So a few words, an idea, maybe even a lie, had led Jimmy to this alleyway. Maybe to the man.

But what did he know about detective work? He’d heard a line once, about art, about sculpture. About a sculptor known for his enormous, very realistic sculptures of horses. He had been asked how he could do it, his technique. “It’s simple,” the sculptor had said, “I just chip away everything that doesn’t look like a horse.” What did Jimmy know about detective work? Nothing, except to go everywhere he could go, cut away everything it wasn’t, until a shape emerged. What did he know, except that almost everything was a mystery and that what was most true about a thing you usually didn’t see until it was too late.

“Which floor?” Angel said. He was stopped, looking up at the side of the brick building at the end of the alley. It was six floors, old arched windows bricked in years ago, covered by a picture of something, signage. If it was one of those romantic alleyways in a documentary about the poor, the old sign would have been a fading picture of an orange tree with a lush, fading, green Promised Land behind it. What it was instead was a man in a bowler hat wearing a truss.

“My guy didn’t say,” Jimmy said. “Just that this was his squat, that he slept in the daytime. Or at least people only seemed to see him at night.”

So they went inside. The first floor of the brick building was open from side to side, with posts, with high windows with arched tops, with unfinished, worn wood on the deck. It had been a factory. Jimmy and Angel crossed to a pile of rubble in the middle of things. Angel picked through it and found a length of hardwood, like a table leg. Maybe it had been a furniture factory. Or a coffin factory. He gripped it by the skinny end.

“You look like a caveman,” Jimmy said.

To tell the truth, both of them were spooked. They’d bought into the hysteria. They’d been carrying it around, a gnawing unease, both of them, for six days. Since the killings up in Benedict. There hadn’t been any more murders since the director and the two women, but that had only increased the apprehension somehow. The whole town’s apprehension.

They went upstairs. The staircase was wooden but strong.

There wasn’t any dust in the center of the treads. Somebody had been coming and going.

“You should have called that cop Dill,” Angel said.

“He was gone,” Jimmy said. “Out.”

“I got his cell somewhere.”

“We’re here, we might as well go on up.”

“I wasn’t saying don’t go up,” Angel said defensively.

The second floor and the third floor were open side to side like the ground floor. Open and empty. The light was all but gone. Now they had to put their hands on the railing to feel their way up.

But there was light above. Golden light.

They came out of the stairwell onto the fourth floor. It was wide and empty, too, but across it there was a single tall window bringing in a sharp-edged quadrilateral of gold light.

They moved toward it. There was a heap of clothes, a bedroll.

And a body.

He was on his side, the upper quarter of his head smashed in from a blow that could have been inflicted by a club like the one still in Angel’s hand. Angel looked down at it, as if he was thinking the same thing.

Angel said, “He doesn’t look anything like you.”

“It’s not him,” Jimmy said. A moment passed that wasn’t as long as it seemed. “It’s the guy who sent me down here, from out in Van Nuys.”

There was dog shit everywhere.

On the drive home, Jimmy and Angel saw people standing outside an electronics store, looking in at the bank of TVs. Same thing at another store down the street.

The radios in all the cars around them weren’t playing music. It was just talking. All talk.

It was like the end of the world. Or the beginning. The people they passed on the sidewalks and the people in the cars around them seemed to be, if not happy, lightened. The Porsche had a hole in the dash where the radio used to be or Jimmy and Angel would have tuned in the news themselves.

Jimmy went straight to the television when he walked in the door of his house.

Mary was there, startling him, coming out of the bedroom.

She let the TV tell him. They’d caught