsy had showed the damage—entry through the foramen magnum of the occipital bone, then the cone-shaped depredation in the brain, a quick swath through the gray porridge. And that’s what had upset him—not that Buddy Roussel was dead, which was only bad fortune for his friends and family, but that he had been iced so well.

Flynn and the three other members of his team had been at the Avalon until four o’clock Sunday morning, then he and Kosta had taken Buddy Roussel’s girlfriend downtown. Her name was Bridget Bonnelli and she couldn’t stop crying. Flynn felt bad for her but he had a job to do so he gave her the Kleenex. Flynn always had a few boxes lying around his desk. Bridget and Roussel had been in the club about two and a half hours. They had danced, talked with friends, and seen about twenty people they knew. Flynn got their names, though some were only first names and some were nicknames. Like Dick-nose, how do you look for a guy named Dick-nose?

Roussel had neither quarreled with nor bad-mouthed anybody. He and Bridget went to the Avalon about twice a month and the bouncers never had a complaint against him. He’d been happy the whole evening and when he’d left the club around twelve-thirty he was relatively sober. That’s when he’d gotten ice-picked, just outside the club, walking beneath the trees with his arm around Bridget’s shoulders on the way to his car.

Roussel was from Manchester, New Hampshire, but he’d worked for a restaurant-supply company in Boston for several years. He had a thousand friends. Bridget Bonnelli couldn’t think why anyone would want to kill him. Just the thought of it made her start weeping again. She knew most of those friends. They were all friends together.