I glanced at Ms. Chigwell. She was looking straight ahead, ignoring the spitting from above as assiduously as she avoided the obscene graffiti scrawled on the huge “No Smoking” signs. Suddenly, though, she bit back a cry. I followed her eyes to the far corner of the room. Louisa lay there on a stretcher. Dr. Chigwell stood on one side of her, Art Jurshak on the other. The two of them stared at us, slack-jawed.

Dr. Chigwell found his voice first. “Clio! What are you doing here?”

She marched forward fiercely. I held her arm to keep her from getting within Jurshak’s grabbing range.

“I came to find you, Curtis.” Her voice was sharp and carried authoritatively over the hissing pipes. “You’ve gotten yourself involved with some very nasty people. I presume you’ve spent the last week or so with them. I don’t know what Mother would say if she were alive to see you, but I think it’s time you came back home again. Well help Miss Warshawski get this poor sick woman back into the ambulance and then you and I will return to Hinsdale.”

I had my gun leveled at Art. Sweat stood out on his round face, but he said pugnaciously, “You can’t shoot. Chigwell here has a needle ready to inject Louisa. If you shoot me, it’s her death warrant.”

“I’m overcome, Art, by your family feeling. If this is the first time you’ve seen your niece in twenty-seven years or so, your reaction would move even Klaus Barbie to tears.”

Art made a violent gesture. He tried shouting at me, but the messages—guilt over his long-forgotten incest, fear of others finding it out, rage at seeing me alive—kept him from getting out anything coherent.

“Is this woman his niece?” Ms. Chigwell demanded of me.

“Yes, indeed,” I said loudly. “And she has closer ties to you than that, doesn’t she, Art?”

“Curtis, I will not tolerate your killing this unfortunate young woman. And if she is your friend’s niece, it is absolutely unthinkable that you do so. It would be unethical and totally unworthy of you as the inheritor of Father’s practice.”

Chigwell looked at his sister dejectedly. He shrank a little inside his overcoat and his hands hung loosely at his sides. If I acted now, he wouldn’t do anything to Louisa.

I was bracing myself to take a flying leap at Art when I saw malice replace the frustration in his face—he was watching someone come up behind us.

Without glancing around, I seized Ms. Chigwell and rolled with her behind the nearest vat. When I looked up I saw a man in a dark overcoat stroll into the area where we’d been standing. I knew his face—I’d seen it on TV or the papers or in court when I’d been a public defender—I just couldn’t place it.

“You took your fucking time, Dresberg,” Jurshak snapped. “Why’d you let that Warshawski bitch in here to begin with?”

Of course. Steve Dresberg. The Garbage King. Majestic slayer of little flies buzzing around his trash empire.