"Yes."

"This boy is someone close to you?"

Myron kept both hands on the wheel. "Yes."

"So there's no way you'll walk away from this?"

"None."

Stan nodded, mostly to himself. "I'll do what I can. But you have to trust me."

"What do you mean?"

"Give me a few days."

"To do what?"

"You won't hear from me for a little while. Don't let that shake your faith."

"What are you talking about?"

"You do what you have to," he said. "I'll do the same."

Stan Gibbs stepped out of the car and disappeared into the night.

Chapter 27.

Greg Downing woke Myron early the next morning with a phone call. "Nathan Mostoni left town," he said. "So I came back to New York. I get to pick up my son this afternoon."

Goody-goody for you, Myron thought. But he kept his tongue still.

"I'm going to the Ninety-second Street Y to shoot around," Greg said. "You want to come?"

"No," Myron said.

"Come anyway. Ten o'clock."

"I'll be late." Myron hung up and rolled out of bed. He checked his e-mail and found a JPEG image from Esperanza's contact at AgeComp. He clicked the file and an image slowly appeared on the screen. The possible face of Dennis Lex as a man in his mind to late thirties. Weird. Myron looked at the picture. Not familiar. Not familiar at all. Remarkable work, these age-enhanced images. So lifelike. Except in the eyes. The eyes always looked like the eyes of the dead.

He clicked on the print icon and heard his Hewlett-Packard go to work. Myron checked the clock on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Still early in the morning, but he didn't want to wait. He called Melina Garston's father.

George Garston agreed to meet Myron at his penthouse at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street, overlooking Central Park. A dark-haired woman answered the door. She introduced herself as Sandra and led him silently down the corridor. Myron looked out a window. He could see the Gothic outline of the Dakota all the way across the park. He remembered reading somewhere how Woody and Mia would wave towels from their respective apartments on either side of Central Park. Happier days, no doubt.

"I don't understand what you have to do with my daughter," George Garston said to him. Garston wore a collared blue shirt nicely offset by a shock of white neck-to-chest hairs sprouting out like a troll doll's. His bald head was an almost perfect sphere jammed between two boulder-excuses for shoulders. He had the proud, burly build of a successful immigrant, but you could see that he'd taken a hit. There was a slump there now, the stoop of the eternally grieving. Myron had seen it before. Grief like his breaks your back. You go on, but you always stoop. You smile, but it never really reaches the eyes.

"Probably nothing," Myron said. "I'm trying to find someone. He may be connected to your daughter's murder. I don't know."