He had been hoping for a miracle. He had no reason to believe there was anything to search for. It was like looking for secret messages in the frozen fish filets.

Moving the sewing machine had lifted a corner of the wall-to-wall carpet. Devlin knew about that stuff, too, but knew how he knew it: one college summer he’d worked as an apprentice to a floor mechanic. Tackless installation of wall-to-wall carpeting was part of the trade, along with putting down linoleum and tiles of all kinds. Once down, carpeting wasn’t supposed to come up unless you pulled it up—casual moving of furniture wouldn’t do it. Devlin moved the sewing machine and lifted the carpet some more.

It came up easily. When it was installed properly, carpeting was stretched out from the center of the room, over little hooks rising out of strips nailed to the floor around the sides of the room. You got the carpet up by stretching it outward again. This had been lifted, but not reinstalled properly. The padding was rotted, hardly more than a pancake of dust. Devlin kept lifting.

And under the padding, flashing white where the padding was crumbled, almost four feet from the corner of the room, was a piece of paper. Devlin reached. An envelope. In the warmth and humidity, bits of padding wanted to stick to his fingertips. The envelope was fat, covered with fragments of carpet padding the length of shaved whiskers that did not blow or wipe off. Nothing written on the outside of the envelope. Devlin moved around toward the hall. No point in putting things back the way they had been, not when the letter Devlin was unfolding was handwritten on legal-size yellow foolscap, and addressed, “Dear Jane,” and signed, after five pages, “Your loving Jack.”

Sure! Let Levine’s people come back and see that things had been disturbed! Devlin hoped he had a bargaining chip even if it wouldn’t mean much to whoever had killed Major and the others. Devlin still didn’t have any evidence that all the killings had been done by the same person or persons anyway.

But he wasn’t going to find that evidence here. He had to get moving again. He wanted to talk to Loncaric and John Lord. He wanted a name and address to go with Major’s saved phone number in Brooklyn.

From the living room window he looked down into the street just as a patrol car turned from West End Avenue. He waited, watching. The car stopped in front of the building. Uniformed officers got out of both front doors and hustled through the rain to the entrance. Quickly Devlin got moving.

In the hall, he closed the apartment door carefully, quietly, and wiped the knob with his handkerchief. The elevator jolted into life, going down. Devlin took the stairs down, slower.