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by the occasional roar of an engine struggling uphill, Lojacono, drifting between nodding off and full wakefulness, thought about Marinella. He wondered how things were going for her, life in the new city. She was a smart girl, a bit introverted, perhaps. He hoped that she’d managed to make new friends, good ones. If so, maybe, as time went by, she might set aside the resentment she felt for him. Who could say? She might eventually want to talk to him.
    On the other hand, he was afraid that she might start running with a bad crowd, fall into the clutches of some bad guy. He didn’t think his wife had a tight enough grip on her; Marinella was smart, but she was still only a child.
    He wondered whether he might not be the classic father who couldn’t stop thinking of his daughter as a little girl. A terrible trap to fall into. He remembered his last conversation with Sonia, the woman’s violent verbal barrage against him. He understood now that the relationship was over and done with, that there was no way to rebuild their old love, after so much hatred. He discovered, as he lay on the foldout bed they had for those on night shifts, analyzing himself, that he wasn’t especially torn up over the fact; emotions are born, live, grow old, and die, just like people. But the way he missed Marinella was an open bloody wound, and it showed no signs of healing.
    He hadn’t had any difficulty procuring his daughter’s new cell phone number—he was a cop, after all. But he’d never had the nerve to call her. It struck him as an intrusion into the girl’s life, trespassing somehow. But he missed her; it killed him how much he missed her.
    Sleep turned his worries into a dream. He saw his daughter in a nightclub, cheerful and pretty. He watched as she drank and took a pill her girlfriend gave her. He watched as she got into a car with a boy whose face, in the dream, was obscured. The car took off at speed, hurtling into the night. He tried to call out to her, to warn her of the danger, but his voice caught in his throat. He watched as the car took a curve at insane speed. He saw a truck coming around the bend from the opposite direction.
    He found himself sitting bolt upright on the bed, eyes wide open, as the office phone rang and rang.

CHAPTER 13
    The place was pretty close by, the courtyard of an old building about half a mile from the police station. Lojacono had grabbed a uniform jacket from the locker room and climbed into the police car, recruiting a sleepy young policeman as his driver. The phone call had come in anonymously, a woman’s voice going on about a dead body.
    There was a small crowd standing outside the half-open front door, a dozen or so silent onlookers. The inspector ran his gaze over the windows of the adjoining apartment buildings, a couple of them lit up, a few others wide open with curious faces watching the drama unfold. The silence was unreal: it seemed like a movie set, right before the cameras began to roll.
    They stopped the car at the mouth of the street, top lights flashing, to keep people from coming in or out. They walked up the street and into the courtyard.
    The scene that met their eyes was illuminated by a lamp, which hung from a pair of crossed cables running over the center of the courtyard and swung lazily in the breeze. To call it a courtyard was perhaps overstating the case: it was really nothing but an airshaft bringing light to the building’s suffocating windows. On one side was a heap of rubble, beams, bricks, and a couple of bags of cement; on the other, a few parked scooters. Near the last scooter in the line, almost up against the wall, sprawled the body of a boy, facedown. A short distance away, one woman held another in her arms; the two of them were sitting on a step. The older of the two, disheveled and wearing a dressing gown, was murmuring words, perhaps a prayer, with her arms wrapped around the second woman’s shoulders, who was younger and wore an incongruous pair of