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treated pretty roughly before he was killed. Tying this in with the question-and-answer stuff from the first call, I’d say this looks like a teacher-student domination fantasy or something.”
    “Yeah,” Emily said, waving away a fly. “Welcome to Hell one-oh-one.”
    I peered at Jacob’s face. He had his mother’s dark hair and creamy complexion, his father’s blue eyes. Those eyes were frozen open forever now, along with his mouth in a rictus of shock and horror. There was a smudge on his forehead that I hadn’t noticed before, a gray mark like a small X .
    “Hey, Mike,” Emily said a second later. She was standing at the other side of the room. “I think you need to see this.”
    I joined her on the other side of the blackboard. On the back, someone had written:
    MEMENTO HOMO, QUIA PULVIS ES, ET IN PULVEREM REVERTERIS.
    “What is that? Latin?” Emily said.
    “It is,” I said, staring at it. “My Catholic high school’s preferred method of torture. Memento means ‘remember,’ I think. Pulvis is ‘dust.’”
    Cold numbed my back like a spinal tap as I suddenly realized its meaning.
    “‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,’” I cried. “It’s what Catholic priests say on Ash Wednesday when you get your ashes. Which must be what’s on the kid’s forehead. He gave Jacob ashes?”
    Emily snapped her rubber-gloved fingers loudly.
    “Wait a second! That’s it. ‘Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.’ The poem is called Ash Wednesday, by T. S. Eliot. What does it mean? How does it tie into the kidnapping?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “But I think the clock just started.”
    I wiped the sweat out of my eyes.
    “Ash Wednesday is only three days away,” I said.

Chapter 14
    THE SUPER WAS nowhere to be found. The closest occupants to the basement were in a crack house on the second floor, but to no one’s surprise, the strung-out inhabitants hadn’t noticed anything.
    I was happy for the cold rain now as I climbed out of that hot pit. I needed something to wash the smell of death from my clothes, off my skin.
    Despite our attempts to keep things under wraps, I spotted the police reporter from the Post standing behind the police tape among the half dozen Briggs Avenue drug dealers. Once the word was out, reporters and producers would pounce on Briggs Avenue like sharks on chum. A billionaire’s kid getting kidnapped and ritually murdered wasn’t just news, it was the next news cycle.
    I headed for my car when I spotted the first news van. Media storms were like real ones, I’d found. The only way to truly withstand them was to evacuate immediately.
    Emily was coming out of the corner bodega as I got to the car. She took the items from the bag as I cranked the heat in the front seat. Paper towels and a couple of cans of Coke.
    “They didn’t have any Scotch, but at least it’s full sugar,” she said, handing me one.
    I put the cold can to the back of my neck before I crunched it open.
    “ Full sugar,” I said. “I just might have to tell your supervisor about you, Emily Parker. Not for nothing, but you were great in there. You know your way around a body. I thought you were just a kidnapping expert.”
    “I did time in the Behavioral Analysis Unit as a profiler,” she said offhandedly. “Lucky me, huh?”
    I watched her rub her hair with a wad of paper towels. It was the color of black cherry soda where it was wet along the nape of her neck, I suddenly noticed.
    She paused as the ME’s techs brought out Jacob in a plastic bag. They slid him into the back of the beat-up Bronx County Medical Examiner’s van parked beside our Impala.
    “I lost four,” Emily said, staring out the rain-streaked windshield.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Dunning was so impressed that I had found three, but nobody told him that I lost four,” she said, looking into my eyes. “Actually, five now,” she added.
    I lifted my soda and took a sip. It