“I read all the newspaper accounts,” he said. “I even read that terrible ‘true crime’ paperback. You two battled evil. And won.”

“It was a draw,” I said and cleared my throat. “Trust me on that.”

“Maybe,” he said, his hard green eyes finding my own. “Maybe for the two of you, it was a draw. But think of how many future victims you saved from those monsters.”

“Mr. Stone,” Angie said, “with all due respect, please don’t talk to us about this.”

“Why not?”

She raised her head. “Because you don’t know anything about it, so it makes you sound like a moron.”

His fingers caressed the head of his cane lightly before he leaned forward and touched her knee with his other hand. “You’re right. Forgive me.”

Eventually she smiled at him in a way I’d never seen her smile at anyone since Phil’s death. As if she and Trevor Stone were old friends, as if they’d both lived in places where light and kindness can’t reach.

“I’m alone,” Angie had told me a month ago.

“No, you’re not.”

She lay on a mattress and box spring we’d thrown down in my living room. Her own bed, and most of her belongings, were still back in her house on Howes Street because she wasn’t capable of entering the place where Gerry Glynn had shot her and Evandro Arujo had bled to death on the kitchen floor.

“You’re not alone,” I said, my arms wrapped around her from behind.

“Yes, I am. And all your holding and all your love can’t change that right now.”

Angie said, “Mr. Stone—”

“Trevor.”

“Mr. Stone,” she said, “I sympathize with your grief. I do. But you kidnapped us. You—”

“It’s not my grief,” he said. “No, no. Not my grief I was referring to.”

“Then whose?” I said.

“My daughter’s. Desiree.”

Desiree.

He said her name like it was the refrain of a prayer.

His study, when well lighted again, was a shrine to her.