“Oh, please.” She stubbed out her cigarette, joined me over the photo. “I’m pretty. Okay. Some men might even say beautiful.”

“Or gorgeous. Or knockout, drop-dead, volup—”

“Right,” she said. “Fine. Some men. I’ll give you that. Some men. But not all men. Plenty would say I’m not their type, I’m too Italian-looking, too petite, too whatever or not enough of whatever else.”

“For the sake of debate,” I said, “okay. I’ll go along with you.”

“But this one,” she said and tapped Desiree’s forehead with her index finger, “there’s not a straight man alive who wouldn’t find her attractive.”

“She is something,” I said.

“Something?” she said. “Patrick, she’s flawless.”

Two days after the emergency meeting in Trevor Stone’s house, Jay Becker did something that would have proven he’d gone off the deep end if it hadn’t proven instead to be a stroke of genius.

He became Desiree Stone.

He stopped shaving, allowed his hair and appearance to become disheveled, and stopped eating. Dressed in an expensive, but rumpled suit, he retraced Desiree’s steps around the Emerald Necklace. This time, however, he didn’t do it as an investigator; he did it as she had.

He sat on the same bench in the Commonwealth Avenue mall, on the same stretch of grass in the Common, under the same tree in the Public Garden. As he noted in his reports, he initially hoped that someone—maybe Sean Price—would contact him, act on a perception that Jay was vulnerable, laid waste by loss. But when that didn’t happen, he instead tried to adopt what he assumed was Desiree’s mind-set in the weeks before she disappeared. He soaked in the sights she’d seen, heard the sounds she’d heard, waited and prayed, as she probably had, for contact, for an end to grief, for a human connection found and forged in loss.

“Grief,” Jay wrote in his report of that day. “I kept coming back to her grief. What could console it? What could manipulate it? What could touch it?”

Alone, for the most part, in the wintery parks, as a light snow misted across his field of vision, Jay almost didn’t see what had been in front of his face and rattling through his subconscious since he’d taken this case nine days before.

Grief, he kept thinking. Grief.

And he saw it from his bench on Commonwealth Avenue. He saw it from the corner of grass in the Common. He saw it from under the tree in the Public Garden.

Grief.

Not the emotion, but the small gold nameplate.

GRIEF RELEASE, INC., it said.