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smaller than life, smaller than the grandiose reputation, certainly. Still intact on one of the gang leader’s fingers was an immense diamond and onyx ring, easily fifteen carats, a marquise cut.
    At the moment of death, Alexandre St.-Germain seemed to have suffered intense pain. Stefanovitch knew the feeling. He’d experienced everything about the moment, except the release of death itself.
    Stefanovitch moved closer to the bed, which was still draped in silver satin sheets. His mind was moving back and forth through time, flashing too many images for him to absorb.
    Part of him was inside the West Side town house—but part of John Stefanovitch was in Long Beach, two years ago. Another part of him was holding his wife, Anna, cradling her in his arms, sobbing his hopelessness. He could remember what Anna’s touch had been like. The scent of Bal de Versailles, her favorite perfume. These memories never dimmed. Sometimes their intensity was a comfort and sometimes it was horrible torture.
    All of the agony and physical suffering during the past two years seemed compressed into this moment. He felt an indescribable rage. A burning had settled in his chest.
    Stefanovitch leaned forward in his wheelchair, careful not to topple it over and find himself in a state of helplessness. He stared at the remains of Alexandre St.-Germain, the Grave Dancer, wearing his million-dollar diamond ring.
    Then he made one final gesture he would remember long after everything else had faded.
    John Stefanovitch leaned forward and he spit onto St.-Germain’s bloodied corpse. “Welcome to hell,” he whispered, not even recognizing the sound of his own voice. “Rot in fucking hell!”
    When he turned to leave, the Bear was standing in the doorway. The detective frowned and slowly shook his head. “Yeah, you’re just fine, Stef. See everything you needed to see?”

13
    Sarah McGinniss; East Sixty-sixth Street
    AT FOUR O’CLOCK that morning, a successful writer named Sarah McGinniss had experienced an unmistakable ache gnawing into the tender walls of her stomach. It was the same dull pain she felt each time she dragged herself out of bed at that hour. She moaned and groaned, mocking herself like the Whiners on late-night TV.
    Every morning between four and four-thirty, Sarah forced herself up to write, before her small son, Sam, was awake, besieging her for French toast, or maybe Belgian waffles, as if that sort of thing were the most common breakfast fare for every growing boy in America.
    She was unusually tired this morning. Though she had tried, she hadn’t slept at all.
    As she brewed a second pot of coffee, she alternated glances at grainy black-and-white photographs she’d once taken of Alexandre St.-Germain with vacant stares out the kitchen window, down onto deserted East Sixty-sixth Street.
    Near the photographs on the kitchen counter was a draft of a seven-hundred-page manuscript on organized crime. The working title was The Club. The book featured Alexandre St.-Germain, who had tried to usher the underworld into a new age. An hour before, she’d received a call from a friend at UPI saying St.-Germain was dead. One problem Sarah hadn’t solved was how to reconcile the life of a man who was both a crime lord and a well-known businessman. Now she never would.
    Sometimes, when she was having trouble getting going with the early morning writing, she would scrawl Be there across the top of a page. It forced her to see and feel everything about the scene she was attempting to describe.
    Somebody murdered Alexandre St.-Germain, she thought now. Be there.
    As Sarah moved around the kitchen, she couldn’t help think about how very far she had come, and how quickly. It was difficult for her to imagine that less than five years ago she’d been a reporter, virtually a stringer on the Times-Tribune in Palo Alto, California.
    She had moved to Palo Alto with her husband, Roger, from San Francisco, where she had written for the Chronicle.