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sadly.
    “Grab a fortune cookie; this meal is
over.”
     
    ~~~
     
    Shawn Riley was able to access Vincent’s home
with very little difficulty. The landscapers were performing the
weekly lawn maintenance. There were at least twenty landscapers
attending to the two hundred homes in the community. They all wore
red tee shirts with the landscaper’s logo printed on the front in
white letters. A quick trip over to TJ Maxx and Riley had a red PCH
tee shirt with a logo so close to the landscaper’s tee that you had
to look twice to tell them apart. Sporting the telltale red tee,
Riley was able to roam the property freely. He was tall and wiry,
an all-state soccer star who had gotten booted from Hofstra for
steroid abuse. Had he found an open window, he could literally have
jumped through it with a short running start. His athleticism was
not needed. On a whim, he tried Vincent’s car, which was still
sitting in the driveway. The door was unlocked. One tap on the
HomeLink button, and the garage door was open.
    Startling cold produced goose bumps on his
arms. Save for the sound of the air rushing through the vents, the
condo was silent. The air was permeated with a stale odor that
Riley had not encountered before. The unit wasn’t big, fifteen
hundred square feet at most. There weren’t many places to look. The
garage led into the kitchen; from there he could see Vincent lying
on the floor in the main room. The television was still on. He
recognized Dr. Phil immediately. The good Dr. Phil was on common
ground, performing an intervention on a teenage boy as the boy’s
bewildered parents looked on. He was talking some manner of
God-awful gibberish scripted to hook weak-minded viewers.
    The odor grew stronger as Riley approached
Vincent’s motionless body. There were pieces of cracked plaster on
the floor around him, and the entertainment unit was smashed.
    Riley had a sense of what to expect: the gray
skin, the blood, and the urine stain on the crotch. It took just a
moment for it to sink in.
    Riley’s downward spiral from soccer phenom to
adolescent aberrant had come about quite quickly. The bust for
substance abuse was followed by dismissal from school and the loss
of his scholarship. It was a perfect storm of unfortunate events
that crushed him and sent him searching for a new path that would
suck him further and further into a dark hole. Heroin is a very
common addiction in Suffolk County these days. It’s an expensive
high with a price tag that can’t be measured in dollars.
    Riley thought for a moment of the places he
would have to wipe down before leaving the deceased’s home. He knew
enough not to leave fingerprints. He dialed Thomas Sparks on his
cell phone and relayed the situation as he had found it. The
conversation lasted less than a minute.
    Sparks ended it with just a few words, “Make
it disappear.”

Seven: Hoochie Coochie Man
     
    I had been Allie before. She was a
go-to, a face and body I had long ago committed to memory. She was
a person whose identity I could assume at will. She was not from
New York, so I wasn’t worried about bumping into her anywhere on
Long Island. She had that rich girl look I figured Keith would go
for in a second.
    Oh dear Lord, there ought to be a law. I was
Allie to a tee. I had the hair and the eyes down perfectly, most
importantly the eyes. I often became lost in the color and
configuration of her iris, in details so complex that it was like
staring up and getting lost in the cosmos. Then, the size and
roundness of her eye sockets—expanding from there, the bridge of
her nose, the placement of her cheekbones, and finally the length
and taper of her chin. Allie’s body was the easiest of all. Those
dimensions were easy to approximate, and if I was off by a
centimeter or so . . . well, who would know? If I was copying a
female form like Allie’s, I would err on the slight side and no one
would complain. For men, a little extra beefcake never hurt
anyone.
    I had a huge