Marino had no doubt about the source of his conflict. At this very moment, it was a goddamn narrow ladder bolted to a brownstone. He pulled himself onto the roof, and his heart lurched and he grunted in surprise as he found himself eye to eye with the barrel of a gun held by a dark figure lying on his belly in a sniper’s position. For a moment, neither of them moved.

Then Mike Morales holstered his pistol as he sat up and whispered furiously, “You stupid fuck! What the hell are you doing?”

“What the hell are you doing?” Marino whispered back. “I thought you were a fucking serial killer.”

He scooted on his butt until he was a safe distance from the roof’s edge.

“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot your fucking head off,” Marino added.

He tucked the Glock back into his coat pocket.

“We just had this conversation,” Morales said. “You don’t get to run around and not tell me what the hell you’re doing. I’m going to get your ass fired. Berger’s probably going to do it anyway.”

His face was almost indistinguishable in the dark, and he wore dark, loose clothing. He looked like a homeless person or a drug dealer.

“I don’t know how I’m going to get back down from here,” Marino said. “You know how old that ladder is? Probably a hundred years old, that’s how old. Back then when people were half the size they are now.”

“What’s the matter with you? You trying to prove something? Because the only thing you’re proving is you ought to go work security in a fucking mall or something.”

The rooftop was concrete, with a boxy HVAC and the satellite dish. In the building across the street where Marino had been earlier today, the only lighted windows were those of the second-floor neighbor’s apartment, and the drapes were drawn across them. Across the street from the back of Terri’s building, there were more people home, and two of them seemed to assume that nobody could see them. An older man was typing on a computer, clueless that he was being watched. One floor below him, a woman in green pajamas was sitting on her living room couch, gesturing as she talked on a cordless phone.

Morales was chewing out Marino for screwing up everything.

“The only thing I’m screwing up is you being a Peeping Tom,” Marino retorted.

“I don’t have to peep to see whatever I want, whenever I want,” Morales replied. “Not saying I wouldn’t look if there’s something to look at.”

He pointed at the dish antenna, angled up about sixty degrees and facing south of Texas where somewhere high in the night sky was a satellite that Marino couldn’t envision.