He had the Falcon’s old AM radio turned to WCBS. The FBI had entered the Brennan case because the candidate’s civil rights had been violated. Sure, Devlin thought, what had been on their minds in Liz Becker’s office last week? With the N.Y.P.D. looking for Devlin, Liz was going to get an interesting response from the federals if she gave them Devlin’s message. Not when, if. Devlin had seen early with Liz that she reminded him of Maryellen in many ways, and what he still did not understand about himself was why he had decided that she would be right for him anyway. In his time with Liz he had thought he had decoded all her gestures and intonations—so he could sort through the truth and lies like a grocer going over a basket of peaches—but when it was over, when he was so sick of her he couldn’t even look at her, what buried it was the thought that he couldn’t allow himself to believe anything she had ever said to him. A liar. If he talked to her again, he was going to have to listen very carefully to what she said. Yes. Devlin didn’t believe he would have trouble remembering.…

Susan Michaels’s apartment was on West Eighty-third, halfway between West End and Riverside Drive. From what she had said to Devlin, she didn’t seem like the sort of young woman who would be scared out of a good apartment by the murder of a roommate. It might be a while, though, before she found someone willing to rent the room of a murdered girl.

It was a pretty good building, too, the Turkish-bath tilework of the lobby relatively free of chips and cracks and the kind of grime that covered Sal’s Falcon. Devlin pushed intercom buttons until someone responded.

“Exterminator!”

The buzzer sounded and Devlin went in. Fourth floor. This part of town had been up, down, and back up again in Devlin’s lifetime. You could find a spectacularly beautiful apartment behind the most dreary, paint-encrusted door. In the elevator Devlin tried to straighten his clothing, which was weighted with sweat. He wasn’t going to pick the lock on Michaels’s apartment door, he was going to use one of his passkeys. Devlin had been carrying passkeys since his first days as a cop—some of them had been his father’s. “We had a guy break his fucking leg kicking in a door,” the old man used to growl. “What’s the point of that?”