He turned as we approached. “The hell’s Kenzie doing here, Devin?”

Oscar. My friend in need, my friend indeed.

Devin said, “The card. Remember?”

“So you might be able to ID this girl, Kenzie.”

“If I could see her, Oscar. Maybe.”

Oscar shrugged. “She’s probably looked better.”

He stepped aside so that I had a clear view of the body lying under the streetlight.

She was naked except for a pair of light blue satin underpants. Her body was swollen from the cold or rigor or something else. Her bangs were swept back off her forehead and her mouth and eyes were open. Her lips were blue from the cold and she seemed to look at something just over my shoulder. Her thin arms and legs were spread wide, and dark blood—chilled to slush—puddled out from the base of her throat, the heels of her upturned palms, and the soles of her feet. Small, flat circles of metal glinted from the center of each palm and each upturned ankle.

It was Kara Rider.

She’d been crucified.

“Three-penny nails,” Devin said later as we sat in The Black Emerald Tavern. “Very basic. Only two thirds of the homes in this city have them. Preferred by carpenters everywhere.”

“Carpenters,” Oscar said.

“That’s it,” Devin said. “The perp’s a carpenter. Pissed off about that Christ thing. Taking it upon himself to avenge the hero of his trade.”

“You writing this down?” Oscar asked me.

We’d come to the bar looking for Micky Doog, the last person I’d seen Kara with, but he hadn’t been seen since the early afternoon. Devin got his address from Gerry Glynn, the owner, and sent a few patrolmen by, but Micky’s mother hadn’t seen him since yesterday.

“There was a few of them in here this morning,” Gerry told us. “Kara, Micky, John Buccierri, Michelle Rourke, part of that crew used to run around together a few years back.”

“They leave together?”

Gerry nodded. “I was just coming in as they were going out. They were pretty hammered and it wasn’t even one in the afternoon. She’s a good kid, though, that Kara.”

“Was,” Oscar said. “Was a good kid.”

It was close to two in the morning and we were drunk.

Gerry’s dog, Patton, a massive German shepherd with a coat of black and dusky amber, lay on the bar top ten feet away, watching us as if deciding whether he’d be taking our car keys or not. Eventually he yawned, and a great bacon strip of a tongue lolled from his mouth as he looked away from us with what seemed a studied disinterest.

After the medical examiner had shown up, I’d stood in the cold for another two hours while Kara’s body was carted into an ambulance and shipped off to the morgue and then while the forensics team swept the area for the evidence and Devin and Oscar canvassed the homes fronting the park for anyone who might have heard anything. It wasn’t so much that no one heard anything, just that women screamed in this neighborhood every night and it was sort of like a car alarm—once you heard it enough times, you stopped noticing.