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Avenue, and South Second Street. Most of what catches the eye was built during the Florida land boom of the 1920s, including the building that dominates the view from Ghost’s front window. The Freedom Tower over at the Miami Dade College is a prime piece of Spanish Renaissance architecture, built in ’25 as a print works for the Miami News. In the 1960s the federal government took it over, in order to process documents and provide health support for refugees fleeing from Castro’s Cuba. That’s when it got the iconic name Freedom Tower. These days it’s more famous for the art exhibitions held there. Ghost has spent many an hour mesmerized by the works of Dali, Goya, and Da Vinci.
    The walls of his apartment are filled with an eclectic and ever-changing mix of paintings by upcoming artists. His dealings in this world, like his activities in the stock and bond markets, brings him an annual income more than five times his police salary.
    The first thing he does after kicking off his shoes is put on music.
    Not from an iPod in a docking station, or a computer with endless, digitally streamed tracks, but from a vintage Bang and Olufsen gramophone that copes with anything vinyl from 33 rpm right back to a good old-fashioned 78.
    He gently places one of his favorite discs on the turntable. It’s Mindru Katz’s live performances of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major.
    The master composer’s melancholic opening is momentarily lost in the culinary clatter that Ghost creates in the kitchen. He may live on his own, but that doesn’t stop him eating well. Tonight he’s starting with fried foie gras and chicken livers on French toast, followed by pan-roasted veal chops and spinach.
    He opens a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Domaine de la Janasse, Vieilles Vignes. He swirls it in a large, round-bowled crystal glass, smells and sips. It’s an ’04 vintage, and on reflection he wishes he’d kept it a little while longer. The Grenache is still a summer too young for his palate.
    Ghost slides open a door and takes his food to a table on the muggy balcony. The sound of piano music follows him and flows off the edge of the penthouse down into the distant, humming sea of life forty floors below.
    As he eats, he flips open the file on today’s case.
    Already he has multiple pictures of the poor girl who was bitten to death. Dozens of statements. Maps of the dead zone and surrounding area. And a summary that says no one has a clue who owns the killer dog.
    It’s the kind of murder puzzle he’s pieced together many times before: Who did what and to whom? Where did it happen and when? But the conundrum has never been quite as strange as this.
    Why?
    That’s the most puzzling question of all.
    Why?
    Why did a dog turn on a kid? Why did it get so vicious? Why couldn’t anyone find the owner?
    He changes the record. Picks Tchaikovsky. More fairy-tale than Liszt. More scope to open up the imagination and let the thoughts break free.
    He picks up one of the photographs in the file and closely examines the head of the giant animal. It has teeth like spiked railings. Vicious. Merciless. “Canis lupus familiaris,” he says, reminding himself that the ancestor of man’s best friend is not Lassie the Wonder Dog, but the wolf. A blood-hungry apex predator. Unhunted, except by humans. The king at the very top of the animal food chain.
    16
    Beijing
    A ir pollution hits a record high in China’s capital city as another day breaks and the world leaders begin to head home from their summit.
    General Zhang, Vice President of the People’s Republic of China, turns away from the window of the hotel suite and faces his breakfast guest, forty-seven-year-old Brandon Jackson, the youngest black man to become Director of National Intelligence and the principal advisor to the President, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council.
    â€œI’m told