He tried to imagine what might happen if he went to the police with this. They knew him there, at the station. They knew who he was and where he lived. And more important, they hated him. Before he could even drive, the neighborhood officers used to question him about every little goddamn thing that happened. Sometimes multiple times per week. He’d been fined for having a broken taillight, jaywalking, not carrying his ID, and riding a scooter on the sidewalk. One of those creeps had once issued him a hundred-euro penalty for “loitering in a public place as part of a group without a legitimate reason,” and not long after that, he’d had to cough up a hundred thirty euros for supposedly having caused a disturbance in the neighborhood. Back then, he earned less than thirty euros a week with his part-time job stacking shelves. They were just picking on him and his friends, plain and simple. And now he was supposed to trust these people?

Fat chance.

“Dealer,” he heard Naomi say again. She narrowed her eyes into slits. “Is that really true, Ralf? Does Brian have a dealer? A cocaine dealer?”

He shrugged apologetically.

“That stupid asshole!” yelled Naomi suddenly. “I hate him! He told me a hundred times that he’d stopped all that. All those little deals of his, and that stupid blow, and the constant lying, and now—and now that prick has taken off. He ripped off his dealer and left us to face the consequences.”

Ralf regarded her inquisitively. So that was what she thought—that Brian had made off with the cash.

“He can drop dead, as far as I’m concerned,” she continued. “I mean it. Drop dead!”

9

9

The morning passed without incident. Two of Helen’s patients were currently in surgery—a man having an appendectomy and a boy Thom’s age with a knee injury.

Helen rolled up a length of tubing and threw it away. Her thoughts turned to the weekend. Tomorrow and Saturday she had to work, but after that, she had three days off. She’d been looking forward to it for weeks—lounging around on the sofa in her pajamas with an embarrassingly big pack of M&Ms and a stack of DVDs.

Her heart had started beating faster without her realizing. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t stay home alone with a dismembered corpse in the basement. The silence would grip her by the throat; it would drive her mad.