I showed him my ID, which he read with his lips moving. Feet on stairs inside the house, a flash of a face past the landing window. Somewhere Mr. Daly shouted something, but his voice sounded faraway and slowed-down, like it was traveling through a long metal pipe.

“That there,” the uniform told me, handing back the ID, “is Undercover. I wasn’t informed of any undercover presence on the scene.”

“You’re being informed now.”

“You’ll have to speak to the investigating officer. That might be my sergeant or it might be one of the lads from the Murder Squad, depending on what—”

I said, “Get out of my way.”

His mouth puckered up. “There’s no need to take that tone with me. You can wait over there, where you were, until you’re cleared to enter by the—”

I said, “Get out of my way or I’ll punch your teeth in.”

His eyes bugged, but I meant it and he moved. He was still telling me what he was going to report me for when I took the stairs three at a time and shouldered past his startled buddy, in the door.

Have a good laugh at this: deep down, I never for a second thought they would find anything. Me, Mr. Street-Smart Cynic giving newbies my savvy little spiel about how the world is always two steps more vicious than you plan for, I never believed it would do this; not when I opened that suitcase, not when I felt the concrete slab rocking in that dim basement, not when I felt that charge magnetizing the evening air. Right deep down, deeper than everything I’d learned before or since, I still believed Rosie. I believed her all the way down the crumbling stairs to the basement and I believed her when I saw the circle of masked faces turning upwards to me in the white glare of their lights, the concrete slab uprooted and skewed at a wild angle on the floor between cables and crowbars, when I smelled the rich underground reek of something horribly wrong. I believed her right up until I pushed between the techs and saw what they were crouched around: the jagged hole, the dark mat of tangled hair, the shreds that could have been denim and the slick brown bones scored with tiny toothmarks. I saw the delicate curl of a skeleton hand and I knew that when they found the fingernails, somewhere in the layers of muck and dead insects and rotten sludge, the right index one would be bitten down to the quick.