Myron spotted a photograph on the end table. He flicked on the lamp and lifted it into view. Mickey was in a basketball uniform, his hair messed, the ringlets in front pasted to his forehead by the sweat. Brad stood next to him, his arm draped around his son’s neck as though he was about to put him in a loving headlock. Father and son sported enormous smiles. Brad gazed at his son with such obvious love, the moment so intimate Myron almost felt like turning away. Brad’s nose, Myron could see, had a definite bend now. But more than that, Brad looked older, his hair starting to recede from the forehead, and something about that, about the passage of time and all they’d missed, made Myron’s heart break anew.

From behind him, Myron heard a noise. He spun quickly. The sound had come from the bedroom. He moved to the door and peered inside. The main room was neat and tidy. The bedroom looked like a tornado had ripped through it, and there, in the eye of the storm, asleep (or worse) on her back, was Kitty.

“Hello?”

She didn’t move. Her breath came in short, raspy pants. The room smelled of old cigarettes and what might have been beer sweat. He moved closer to the bed. Myron decided to do a little poking around before he woke her. The disposable cell was on her bedside table. He checked it. He recognized the calls from Suzze and Joel “Crush” Fishman. There were three or four other calls, some with what looked like an overseas number. He punched them into his BlackBerry and e-mailed them to Esperanza. He searched Kitty’s pocketbook and found her and Mickey’s passports. There were dozens of stamps for countries on every continent. Myron tore through it, trying to figure out the timeline. A lot of the stamps were smeared. Still it looked as though Kitty had entered the United States eight months ago from Peru.

He put the passports back in the purse and rifled through it. There were no surprises at first, but then he started to feel along the lining and—hello—he felt the hard lump. He reached in, slid the seam open with his fingers, and pulled out a plastic bag with a small amount of brown powder in it.

Heroin.

Anger almost got the better of him. He was about to wake her up with a kick to the bed when he spotted something on the floor. For a moment he just blinked in disbelief. It was there, on the floor near Kitty’s head, where you might toss a book or magazine if you were falling asleep. Myron bent down to get a closer look. He didn’t want to touch it, didn’t want to get fingerprints on it.

It was a gun.