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    Standing in the hallway just outside her adored older brother’s room was Julia, tears streaming down her face.

5
    It wasn’t long after Nick had finally gotten Julia back to sleep—picking her up, hugging her, snuggling with her in her bed—that there was a quick rap on the front door.
    Eddie Rinaldi, Stratton’s corporate security director, was wearing a tan fleece jacket and a pair of jeans, and smelled like beer and cigarettes. Nick wondered whether Eddie had just come over from his usual hangout, Victor’s, on Division.
    â€œShit, man,” Eddie said. “That sucks, about the dog.”
    Eddie was a tall, lanky guy, edgy and intense. His frizzy brown hair was run through with gray. He had pitted cheeks and forehead, the legacy of a nasty case of acne in high school. He had gray eyes, flared nostrils, a weak mouth.
    They’d been high school teammates—Eddie was the right wing on the same hockey team on which Nick, the captain, played center—though they’d never been especially close. Nick was the star, of the team and of the high school, the big man on campus, the good-looking guy all the girls wanted to go out with. Eddie, not a bad hockey player, was a natural cut-up, half-crazy, and with a face full of zits, he wasn’t exactly dating the prom queen. The joke about Eddie among some on the team was that he’d been left on the Tilt-A-Whirl a bit too long as a baby. That wasn’t quite fair; he was a goofball who just scraped by in school, but he had a native cunning. He also looked up to Nick, almost hero-worshiped him, though his idolatry always seemed tinged with a little jealousy. After high school, when Nick went to Michigan State, in East Lansing, Eddie went to the police academy in Fraser and lucked out, got a job with the Grand Rapids PD, where after almost two decades he hit a bad patch. As he’d explained to Nick, he’d been accused of brutalizing a suspect—a bullshit charge, but there it was—banished to a desk job, busted down the ranks until the publicity blew over, or so he was assured by the police chief. But he knew his career was as good as done for.
    Nick, by then CEO of Stratton, stepped in and saved his ass, offering Eddie a job he was maybe underqualified for, assistant director of corporate security, in charge of background checks, pilferage investigations, that sort of thing. Just as Nick had assured the longtime security director, a white-haired sergeant who’d retired from the Fenwick force, Eddie had poured himself into the job, deeply grateful to Nick and eager to redeem himself.
    Two years later, when the security director took early retirement, Eddie moved into the top job. Sometimes Nick thought it was like the old hockey days: Nick, the star, the power forward as they called him, with his hundred-mile-an-hour slap shot, taking the face-offs, making a pass through nine sticks as if he were threading a needle; and Eddie, grinning wildly as he did wild stunts like kicking an opponent’s skates out from under him, spearing guys in the gut, carving some other guy’s face with his stick, skating up and down the wing with a jittery juking craziness.
    â€œThanks for coming over,” Nick said.
    â€œFirst I want to see the kitchen.”
    Nick shrugged, led him down the hall. He switched on the light and peeled back one of the heavy plastic sheets, taped to the doorjamb, which served as a dust barrier between the kitchen and the rest of the house.
    Nick stepped through, followed by Eddie, who gave a low whistle, taking in the glass-fronted cabinets, the Wolf commercial range. He set down the little nylon gym bag he’d been carrying. “Jeez Louise, this gotta cost a fortune.”
    â€œIt’s ridiculous.”
    He switched one of the burners on. It tick-ticked and then ignited, a powerful roar of blue flame coming out. “Man, serious gas pressure. And you don’t even