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awoke after a dream of waking and finding someone had taped red ribbons all over the room. Ribbons in bows, in loops, simple strands of ribbons.
    When he sat up and switched on the lamp, he almost expected to find them.
    But it was his bedroom as usual. Their bedroom. He remained sitting up in bed, wondering what dark specter of the mind had plucked his wife from the balcony. Witnesses had said she’d put down her drink at the charity function cocktail party she was attending, then walked calmly and resolutely out to the twenty-fourth-floor balcony. She’d been alone out there, and apparently she’d simply let herself fall over the railing into space. The railing had been higher than her waist, so it couldn’t have been an accident. Something like that, something so…monstrous and profound, what had moved her to do it?
    Beam had been sure things had changed between them, but was that true? Had it been more that things had finally come to a head? Had it been the death of their only child, so long ago? Had all the years of doubt and wondering that any cop’s wife endures finally taken its toll?
    The fact was, when people committed suicide without leaving notes, they left agonizing, unfinished business behind. Questions that would never be answered. Guilt that might never be firmly affixed. Their survivors had to learn to live with uncertainty, and get used to being haunted.
    Uncertainty was something that had always bothered Beam. Lani had known that about him, yet she’d chosen her anonymous and eternally mysterious death.
    Or might it have been an accident? Somehow…
    He knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Light brighter than the lamp was beginning to show around the edges of the closed drapes. Glancing at the clock radio by the bed, he saw that it was quarter to five. Morning enough, he thought, swiveling on the mattress so he could stand up. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, still lean and strong but with undeniably more fat collecting around his waist, musculature still there, but now that of a fifty-three-year-old man. There on his right thigh was the scar where the bullet had been removed, a pink-edged pucker about two inches in diameter. He ran a hand through his mussed gray hair and looked away from his image. Getting older fast.
    Well, at the same speed as everyone else. Some solace.
    Usually he showered and shaved, then walked to the diner where he had breakfast. The walk was part of his physical therapy to regain at least some of the wind and endurance he’d lost to his injury. He experienced normal stiffness and joint aches at first when he climbed out of bed—he hadn’t been easy on his body over the years—but nothing connected to the gunshot wound actually hurt anymore. And he knew he should be pleased; his endurance had improved considerably. But it was only months since Lani’s death, and to Beam she was still beside him, still in his dreams and his life awake. He knew she would be for some time to come.
    Retirement might have been a good thing if Lani were still alive, but now retirement was like a disease. That was one of the main reasons Beam had accepted da Vinci’s offer to take over the serial killer investigation. Beam desperately, desperately, needed something to do, needed to be useful, needed something to displace his grief, at least temporarily.
    When he was showered and dressed, he looked out the window and saw that a light rain was falling.
    Instead of walking, he decided to elevator to the building’s garage and take his car.
    Â 
    The rain had stopped by the time Beam finished breakfast. He was paying at the register, when he glanced out the Chow Down’s window and saw da Vinci standing with his arms crossed and staring at Beam’s parked, gracefully aging black Lincoln.
    â€œHow come you drive a behemoth like that in New York?” he asked, when Beam emerged from the diner.
    â€œI drove it this