"On Saturday I came by three times. Three times I came." He holds up forefinger, middle finger, pointer, and his rhythm is like a Bible story: Three times I called your name and three times you refused me. Three times Cortez the thief came from Garvins Falls Road on a bike-and-wagon, laden with supplies for Martha, three times he did a "comprehensive walkaround" to ensure the safety of the small home, checking the doors and windows, checking the perimeters. Morning, midday, sunset. Three times he made sure all was well; three times he paraded himself around with large and visible firearms, so any thugs or rapists would be aware of the presence of an armed defender. Sunday, Cortez says, same thing: morning visit, noon visit, nighttime.

"And I told her, anything else you need, I provide it." Cortez looks around the living room. "You want a muscular gentleman with a baseball bat sitting on this sofa all night long, you can have that. You want someone on the porch with a rocket launcher, we can make that happen."

I raise an eyebrow-they do not sell rocket launchers at Office Depot-and Cortez grins, happy to explain, but I wave my hand for him to go on. I'm not in the mood.

"The woman is not interested in protection inside the house, but otherwise she is happy," Cortez says. "Happy to have us around. As her husband had arranged."

"Okay. And?"

"Okay, so same yesterday. But then today, I am here in the morning, just the same, and the woman is standing out on the porch, shaking her head and waving her hands."

"She's on the porch?"

"Yes, Policeman. With a suitcase."

"A suitcase?"

"Yes. Suitcase. And she says, no thank you. Like I'm selling Girl Scout cookies. Like I'm a goddamn Jehovah's Witness." He puts on a mocking, feminine voice, says it again: "No thank you."

Martha, oh Martha, what secrets had you hidden in your heart?

"It was like she was waiting for someone," Cortez says, rubbing his chin. "Someone other than me."

"Wait-" I say. I'm trying to capture all these details, arrange them in my head. "Wait one second."

"What is it?" Cortez looks at me curiously. "You need me to repeat something?"

"Nothing," I say, "No. Just-what day is it?"

"It's Tuesday." He grins. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I just didn't know what day it is. Please continue the story."

What happened next is Cortez told her it wasn't up to her, with all due respect he had been contracted to take care of her, and this wasn't her arrangement to undo. If she didn't want to see him, she could stay inside the house and he or his friend would drop off supplies and protect her from the outside. She insisted, no thank you, told him to leave her be, and then someone hit him on the side of the head.

"Someone hit you or her?"

"Me. I said me."

"With what?"

"I do not know. Something hard and flat." Cortez ducks his head, embarrassed. "I was hit very hard. I was knocked unconscious." He steps back, raises his hands, looks at me wide eyed, like, Sounds impossible, I know, but that's what happened. "I was out cold for I don't know how long, not long I think, and when I woke up, she was gone. I went inside and ran up and down, three times I searched for her. But the house was as you see it. She is gone."

"Holy moly," I say.

"Yes," says Cortez drily, and now it's my voice he puts on, flat and solemn. "Holy moly."

"So what are you doing here now, Mr. Cortez?"

"Waiting for her. A friend I have, Mr. Wells, is out looking while I wait-often the missing simply return. Ellen, meanwhile, minds the home front. Listen, I don't care if that girl wants to be found or not. We're going to find her. That cop comes back and finds her gone, I'm finished."

"That contract, I think, has been abrogated."

"Why? Oh-dead?" Cortez does not look saddened by this news. "Who killed him?"

"I'm working on it."

He pauses, tilts his head. "Why?"

"I don't know yet. I'll know when I find the killer."

"I don't mean why was he killed. I mean, why are you working on it?"

I take one more turn around the small house, Houdini close at my heels. I check the locks on the window, look for fingerprints, footprints, anything. Did someone do this to her, or did she do it herself, slip out from under the protection that Brett had arranged? Was she kidnapped? The suitcase says she was waiting for someone, presumably the mysterious Mr. N. But the mysterious Mr. N. is dead, right?

For a long time I stare into Martha Milano's empty closet, and then I go back downstairs, find Cortez lounging in the recliner, his cigarette raised like a scepter.

"I tell you, this whole thing, it's a bad sign," he says. "Me losing track of someone I'm supposed to look after? That is a bad fucking sign."

"For what?"

"Oh, shit, you know. For all of mankind. The whole human race."

Back on Albin Street I look up at the sun. The city is hotter than it was last week, and you can smell it on the air-the reek of untreated sewage water drifting up off the river, of garbage that's been dumped in the streets and out of windows. Sweat and body odor and fear. I should go home and change clothes, see if any damage has been done while I was away. Make sure that nothing has been taken from my store of food and supplies, all that we left behind.

"We really should, buddy," I say to Houdini. "We should go home."

But we don't. We go back the way we came, down Albin, down Rumford, up Pleasant Street.

What few people there are on the streets are moving quickly, no eye contact. As we get closer to Langley Boulevard a man rushes past in a windbreaker, head down, carrying two whole hams, one under each arm. Then a woman, running, pushing a stroller with a giant Deer Park bottle strapped into it instead of a child.

I realize suddenly I have not seen a police car or a police officer or evidence of police presence of any kind since I returned to Concord, and for some reason the observation floods my stomach with a churning dread.

My legs are getting tired; my busted arm joggles against my side, tight and uncomfortable and useless, like I'm lugging a ten-pound weight around, to prove a point or win a contest.

I find Dr. Fenton right where I left her, working her way down her towering pile of charts, leaning against the counter of the nurses' station, her eyes blinking and red behind the round glasses.

"Hey," I start, but then another doctor, short and bald and bleary eyed, stops and scowls. "Is that a fucking dog? You can't have a fucking dog in here."

"Sorry," I say, but Fenton says, "Shut up, Gordon. That dog's more hygienic than you are."

"Clever," he says, "you fucking hack." He disappears into an adjacent exam room and slams the door. Fenton turns to me. "What happened, Detective Palace? You get shot again?"

We take the unlit stairwell down to the crowded first-floor cafeteria: dirty linoleum tables and a handful of stools, a big plastic bin filled with mismatched cutlery, boxes of supermarket teabags and a row of kettles lined up on camp stoves. Dr. Fenton and I take our tea out to the lobby and sit in the overstuffed chairs.

"When did you stop working in the morgue?"

"Two weeks ago," she says. "Three, maybe. The last month or so, though, we weren't doing autopsies. No call for it. Just intake, preparing bodies for burial."

"But you were still down there when Independence Day happened?"

"I was."

The front door of the hospital crashes open and a middle-aged man stumbles in carrying a woman in his arms like a newlywed, her bleeding profusely from the wrists, him just yelling, "God you idiot, you idiot, you're such an idiot!" He kicks open the door of the stairwell and lugs his wife inside, and the door slams closed behind them. Fenton lifts her glasses to rub her eyes, looks at me expectantly.

"I'm trying to I.D. a corpse that came in that night."

"On the Fourth?" says Fenton. "Forget it."

"Why?"

"Why? We had three dozen corpses at least. As many as forty, I think. They were stacked like firewood down there."

"Oh."

Stacked like firewood. My neighbor, sweet Mr. Maron of the solar still, he died that night.

"We weren't able to process them properly, is the other thing. No photographs, no intake records. Just bagging and tagging, really."

"The thing is, Dr. Fenton, this particular corpse would have been rather distinctive."

"You, my friend," she says, tasting her tea with a moue of displeasure, "are rather distinctive."

"A man, thirties probably. Gold-capped teeth. Humorous tattoos."

"How so, humorous?"

"I don't know. Zany, somehow." Dr. Fenton is looking at me bemusedly, and I don't know what I had imagined: a tattoo of a rubber chicken? Marvin the Martian?

"Where on the body?" Fenton asks.

"I don't know."

"Do you know the means of death?"

"Weren't they all-gunshots?"

"No, Hank." The words are dry with sarcasm, but then she stops, shakes her head, continues quietly. "No. They weren't."

Dr. Fenton takes off the glasses, looks at her hands, and in case I am correct in my impression that she is silently weeping I avert my gaze, try to find something interesting to look at in the dimness of the hospital lobby.

"And so," she says abruptly, shifting back into her characteristic tone, "the answer is no."

"No, there wasn't anybody matching that description or, no, you don't recall?"

"The former. I am relatively certain we did not see a body matching that description."

"How certain is relatively certain?"

Dr. Fenton thinks this over. I wonder how it's going upstairs for the desperate man and his wife, bleeding from her wrists, how they're faring under the charge of Dr. Gordon.

"Eighty percent," says Dr. Fenton.

"Is it possible a victim might have been taken to New Hampshire Hospital?"

"No." she says. "It's closed. Unless someone took a body there and didn't know they were closed and dumped it in the horseshoe driveway. I understand-" She pauses, clears her throat. "I understand some bodies have been deposited in such a way."

"Right," I say absently.

She stands up. Time to get back to work. "How's the arm?"

"So-so." I squeeze my right biceps gingerly with my left hand. "I don't feel much yet."

"That's appropriate," she says.

We're walking back to the stairway. I set my half-empty teacup down carefully on the floor next to a full garbage can.

"As circulation improves over the next couple weeks, you'll start to get a persistent tingling, and then you'll need physical therapy to work toward regular functioning. Then, around early October, a massive object will strike Earth and you will die."

"So I go over there on Friday night, maybe two hours after you take off, and the playground is a no-man's-land. The swings are cut down, just chains dangling, you know? The fence is kicked over, and the-what do you call it?-the jungle gym, it's over on its side. I'm thinking maybe I've got the wrong place."

"You're at Quincy Elementary?"

"Yeah," says Detective Culverson. "Quincy. The play field behind the school."

"That's right."

The diner; the booth; my old friend with an unlit cigar, stirring honey into his tea, telling me a story. A fat double-bread-loaf indentation in the vinyl where McGully used to sit.

"So there I am like a dummy, holding this samurai sword. And don't even ask how I got it, by the way. I'm standing there and I'm thinking, Okay, so, Hank's little buddies have moved along, they've found some other squat. But then I see that there's a flier: If you are the parent of ... You know? One of those. It looks like they got scooped up."

I exhale. This is good news. This is the best possible outcome for Alyssa and Micah Rose. A mercy bus came and took them somewhere indoors, with food and organized play and prayer circles three times a day. Ruth-Ann is sitting at a stool by the counter. She's got her hot-water carafe, her pens arranged behind her ear, her little order notebook jutting out of the front pocket of her apron. Culverson is in his undershirt, off-white and yellowed and stained at the pits, because he's lent me his dress shirt, which puffs out at my stomach and gaps at the collar.

"Was it the Catholics?" I ask him.