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this what he’d been seeing? He shivered, rubbed at his eyes with the arm of his leather jacket, caught a whiff of something sour. He sniffed.
    “Nothing gets rid of that smell,” Kate said in a voice so flat that it surprised her. When did it happen–this switch into her old self, the cop, whom she’d never wanted to be again? She could see from the look on Willie’s face that she was scaring him. But she’d already made her decision–or it was made for her. No turning back now. Not if she was going to do something about this. And no way this hideous act would go unpunished. No fucking way. “You sure you didn’t touch anything?”
    “I told you. I don’t think so.”
    “Don’t think, Willie. You have to know. ”
    “Well, I don’t, okay? I wasn’t in there long. I just don’t know! Shit. Shit. Shit !” He beat his hand against the brick wall. There were tears on his cheeks.
    Okay, Kate would risk being human. She put her arms around Willie’s shoulders, and–boom! That was it: her hands were shaking, her chin quivering; one more minute and she would be fucking Jell-O. She pulled away fast. “Damn!” She sucked air into her lungs, tried to think of what to do next. Anything to keep from shattering. “There must be someone who saw something. Stay put.”
    At the first-floor apartment she turned her diamond ring into her palm, rapped at the door with the back of her fist. No answer. Down the hall, behind the door of the back apartment, there were slow, shuffling footsteps, then a fraction of an elderly woman’s face, eighty, maybe older, appeared in the two inches between the door and the chain lock.
    “Vat? Vat is it?” A scratchy voice heavy with Eastern European traces.
    There were sirens in the distance.
    “There’s been an . . . accident,” said Kate. “I need to talk to you.”
    “You the police?”
    “No, I–I’m a friend.”
    The sirens were right outside now. What to do? Try to get something out of the old woman or go outside and protect Willie? The old woman made the decision for her, slammed the door shut. Whatever it was she would or would not say would now belong to the police.

CHAPTER 4

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    The landing outside Elena’s apartment was littered with cops. The tech team had descended on the place like antic, oversize roaches, infesting every corner. Kate peered in through the door. A woman in a dark brown pantsuit pulled on a pair of latex gloves. The next minute she was reaching under Elena’s blood-soaked blouse–the thin stained cotton undulating as if an alien creature were about to burst from Elena’s torso. Kate attempted to give her statement without crying or screaming to a cop young enough to be her son. Down at the end of the hallway, illuminated under a single bulb hanging from a chain, a uniform was talking, leaning into a guy wearing a bow tie. A detective, Kate figured, and high up, from the attitude the guy seemed to radiate. Kate strained to hear what the uniform was saying. “The old lady in One B, in the back, says she saw a black man in here last time she saw the girl alive.” Bow Tie caught Kate’s eye, turned the uniform around, whispered as he wrote something into a little NYPD notepad.
    The young cop taking Kate’s statement asked, “And then?”
    “What?” A bulb popped, flashed inside the apartment. “Oh. Right.” Kate continued with facts: time she arrived on the scene, called the cops. Another flash. This time, Kate was blinded–and thankful for it. She’d been staring at the ME, who had her fingers deep in Elena’s mouth just as the photographer took his shot.
    Kate went numb as a detective passed by, and then a couple of uniforms slid Elena’s corpse into a dark green body bag.
     
    WILLIE STARED PAST THE CROWD, his vision blurred by tears.
    “Why do I do it? No one wants this shit! Who do I paint for?”
    When was that? Two, no, three years ago. Just before it all started happening for him, when he was ready to give up, quit