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can—”
    “Uncle Nick,” he said, “I need you.”

5.

    WASHINGTON

    S he must have fallen asleep again—a fitful, distressed sleep, troubled by dreams that were far too real. Gabe visiting her in the hospital, his curly hair a mess, crying when he saw her. A doctor with a long chin and a high-domed forehead peering into her eyes with a bright light. She awoke, slowly this time, unsure which if any of these things had actually happened.
    When she opened her eyes again, she could tell right away she’d been moved. None of that frantic intensive-care cacophony, the jumbled voices and quick footsteps or the dissonant symphony of electronic beeping. One machine beeping quietly, but not much else. Quiet whispers.
    The quality of light was different somehow. Daylight, maybe. There had to be a window somewhere nearby. She’d slept through the night. Another night, come to think of it.
    Two men in jackets and ties stood at the foot of her bed. One a lot older than the other. Cops, she thought.
    For a moment she thought she might still be dreaming. She closed her eyes and went away for a while, but when she opened them again, they were still there, talking quietly to each other. One of them glanced at her, approached.
    He was around sixty, with thinning white hair and a scraggly white beard that she guessed had been grown to conceal a weak chin. “Mrs. Heller, I’m Detective Garvin from the D.C. police department.” He was holding a giant Dunkin’ Donuts cup. “And this is Detective Scarpino.”
    The guy standing behind him—cute, dark-haired, the innocent face of a boy and the body of a linebacker—looked barely thirty. “How’s it going?” he said, smiling, and she couldn’t help smiling back.
    They each took out leather badge holders and flipped them open. She saw only a flash of gold, a glint of silver.
    The older one sat slowly, gingerly, on the only chair, as if he had a bad back. “How are you feeling, Mrs. Heller?” His partner went scrounging for another chair from somewhere beyond the blue curtains, the boundaries of her world.
    “Where’s my husband?” she said.
    Garvin went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “One of the nurses gave us the heads-up that you were okay to talk, but if you don’t feel up to it, we can come back.”
    “What time is it?”
    “Around nine. In the morning.”
    “Are you here about my husband?”
    Garvin wore steel aviator rim glasses with thick lenses that grotesquely magnified his bleary pale eyes—gray? blue? Hard to say. “Mrs. Heller, we’d like to ask you some questions about what happened.”
    The throbbing behind her eyes was back with a vengeance. “Are you . . . homicide detectives?” she asked in a choked voice.
    He shook his head, gave a prim smile. “We’re from the Violent Crime Branch.”
    The words made her stomach flip over. “Detective, where’s my husband?” she said, heart thudding. “Have you found him or not?”
    “No, ma’am. Nothing.”
    “What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”
    “Every hospital in the city and the surrounding area has been called. Medical examiners’ offices, even the central cellblock.”
    “Cellblock?”
    “We don’t want to rule anything out. A notice went out on WALES—the Washington area law-enforcement network.”
    “And . . . ?”
    “Nothing, ma’am. I’m sorry. At this point, we’re treating this as a missing-persons case.”
    “How do you know he wasn’t—harmed? Or worse?”
    “Our crime scene squad didn’t find any cartridge casings or bloodstains or anything else that would indicate bodily harm.”
    “ ‘Missing persons’ . . . ?”
    He hesitated. “Missing Person Critical, actually.”
    Scarpino returned with a molded plastic chair and scraped it into place behind his partner’s.
    “Why ‘critical’?”
    “Suspicion of foul play.”
    “But you just said you didn’t find anything.”
    “Because of what happened to you.”
    “How do you know I wasn’t just mugged or