“Thank you.”

He kissed her soft lips, then sat down at the dining-room table. Rina had laid it all out for him—a neat little stack of papers in a folder, an empty notepad, a pen, a pencil, and a good street map of Munich. In all honesty, he was happy to be occupied. His mind abhorred a vacuum because that meant that sooner or later it would fill with images he’d rather forget.

He picked up the folder and opened it.

Regina Gottlieb’s body was found in a tangle of foliage inside the Englischer Garten—a long stretch of parkland that ran parallel to the Isar River but was separated from it by several city streets. From the map, it looked like the two areas intersected in the northern neighborhood of Schwabing. But then the garden ended and the Isar broke away.

Decker sat back, visualizing his morning jog through the parklands that abutted the Isar—a hint of the indigenous Bavarian wilderness—the area so long that it went under city streets. The cement pillars that supported the roadways above had been stamped with graffiti that was—not surprisingly—written in German, the same crude epithets as in America no doubt. He recalled his body washed with numbness as his face hit the frigid air at six in the morning. Jet lag had been playing games with his diurnal clock, and at that hour it was still black outside, dawn at least an hour away. It was dangerous for him to be out so early, but he took a perverse pleasure in flirting with peril, daring anyone to try to mug him. The leafless trees had dripped gelid moisture, the ground wet and muddy in spots, filled with detritus from the nighttime Munich rains. The air reeked of moss, mold, and rotting flora. The Isar was roiling after the storm, bubbling over with water and spray, boisterously shouting as it rolled over rocks and boulders that lined the riverbed.

Toward the end of his jog, a gray light shrouded the city. Decker’s mind flashed back to the upscale neighborhoods on either side of the river. All around had been imposing stone buildings constructed with perfect proportions and mindful of detail.

He wished he had paid more attention to his surroundings. The trip was lacking the sharp, defined angles of clear retrospection, like reading the paper in bad light. Although he had passed many landmarks, he had no idea where they were in relation to one another. Then again, how was he to know that his sight-seeing might be crucial in solving this long-buried, unsolved case?

Looking at the city as a whole entity—not just a road map to chart where the hell they were in relationship to the hotel—Decker discovered that the Englischer Garten was located in Munich’s northeast corner. He and Rina had stayed at a hotel on Maximilianstrasse, a thoroughfare that housed great restaurants, five-star hotels, and most of the designer boutiques. When he was there, the distance between the hotel and the garden didn’t seem very far at all. On the map, it looked much more distant.