the dark and unfamiliar streets . . .
With his partner, Lydia Chin, Bill tries to find the missing teen and uncover what it is that has led him so far from home. Their search takes them to Gary’s family in a small town in New Jersey, where they discover that one of Gary’s classmates was murdered. Bill and Lydia delve into the crime – only to find it eerily similar to a decades-old murder-suicide . . .
The situation is not helped by Bill’s long term estrangement from his sister. But now, with his nephew’s future at stake, Bill must unravel a long-buried crime and confront the darkness of his own past . . .
Praise for this series:
‘One of my favourite writers’ Dennis Lehane
‘Wonderful’ Robert Crais
‘Chilling’ Linda Fairstein
‘Terrific’ Washington Post
Turn the page for an exclusive extract . . .
one
When the phone rang I was asleep, and I was dreaming.
Alone in the shadowed corridors of an unfamiliar place, I heard, ahead, boisterous shouts, cheering. In the light, in the distance, figures moved with a fluid, purposeful grace. Cold fear followed me, something from the dark. I tried to call to the crowd ahead: my voice was weak, almost silent, but they stopped at the sound of it. Then, because the language I was speaking wasn’t theirs, they turned their backs, took up their game again. The floor began to slant uphill, and my legs were leaden. I struggled to reach the others, called again, this time with no sound at all. A door swung shut in front of me, and I was trapped, longing before, fear behind, in the dark, alone.
The ringing tore through the dream; it went on awhile and I grabbed up the phone before I was fully awake. “Smith,” I said, and my heart pounded because my voice was weak and I thought they couldn’t hear me.
But there was an answer. “Bill Smith? Private investigator, Forty-seven Laight Street?”
I rubbed my eyes, looked at the clock. Nearly two-thirty. I coughed, said, “Yeah. Who the hell are you?” I groped by the bed for my cigarettes.
“Sorry about the hour. Detective Bert Hagstrom, Midtown South. You awake?”
I got a match to a cigarette, took in smoke, coughed again. My head cleared. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. What’s up?”
“I got a kid here. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. Says he knows you.”
“Who is he?”
“Won’t say. No ID. Rolled a drunk on Thirty-third Street just up the block from two uniformed officers in a patrol car.”
“Sounds pretty stupid.”
“Green, I’d say. Young and big. I told him what happens to kids like him if we send them to Rikers.”
“If he’s fourteen, he’s too young for Rikers.”
“He doesn’t know that. He’s been stonewalling since they brought him in. Two hours I been shoveling it on about Rikers, finally he gives up your name. How about coming down here and giving us some help?”
Smoke twisted from the red tip of my cigarette, lost itself in the empty darkness. A November chill had invaded the room while I slept.
“Yeah,” I said, throwing off the blanket. “Sure. Just put it in my file, I got out of bed at two in the morning as a favor to the NYPD.”
“I’ve seen your file,” Hagstrom said. “It won’t help.”
Fragments of stories I would never know appeared out of the night, receded again as the cab took me north. Two streetwalkers, one white, one black, both tall and thin, laughing uproariously together; a dented truck, no markings at all, rolling silently downtown; a basement door that opened and closed with no one going in or out. I sipped burnt coffee from a paper cup, watched fallen leaves and discarded scraps jump in the gutters as we drove by. The cab driver was African and his radio kept up a soft, unbroken stream of talk, words I couldn’t understand. A few times he chuckled, so whatever was going on must have been funny. He let me out at the chipped stone steps of Midtown South. I overtipped him; I was thinking what it must be like to grow up in a sun-scorched African village and find your self driving a cab through the night streets of New York.
Inside, the desk sergeant directed me through the glaring fluorescent lights and across the scuffed vinyl tile to the second floor, the detective squad room. Two men sat at steel desks, one on the phone, the other typing. A third man, at the room’s far end, punched buttons on an unresponsive microwave.
“Ah, fuck this thing,” the button-puncher said without rancor,