I really had told Marta everything I knew about Darby; everything else I’d learned about Jung and Ganz, I held back, at least for now. She’d have her leads to pursue, and I had mine. There had been an e-mail from C.D. waiting for me on my phone, showing a copy of his discharge papers. He actually had been admitted the night Tim died. The blackmail—well, there were extenuating circumstances involved with that. The elder Ayers paid up, Tim accepted C.D.’s apology, and Ganz got what Tim promised him in the first place. I considered the whole thing done and done. It was Nick Spada who deserved a closer look. He hadn’t struck me as odd when I met him, just obstructive, but our encounter had been rather brief. Even psychopaths can hold it together the length of an elevator ride. Had he killed Darby, or had Darby’s past finally caught up with him? Mobsters make creative presentations of their victims: They fit them with cement shoes and toss them into the river; they cut out their tongues and shove them down their throats; they cut them up into little pieces and stuff them into a box. But nothing I’d uncovered so far hinted at Darby having any ties to these types of monsters, Mob connected or otherwise.

I glanced out the window at the rain. It was coming down hard, not in gentle droplets meant to caress flower petals, but in torrential sheets of angry projectiles heavy enough to dent dirt. Biblical rain—rain a person could drown in. I swiveled in my chair, staring at all the wet. A car horn sounded from the street below; my view of the apartment building across the street was muddied by a blanket of rolling fog as dense as chimney smoke. I needed to move. I needed to turn over rocks, push my way in a door, knock something loose, but Marta had warned me away from anything having to do with Darby. That wasn’t what was holding me back, though. She likely knew even as the words were coming out of her mouth that I had no intention of backing off. I had a case I hadn’t yet solved, a client I couldn’t find, and a sinking feeling that both were now closely connected to two dead men. What Marta didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

I grabbed my keys, my bag, and locked up. I needed air, even if rain came with it. I took the stairs at a fast clip, two at a time, toward the ground floor, but stopped when my cell phone rang. For a moment, I considered not answering it, but I did. It was Barb.

“What are you doing?”

“Heading out. Why?”

“Important?”

“It could be.”

“Then never mind. It can wait.”

There was something in her voice. “What can wait?”