“That’s a stupid question to ask a cop.”

“No, he said ‘My first time was in a hayloft.’ Or something like that.”

“Is that a thing? Like, a hay fetish? Or is that a subset of the cowboy fetish?”

“His first time. I just asked about blackmail, and he brought up his first time. Like Matty.”

Like you, North wanted to say. Like you, throwing that first time away on Matty, fucking throwing it away. But all that came out was, “Oh.”

“Yeah. Actually, Reck talked about it a lot. He made it sound like a lot of the blackmail videos are first times. Maybe all of them.”

“Ok,” North said. “But Brueckmann wasn’t a first time.”

“It was his first time in that scene, BDSM.”

“So there’s somebody taking advantage of people who are inexperienced. They lure their victims into a sexual encounter, knowing that the victim is likely to be vulnerable and worried about their first time, and therefore be less likely to notice things that are strange. Like, say, a videocamera.”

Shaw was nodding, but he didn’t really seem to be listening.

“Shaw?”

“Oh. Yeah? What?”

“You with me?”

“It’s just—I feel like I’m missing something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something. And Brueckmann, his whole story, it feels off.”

“You think he was lying to us?”

For another moment Shaw was lost in shawland. Then he shook his head, shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Well,” North said, “if all these videos are blackmail of guys having their first sexual encounter, I think there’s somebody we should talk to.”

Shaw frowned. “I already asked Matty about Regina, and he said he doesn’t know her. And the security footage from Allure—”

“I know. It’s Mark on the video. That lines up with what Matty told us. But I still want to talk to Regina.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like coincidences.”

They drove first to the address that Teddi provided and found an apartment in a slouching brick walk-up in Dutchtown. There were needles on the ground, a ripped—and obviously used—condom, and the foil wrapper from a convenience store hotdog. Someone in the building was screaming for a goddamn glass of lemonade, and from one of the upper windows, a petite woman in a hijab hung wet laundry to dry. Regina didn’t answer the door, so they tried the second address Teddi had provided—Regina’s home away from home.

The Lucky Lindbergh Movie Palace had been one of the premiere structures of the late 1920s. Like so many of the buildings from that time, it showed an excess and architectural abandon that marked it as predating the crash in 1929: fluted columns, elaborate friezework, gilt and gold leaf on the walls, the ceilings, the chairs. And like so much from that time, the Lucky Lindbergh hadn’t fared well over the decades. North didn’t know all the details, but he knew that it had changed ownership multiple times, operating as a supply depot during World War II, then briefly again as a theater, then as a canned tomato warehouse, and then, according to urban legend, as the headquarters for one of the Irish mob bosses still lingering in the city—rumor differed as to which one.