But somebody else got in before me.

Yoo-hoo describes a man of about thirty, tall, broad shoulders. . .

Manning displays a police sketch of Instancer.

Yoo-hoo nods.

YOO-HOO

He did the job before I could.

MANNING

You saw him?

YOO-HOO

He crushed the dude’s throat. One hand. No gloves. No booties. No hairnet. I was as close to him as I am to that door over there.

MANNING

He see you?

YOO-HOO

If he did, he didn’t give a shit. He walked out the front door like the place belonged to him.

I’m recording and taking notes at the same time. I’m thinking, Ask the obvious question.

ME

Anything else? Did you see anything else?

YOO-HOO

A car got him.

ME

A car? A self-driver?

YOO-HOO

A real car. It pulled up to the curb.

ME

Could you see the driver?

YOO-HOO

Not enough to recognize her.

MANNING

Her? It was a woman?

Manning turns to me. I pull up a pic of Rachel on my phone. I hold the phone out to Yoo-hoo.

YOO-HOO

Bingo.

22

INSIDE A MIGRAINE

MANNING DOESN’T SAY a word all the way back to Manhattan.

He takes the passenger seat and turns the car over to me. His eyes are the color of coal. I’m afraid, not just for him but of him. His skull is splitting, I know. He takes one shot of Imitrex and has me detour to the only open Walgreens in the city (according to the POI on our dash), on Atlantic Avenue in Bed-Stuy, to pick up two more kits.

ME

What do you want me to do about Rachel?

It occurs to me that Manning might take matters into his own hands. I know he feels suckered. I know he feels played.

But he offers no answer.

He just wants me to get him home.

In the two and a half hours since we left the scene of Ellie Landau’s murder, the weather has made a screeching one-eighty. It has gone from Noah’s Ark inundation to a blistering-dry desert sirocco. Gusts of fifty and more, according to WPIX-FM, howl down a Flatbush Avenue whose low spots look like the Mississippi River, with cars and buses marooned in midstream. Our AV zigs and zags along frontage roads and side streets, high-pointing around flooded intersections and downed power transformers. Flatbush Avenue is blocked at Tillary Street by a blown-over tractor-trailer. The Manhattan Bridge is the only span still functioning, though its EZ-Pass toll plaza is half a foot deep, dark, and empty.

Temp on the dash reads 106.7 with an up arrow.

Time is 0410 when our car breasts the streambed that Central Park West has become between Sixty-Eighth and Seventy-Second. The iron gate outside the Midtown Athletic Club is chained and padlocked. Manning’s grunt says, Take me around to the kitchen. He’s in too much pain to speak.