Leo smiled again and realized he was having fun. He guessed it was a little unexpected, considering how uptight he had felt asking Rachel’s aunt if she could spend her school lunch break with him.

“Just so you know,” he said, “you wouldn’t be on turtle poop duty. I—”

The phone rang in his pants pocket. He pulled it out, saw that it was Carol and thought at once that she might have something to tell him about Pinnacle. Whatever it was.

“One minute, Rach,” he said and swiped to answer. Then, into the phone, “Carol, what’s up?”

Silence. He waited a second. He thought he could hear her breathing at the other end.

“Carol? You there?”

Another moment’s silence.

“Leo, you should come back to HQ,” she said finally. “There’s been...something terrible’s happened. It’s Ki Marton.”

“What are you talking about? What happened to Ki?”

A pause.

“Carol?”

“He was killed, Leo. A hit-and-run right outside on Tenth. Musil was with him.”

He felt the blood drain out of his veins.

“I’ll be there soon as I can,” he said and disconnected, staring numbly into Rachel’s ten-year-old face.

She looked back at him, her eyes filled with open curiosity and worry.

“Hon, we have to go,” he said.

At one thirty-eight, Grigor entered a place called Caswell’s Ale House on West Fifty-Third Street, sat down at the bar and put his backpack on the floor at the foot of the stool.

He glanced up at the menu board. The tavern was about three-quarters full, and he could hear sirens sporadically through the door as its lunchtime patrons went in and out. The sound was several blocks west, and no one in the bar paid attention to them. This was New York City.

After three or four minutes, the server came over, and Grigor ordered a hamburger and dark ale. Then he took out a cheap burner phone he had purchased at a chain drugstore near his hotel.

Using a GoRide shuttle account activated under the alias Luis Castro, he arranged for a car to pick him up at the tavern in about fifteen minutes. His request was for two stops. The first was at a location he’d scouted out in Flushing, Queens, only blocks from the Woodmere Middle School. The second destination was LaGuardia Airport in East Elmhurst, four miles and a fifteen-minute drive west across the bay.

He had no intention of going to the airport.

The request submitted, Grigor set the phone down on the counter. The server came over with his order. He thanked her and ate.

Cordoned off by police sawhorses, the four-block stretch of Tenth Avenue between West Fifty-Second and West Fifty-Sixth Streets was jumbled with flashing patrol cars, EMS vehicles and a large mobile crisis-response truck. There were cops at the barricades and everywhere else.