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places like Oyster Bay, Great Neck, Massapequa, and Ronkonkoma. Might just as well have been Siberia as far as I was concerned. In my kid’s mind, Long Island meant exile and punishment, a forbidden zone where friends went never to return. I mean, who would ever want to leave Brooklyn besides Walter O’Malley? Sometimes I think that prick’s only saving grace was that he didn’t move the Dodgers to Long Island.
    But my rocky relationship with Long Island transcended my childhood visions of it as the briar patch. For almost nothing good beyond profit has ever come of my setting foot over the Queens-Nassau County border. Patrick Maloney went to school at Hofstra University on Long Island and I spent too much time there uncovering things about him, about his family and his relationships with women, one in particular, that made my skin crawl. It was five years later, however, after Katy and I were married and Sarah was just a little girl, that the first tentative steps in the long slow dance that led to Katy’s murder were taken.
    It was at the wedding of a former wine store employee. She was a rich girl from Crocus Valley and her father, Thomas Geary, a star maker, bullied and extorted me into taking the case of one Steven Brightman. Brightman, a state senator, was the next fair-haired boy with Kennedy charm and working class credentials, but he had a big problem. One of his interns, a young woman named Moira Heaton, had disappeared from his community office on Thanksgiving Eve 1981. Although there was no evidence tying Brightman to Moira’s disappearance and in spite of his fully cooperating with the authorities, the whiff of scandal and suspicion put a hold on his once-meteoric ascendency. After two years in political purgatory, he needed someone to prove him innocent, to plunge him in the waters and have him come up pure and saved. That someone was me.
    It almost worked too. I cleared him, but he came back up out of the purifying waters a little too clean and a little too easily. I found what had been planted for me to find: a patsy in a nasty package by the name of Ivan Alfonseca or, as the press had dubbed him, Ivan the Terrible, a convicted serial rapist. Already going away for life, he was paid to confess to Moira’s murder, clearing Brightman’s path to the Senate, if not to the White House. But I was no patsy and I kept digging. Problem was, the brother of one of Ivan’s real victims killed him in jail and with Ivan dead, I had a case as solid as air. So instead of going to the cops, I set Brightman up to spill his guts in front of two witnesses— his wife and Thomas Geary, the people in his life who could hurt him most. His wife left him and Geary withdrew his money and backing. Moira got whatever scraps of justice and shreds of revenge she was ever going to get. Then, seventeen years later, Brightman got his. He and his flunky, Ralph Barto, the man I wounded in Miami Beach, murdered Katy in front of me.
    So here I was again, heading back to Long Island, the sun rising up before me, blinding me. I felt in my bones only darkness lay ahead. There were a lot of people I needed to speak to, people whose names appeared in the paperwork Detective McKenna had shared, and there were things I needed to see for myself. The day before, Candy had been with me, showing me Sashi’s room, the rest of the house and the property, walking with me along the length of the little beach across the road from the big Victorian, but when you’ve got a guide it’s hard to see things for yourself. You see things through their eyes. I didn’t know that I’d find anything or notice anything new. Nothing had jumped out at me, nothing got under my skin. Still, I had to look.
    I stopped off at a deli and got myself a large coffee and a cholesterol special: two eggs scrambled, bacon, and cheese on a buttered roll. A steady diet of these had killed more cops than all the skels and mutts who’d ever lived. I laughed to myself thinking