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end, cut through a gas station, and headed down to Hill Street, where he turned left. He would rejoin Route 27 half a mile or so up the road, the jammed intersection behind him.
    The traffic snarl brought to mind a casual conversation with that Columbia economist who had hired him to investigate his boyfriend. Perry had remarked that they should widen the expressway. The professor had laughed and told him that widening roads made congestion worse: “Add more lanes and you lower the effective cost ofdriving. If you make a resource cheaper to consume, people take more of it, not less. The way to cut congestion, narrow the road, or add tolls. Lots of tolls. You have to make it harder, not easier. Then people will use it less.”
    Perry supposed that the same wisdom applied to families, too. If you want to see less of your daughter, let the other parent raise her. There, at least, Perry and Julia were in the same boat.
    Passing through Southampton, he did his best to ignore the past but couldn’t. It had been almost two years since his last trip to the Hamptons, and he had never expected to come back. He was half tempted to head south and join the brave tourists who, even in winter, dawdled along Meadow Lane gawking at the homes of the superrich. If you hit the water and turned right, you headed for even bigger mansions. If you turned left onto Dune Road, you’d pass the weather-beaten St. Andrew’s Dune Church, and beyond the church was some of the most expensive beachfront in the country. The beach was where, on a moonless winter night two years ago, he had cornered mad Derace McDonald; and although Perry had drawn his gun many times, that was the only time in his life he’d fired at another human being.
    Perry rubbed at a sudden pain in his side and drove straight ahead. The events of that night were still a blur, and he saw no reason to jog the memory.
    That was the other reason he hated Long Island, at least the eastern end where the rich people lived. The last time he was in the Hamptons was the last time he got shot.

3
MARCIA CLARK
    P erry squinted through his windshield, taking in the barren white dunes to his right, the rolling, black ocean to his left, and the vast, gray canopy of sky. As he shifted his gaze back to the wide two-lane highway that had finally emptied out of traffic, he was suddenly conscious of a strange, unsettled feeling.
    Now that he thought about it, the feeling had begun to creep in a while ago, hovering just below consciousness. He again scanned the austere landscape searching for an answer. And found it. Openness. That’s what it was. The sense of near-limitless space. And quiet. No concrete canyons that echoed with eardrum-shattering horns, no teeming-humanity sidewalks. It should have been soothing. Instead, it made him anxious, scared. As though he was floating alone and untethered through space. Perry struggled to rationalize the sensation, reasoned with himself that it was just a reaction to the long stretches of lonely road, but the panic continued to surge. He was barely breathing.
    He quickly rolled down the window and gulped cold, wet blasts of air. The sobering slap brought him back to earth, and he huffed with relief. But the relief brought only disgust. What kind of loser gets freaked by some empty sand dunes? A familiar lead weight sankin his chest. As usual, he’d found yet another way to despise himself. And no sooner had that feeling wormed its way to the surface than the march of Perry’s parade of horribles began: his ruined career on the force, his failed marriage, a daughter he loved dearly but saw only on weekends, and sometimes not even then. He gripped the steering wheel in frustration. He didn’t have time for this now. With an effort that was almost physical, Perry forced his mind to push down the lid on that treasure chest and work on the problem at hand: Julia Drusilla.
    What was her angle? After years as a homicide dick, Perry accepted nothing and no one at