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visited the scene of the crime, he’d sensed something he’d never felt before. He couldn’t explain it. He’d been kidding himself when he thought it was Vito Cipriano he’d worried about—it was more than that, and it was not a joke.
    It was a feeling, if he had to name it, that evil had been there. Close to him. Watching him. A sickness, like cancer, but with volition and intent, looking for a host.

4 .
     
    The district attorney’s branch office for Northern Westchester was in Mt. Kisco, on a residential street across from Northern Westchester Hospital. The building was utterly without charm, a two-story yellow brick box shared with the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Conservation.
    Dani rode the small claustrophobic elevator up to the second floor. As the door opened, she greeted the receptionist. “Buenos días, Luisa. ¿Cómo va tu día? ¿Ya llegó Irene?”
    “No, llamó para decir que iba a llegar tarde,” Luisa said. “Your Spanish is getting better.”
    “Is the boy they brought in downstairs?” Dani asked. The basement had a processing office, a holding facility, and a pair of interrogation rooms where suspects or witnesses could be questioned by the DA or by any of her investigators. A parking garage beneath the building afforded an area where prisoners could be brought in away from prying eyes or cameras.
    Luisa shrugged.
    “Was there a man here?” Dani asked. “Asking about the boy?”
    “¿Es muy guapo?” Luisa smirked when she saw Dani’s reaction. “I told him to ask downstairs.”
    Once the elevator door closed behind her, Dani couldn’t help glancing in the small mirror on the elevator wall. It was normal to want to look good, she defended herself, when greeting a friend you hadn’t seen in years. In her senior yearbook picture, taken before she’d gotten contact lenses, she looked like a bookish nerd trying hard not to look like a bookish nerd, with eyeglasses too big for her face and hair that really wasn’t working for her.
    Her cell phone rang just as the doors opened on the first floor, and she stepped out into the ground floor lobby to take the call.
    “Got a sec?” Beth asked.
    “Maybe that. What’s up?”
    “Grandpa Howard wants to come out for the Christmas holidays,” her sister said. Their Grandfather Howard lived in Libby, Montana, where he’d retired as a district court judge and spent most of his time fly fishing. “I’d like to tell him you have room, but I wanted to check with you first.”
    “Oh, Beth.” Dani tried to switch gears. “I mean, sure, if he wants to stay in a room that has no wallpaper.”
    “He can stay in my old room,” Beth said.
    “I stripped that one too.” She’d been trying to rehabilitate the house she’d inherited from their parents one room at a time, to get it ready to sell, though she wasn’t sure she really wanted to let it go. It was certainly more house than she needed, a four-bedroom French colonial with a gambrel roof, the clapboard siding painted a smoky mustard with sage green shutters. “I suppose, if he doesn’t mind.”
    “He won’t. Why don’t you just paint?” Beth said. “Or hire somebody. No offense, but the idea of you trying to hang wallpaper in a straight line isn’t working for me.”
    “I gotta go,” Dani said. “Tell Grandpa he can stay as long as he wants. By the way—guess who I might run into?”
    “Who?”
    “Guess.”
    “Dani . . . ,” Beth said impatiently.
    “Tommy Gunderson.”
    “Get out of town! Wow. You think you might fall in love with him again?”
    “I didn’t fall in love with him the first time,” Dani protested. “I freaked out.”
    “Yeah,” her sister said, “because you fell in love with him.”
    “I so did not.”
    “That’s your story and you’re sticking to it,” Beth mocked. “You know what I think? I think he dumped Cassandra Morton because he was still in love with the high school homecoming queen.”
    Dani should have