Her reaction was stamped by long practice. Without hesitation or thought, she screamed out, “Trevor, cops!” as she simultaneously rolled out of the bed and made a tackling run directly at Joe.

He impressed himself by instinctively pirouetting on one foot, catching the side of her downthrust head with his forearm, and redirecting her past him, right into the wall beyond.

“Go, go, go,” ordered the next man in, heading for the open bathroom door, while another dropped onto the moaning woman to cuff her hands behind her back.

The next few minutes dissolved into a chaotic jumble of shouts, radio commands, and bodies in rapid motion. The bathroom door slammed shut, a disorganized and frustrating series of methods—none as seamless as those on prime time—were used to break it open, but only in time to see a hairy-backed, shirtless male disappearing through the window.

From the bedroom, Joe saw him hit the icy roof outside, instantly lose his footing, and roll like a tree trunk until he’d vanished over the edge.

“You got him?” came the reasonable next question over the radio.

“What’s left of him.”

CHAPTER THREE

For the time being, it was just the two of them, Joe and Fred Houston, in the sudden quiet of the empty Buttner apartment. Trevor had been carted off to repair a broken pelvis and some ribs; Melissa Monfet was being treated for a neck complaint after her close encounter with the wall; the baby had been scooped up by social services; and poor Angie Neal, this storm’s central attraction, was for the moment being cared for before the inevitable interview when she’d be asked to describe events she wouldn’t outdistance for the rest of her life.

Joe had witnessed such highly structured interviews before, of sexually exploited and/or abused children, and been caught by the metaphor of each victim becoming traumatically transformed into conjoined twins, one destined to lug around the corpse of the other until death. Not the gift a child should expect from supposedly caring adults.

Houston had been searching the apartment with a tablet in hand and now sidled up to Joe, showing him the earlier view of Angie posing, self-conscious and nude. “Look at the background. I found where this was shot.”

Joe looked past the thin girl. There was a curtained window, what appeared to be a bedroom wall, papered in faded flowers, and the corner of a piece of furniture.

“This way,” Fred urged him, heading to where the baby and Angie had shared a room.

He paused inside the door and held up the screen photo as a reference, comparing it to the room’s actual setting. Both men could appreciate how the window, wall, rug, and what turned out to be a fragment of the crib matched perfectly.

“That’s gotta help down the line,” Joe agreed.

“It’s not all,” Fred offered. “In his rush to make like Batman, Buttner left behind a laptop—another smoking gun. We’ll be able to make his life miserable for the foreseeable future, and probably some of his cyber playmates. And Lisa Rowell? His online avatar. Guess he thought he’d get more mileage as a woman.”