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on my list of priorities.”
    “Think about it, Lou. What’s an addict doing with Quantrell’s personal phone number? Why was Quantrell so eager to look at the body? He’s hiding something.”
    “No, he’s not.”
    “I think he is.”
    “They were junkies, Novak. They lived on the edge, they fell off. It’s not homicide. It’s not suicide. It’s stupidity. Social Darwinism, survival of the smartest.”
    “Maybe that’s what you think. Maybe that’s what Quantrell thinks. But I’ve still got two dead women.”
    “Forget Quantrell. The man’s into drug rehab, not drug pushing.”
    “Lou, this is a new drug. I spoke to an ER doctor here who says he’s never seen it before. To cook up a brand-new drug, you need a biochemist. And a lab. And a factory. Cygnus has it all.”
    “It’s a legitimate company.”
    “With maybe an illegitimate branch?”
    “Christ, Novak. I’m not going to hassle Quantrell.”
    “I heard you did a favor for him. On the side.”
    There was a pause. “Yeah. So what?”
    “So what were you doing for him out in South Lexington?”
    “Look, you want to hear the details?” Sykes snapped. “Then you talk to him .” He hung up.
    Kat stared at the phone. Well, maybe she hadpushed Lou too far on this one. My big mouth , she thought. One of these days it’s going to get me into trouble .
    Slipping her cell phone into her pocket, she saw Mr. and Mrs. Biagi coming out of the ICU. They were leaning on each other, holding each other up, as though grief had sapped all their strength.
    Kat thought of their son Nicos, with the seven tubes in his body. She thought of Jane Doe and Xenia Vargas, both relegated to the approximate level of primordial muck in Sykes’s scale of social Darwinism. Something was killing these people, something that had sunk its evil roots into the Projects.
    Her old neighborhood.
    On her way back to the freeway, she drove up South Lexington. In the last few years, nothing had changed. The seven Project buildings still looked like prison towers, the playground still had a bent basketball hoop, and teenagers still hung out on the corner of Franklin and South Lexington. But the faces were different. It wasn’t just that these were different people. There was a new hardness to their gazes, a wariness, as they watched her drive by. Only then did the thought strike her.
    To them she was an outsider. Someone to be watched, someone to be guarded against. Someone not to be trusted.
    They don’t know I’m one of them. Or I was .
    She continued up South Lexington and took the freeway on-ramp.
    Traffic was still heavy moving north. It was the evening exodus to the suburbs, a daily hemorrhage of white-collar types to Bellemeade, Parris, Clarendon, and Surry Heights. Those who could afford to flee, fled. Even Kat, a city girl born and bred, now called the suburbs home. Just last year, she’d bought a house in Bellemeade. It seemed a logical move, financially speaking, and she’d reached the point in life when she had to make a commitment—any commitment, even if it was only to a three-bedroom cape. Bellemeade was a hybrid neighborhood, close enough to town to make it feel like part of the city, yet far enough away to put it squarely in the safety of the suburbs.
    On impulse, she bypassed the Bellemeade turnoff and stayed on the freeway. It took her half an hour to drive to Surry Heights.
    Along the way, the traffic thinned out, the scenery changed. Cookie-cutter houses gave way to trees and rolling hills, newly green fromthose proverbial April showers. White fences and horses appeared—a sure harbinger of old money. She took the Surry Heights exit onto Fair Wind Lane.
    Two miles down the road she came to the Quantrell residence. There was no mistaking the place. Two stone pillars flanked the driveway entrance; the name QUANTRELL was spelled out in wrought-iron lettering mounted on one of the pillars. The gate hung open to visitors. Kat drove through and followed the curving