I came off the porch when Devin telephoned.

“What’s up?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t call to chat, Dev. It’s not your style.”

“Maybe this is the new me.”

“Nope.”

He grumbled. “Fine. We have to talk.”

“¿ Porque?”

“Because someone just smoked a girl on Meeting House Hill and she has no ID and I’d like to know who she is.”

“Which has what, exactly, to do with me?”

“Maybe nothing. But she did have your card in her hand when she died.”

“My card?”

“Yours,” he said. “Meeting House Hill. See you in ten minutes.”

He hung up and I sat with the phone in my ear, listening until the dial tone returned. I sat there longer still, hearing the tone, waiting for it to tell me that the dead girl on Meeting House Hill wasn’t Kara Rider, waiting for it to tell me something. Anything.

9

By the time I reached Meeting House Hill, the temperature had dropped into the low thirties. It was a barren cold, one without wind or spirit, the kind that sinks into your bone marrow and fills your blood with shards of ice.

Meeting House Hill is the dividing line where my neighborhood ends and Field’s Corner begins. The hill starts below the pavement, sloping the streets into a steep upgrade that turns a car’s third gear into reverse on icy nights. Where several streets converge at an apex, the tip of Meeting House Hill rises through the grid of cement and tar to form a pauper’s field in the middle of a neighborhood so blighted you could fire a missile through its center and no one would notice unless you hit a bar or a food stamp office.

The bell of St. Peter’s tolled once as Devin met me at my car and we trudged up the hill. The sound of the bell was hollow, ringing blithely on a cold night in an area some god had clearly forgotten. The ground was beginning to harden and patches of dead grass crunched under our feet.

I could see only a few figures silhouetted under the streetlight atop the hill, and I turned to Devin. “You bring the entire force out tonight, Dev?”

He looked at me, his head shrunk low in his jacket. “You’d prefer we made a media event out of it? Have a bunch of reporters and townies and rookies trampling evidence?” He glanced at the rows of three-deckers overlooking the hill. “Great thing about homicides in shitty neighborhoods, nobody gives a fuck, so nobody gets in the way.”

“Nobody gives a fuck, Devin, then nobody’s going to tell you anything.”

“That’s the downside, sure.”

His partner, Oscar Lee, was the first cop I recognized. Oscar is the largest guy I’ve ever met. He’d make Refrigerator Perry look anorexic and Michael Jordan look like a midget, and even Bubba looks puny beside Oscar. He wore a leather watch cap over a black head the size of a circus balloon and smoked a cigar that smelled like beachfront after an oil slick.