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turning danger into something she hadn’t let herself think of: pain. She was phobic about pain. The thought of what might be done to her made her freeze for a moment, paralyzed her. She felt herself go limp but then her anger took over.
No panic
, she told herself again.
You cannot panic!
She felt the man’s grip tighten and her hysteria disappeared, replaced by fury. So she kicked as hard as she could, shook her leg and kicked again, and his fingers let go and she scurried up the fire escape, climbing away from him as fast as she could.
    She got to the flat roof and even before she hoisted herself over the top, she knew she’d won. She’d been up here many times. She kept a beach chair here, used to come up and sunbathe and read on weekends when the beaches were too crowded. She knew this roof and knew that all she had to do was hop over to the next building, maybe a one-foot jump, no big deal, and there was another fire escape there, at the back. All she had to do was get there and climb down and then it was over. He couldn’t possibly get there as fast as she could. Couldn’t even know which direction she’d go.
    It was easy now.
    She was safe.
    So before she pulled herself onto the roof she looked down. Saw that he wasn’t even trying to follow her. He was just looking up at her. She stared straight into his eyes, studied his face so she could remember to tell the police exactly what he looked like, was startled because he was smiling. Looking up at her and smiling.
    She swung her legs up onto the tarred rooftop. Started running over to the next building. But she got only a few steps before she stopped cold. It was impossible.
    What she saw was physically impossible!
    He was there. The blond man. He was on the roof, smiling at her. The same smile she’d just seen.
    But it couldn’t be. He couldn’t be here! He
couldn’t
. …
    She was going to scream. That was her only chance. She could scream and hope that someone would hear her. Hear her and help her.
    But she didn’t scream.
    The blond man moved too quickly and the thing she feared more than anything, the pain, was too great. When the blond man spoke, it was quietly, as if he was being respectful of the early-morning silence. “I need to know a few things,” he said.
    So she nodded. She wanted him to understand that she’d be happy to tell him anything she could. He said, “Aphrodite,” and she looked confused, even through the pain, so he said, “What do you know about Aphrodite and who did you tell?” She said she didn’t understand what he was talking about, it was more of a whimper really. He asked her three times and after the third time she couldn’t even answer, she could just moan very, very quietly and shake her head, and he was convinced she was telling him the truth. Then he said, “I need a name,” and she knew the answer to that one, so she told him, she was so happy to tell him, and then he took a small step away from her.
    “Is it over?” she asked, barely able to get the words out. “Do you need anything else from me?”
    “It’s almost over,” the blond man told her. “There’s just one more thing.”
    There were details to be attended to inside Susanna’s bedroom. First her body was carried down the fire escape, put inside, and arranged on the floor, by her bed. Then her nightstand was tipped over, the contents of the one drawer allowed to spill and spread on the floor, the clock radio tumbling and breaking. The sheet and summer quilt were wrapped around Susanna’s feet and legs. From the kitchen, a drinking glass half-full of water was brought in, then thrown down. The glass shattered, the water spilled. Soon it was safe to assume that anyone finding the body would come to the reasonable conclusion that Susanna Morgan had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night, tripped, fallen, and broken her neck.
    Outside, Main Street was absolutely empty. It took less than a minute to reach the car, which was parked in the