Marino thought of Oscar Bane again. It made no difference if anyone had seen him well enough to identify him later. He was Terri’s boyfriend, had keys to her building, and he was expected. If the outside lights weren’t on when he arrived, then why not? By five p.m., when he allegedly arrived, it would have been completely dark out.

Marino supposed it was possible that the lights had been on when he’d arrived, and for some reason, he’d turned them off as he’d entered the building.

Marino stopped half a block away from the brownstone, staring at the entrance on East 29th. He imagined himself the killer, imagined what it would have been like to approach Terri’s apartment building. What would he have seen? What would he have felt? Yesterday had been cold and damp, and extremely windy with gusts up to twenty-five miles an hour, making it very unpleasant for people to be out walking, about as unpleasant as it was right now.

By three-thirty in the afternoon, the sun was below the buildings and trees, and the entryway would have been cast in shadows. It was unlikely the lanterns would have been on that early, whether they were on a timer or not. By mid-afternoon, anybody inside the apartment building probably would have had his lights on, making it obvious to a predator which tenant might be home.

Marino hurried to the playground. He was relieving himself against the dark front gate when he spotted a dark, bulky shape on the brownstone’s flat roof. The shape was near the faint silhouette of the satellite dish, and then the shape moved. Zipping up his pants, he reached into his coat pocket for his gun and crept around to the west side of Terri’s apartment. The fire escape was a narrow ladder, straight up, and much too small for Marino’s hands and feet.

He was sure it would pull away from the building and send him plummeting backward to the earth. His heart pounded, and he was sweating profusely beneath his Harley jacket, his Glock forty-caliber pistol in hand as he climbed, one rung at a time, his knees shaking.

He never used to have a fear of heights but had developed one after leaving Charleston. Benton had said it was the result of depression and accompanying anxiety, and had recommended a new treatment that involved an antibiotic called D-cycloserine, just because it had worked on rats in a neuroscience research project. Marino’s therapist, Nancy, said his problem was “an unconscious conflict,” and he’d never determine the exact nature of that conflict unless he stayed sober.