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low thick sound that seemed to be more an expression of revulsion than an expression of pain.
    I wore my knitted gloves, yet when I touched him, he shuddered and clearly would have kicked out and scrambled away from me if he’d not been so weak.
    In his raw and desperate voice, words came with bubbles of blood that popped between his lips. “Get away. Get. Get away.”
    Then I realized not only that had I neglected to pull the scarf over my face, but also that the hood had slipped off my head.
    Mother warned me that by my eyes alone I would be known, and the dying man couldn’t look away from them. His pallor worsenedquickly when he met my stare, as if my eyes did more damage to him than had the bone-handled knife.
    With a sudden burst of energy, he snarled a word I didn’t know but delivered it with such viciousness that I realized it must be both an insult and a curse. On the repetition of that word, he found within himself a hatred so great that it anesthetized him against the searing pain of disembowelment. He ripped a wider wound as he pulled the knife out of his abdomen, and he slashed at my face, as if to blind the eyes that so offended him.
    I pulled back, the blade cut only air, it fell from his hand, his arm dropped to the ground, and he lay dead.

10
    BEYOND THE DOOR THROUGH WHICH THE GIRL HAD vanished, a wide hallway with a groin-vaulted ceiling served four rooms that housed specialty collections. One of those was a seven-thousand-volume collection of first editions of important detective fiction, valued at many millions and donated by a famous writer who resided in this city.
    Crossing the threshold, I switched off my flashlight. I stood in the dark room, listening.
    In any large building designed both for functionality and to please the eye, dead spaces exist here and there behind walls, not needed for plumbing or electrical chases. Some are as large as walk-in closets. If included in the room that they adjoin, these nooks and coves woulddeform the shape of that chamber. In the interest of eye-pleasing harmony, such cavities are lost behind walls.
    A clever architect with a romantic streak and an appreciation for mystery will sometimes find ways to make those spaces accessible through a secret door well concealed in a paneled wall or by some other means. Often, these recovered dead spaces serve as storage, but some architects with a sense of fun and a love of things arcane will make other use of them.
    If the fleet-footed girl had taken refuge here among the storied pages full of FBI agents, homicide detectives, private investigators, and amateur crime-solvers of a thousand kinds, she was as quiet as the cadavers that also filled those pages.
    The original blueprints for the central library, more than a century old, were archived in the basement. My love of the building’s beauty and its books had motivated me to study the plans during numerous visits, years earlier, and I had found two dead spaces of generous proportions.
    One was indeed concealed behind a secret door in a paneled wall, elsewhere in the building. It measured eleven feet wide, six deep, and it was beautifully finished with several exotic woods and exquisite millwork. I thought the architect—John Lebow of the firm Lebow and Vaughn—himself had designed and secretly performed the finish work in both hidden rooms, though not in a spirit of fun.
    On the back wall, as the focal point of the first space, hung a portrait of a lovely woman with auburn hair and green eyes. She held in her hands a book and was sitting beside a table on which other volumes were piled high. On the bottom rail of the painting’s frame, a brass plaque identified her as MARY MARGARET LEBOW / BELOVED WIFE . Her date of death was given as June 15, 1904, more than a year before the construction of the library was completed.
    The second secret room, ten feet wide and eight deep, was here with the detective fiction, concealed behind a wall of bookshelves that flanked a