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Mr Gonzalez; purchase a new can opener, an electric one; call her son; visit the Holocaust Center; talk to the rabbi and Mr Silver and Mrs Kroner; and meet with Simon Winter and make a decision. A busy day, she thought. She stepped into the small bathroom and opened her medicine cabinet. Lined up at attention were a number of medications. Something for her heart. Something for her digestion. Something for her aches and pains. In a small container near the end of the shelf was what she was searching for: something to help her sleep. She poured a single white pill into her hand and swallowed it without using any water.
    ‘There,’ she said to her reflection in the mirror. ‘Now, maybe ten minutes and you’ll be out like a light.’
    She hurried into the bedroom and slipped out of her clothes, taking the time to carefully hang her dress in the closet and drop her undergarments in a white wicker hamper. She slipped on a rayon nightgown, adjusting the frilly part near her neck. She remembered it was one of Leo’s favorites, and that he’d teased her and called her sexy when she wore it. She missed this. She had never thought herself sexy, but she’d liked it when he’d teased her, because it made her feel desired, which was pleasurable. She glanced at her husband’s picture one last time, then slid under the thin covers. She could feel a warm, dizzying sensation moving through her body as the sleeping pill took effect.
    The cat jumped up on the bed next to her.
    She reached out and stroked it.
    ‘I was mean to you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry Mr Boots. I just need to sleep.’ He curled next to her.
    She closed her eyes. It was all she wanted in the entire world, she thought: a single, restful evening of comforting, dreamless sleep.
    Night like a box closed around Sophie Millstein. She did not even stir several hours later, when Mr Boots suddenly rose up, back arched, spitting and hissing in hasty cat-fear at the harsh and heartless sounds of intrusion.

CHAPTER THREE
The Accountant for the Dead
    It was already nine minutes after midnight and Miami Beach 911 operator Number 3 was irritated that her shift replacement was delayed for the third time that week. She knew Number 17’s toddler had been ill with bronchitis, but still, nine minutes was nine minutes, and she wanted to get home so that she would not be completely exhausted when her own son awakened her as he did almost every morning by banging his way around the small bathroom and kitchen of her home in Carol City. One of the advantages, she knew, of teenage, was a certain oblivious-ness to racket. So she counted the minutes, adding Number 17’s tardiness to the drive across the beach, over the causeway, past downtown and up onto the expressway, skirting Liberty City, until finally reaching the small house she owned in a dusty part of the county that was neither city nor suburban, a lower-middle-class enclave that offered modest safety and slightly less heartbreak than the world barely a mile or two away. The trip would take her just under an hour in her eight-year-old Chevy.
    To her right and left, numbers 11 and 14 had already settled into the nightly routine. Number 11 was moving a hook and ladder company to a third-story apartment fire just off Collins-Avenue, and Number 14 was patching a
    state trooper through to wants and warrants as he chased a big BMW across the Julia Tuttle Causeway, It had been a tiring night: a convenience store robbery, a reported rape, a fight outside a nightclub. Plenty for her to do, nothing she thought that would make the papers in the morning. Number 3 looked up, craning her neck away from the bank of phone lines, looking for Number 17.
    She was still looking when the light on the board in front of her blinked red, and without thinking, she punched the connection and spoke, sounding machinelike and well-drilled.
    ‘Miami Beach Fire, Police and Rescue.’
    As she heard the first words, she knew it was an old person’s