“I’m going to try to keep her going for a half hour. Or forty minutes, if I can.”

“She deserves it, hm?” Vincent asked.

Duncan paused. “The question you’re really asking is why am I killing these particular people.”

“Well . . .” It was true.

“I’ve never told you.”

“No, you haven’t.”

Trust is nearly as precious as time. . . .

Duncan glanced at Vincent then back to the street. “You know, we’re all on earth for a certain period of time. Maybe only days or months. Many years, we hope.”

“Right.”

“It’s as if God—or whatever you believe in—has a huge list of everybody on earth. When the hands of His clock hit a certain time, that’s it. They’re gone. . . . Well, I have my own list.”

“Ten people.”

“Ten people. . . . The difference is that God doesn’t have any good reason for killing them. I do.”

Vincent was quiet. For a moment he wasn’t clever and he wasn’t hungry. He was just regular Vincent, listening to a friend sharing something that was important.

“I’m finally comfortable enough telling you what that reason is.”

And he proceeded to do just that.

The moon was a band of white light on the hood of the car, reflecting into her eyes.

Amelia Sachs was now speeding along the East River, the emergency flasher sitting cockeyed on the dash.

She felt a weight crushing her, the consequences from all the events of the past few days: The likelihood that corrupt officers were involved with killers who’d murdered Ben Creeley and Frank Sarkowski. The risk that Inspector Flaherty might take the case away from her at any minute. Dennis Baker’s espionage and the vote of no confidence from the brass about Nick. Deputy Inspector Jefferies’s tantrum.

And, most of all, the terrible news about her father.

Thinking: What hope is there in doing your job, working hard, giving up your peace of mind, risking your life, if the business of being a cop ultimately spoils the decent core within you?

She slammed the shifter into fourth, nudging the car to seventy. The engine howled like a wolf at midnight.

No cop was better than her father, more solid, more conscientious. And yet look at what had happened to him. . . . But then she realized that no, no, she couldn’t think of it that way. Nothing had happened to him. Turning bad was his own decision.

She remembered Herman Sachs as a calm, humorous man, who enjoyed his afternoons with friends, watching car races, roaming with his daughter through Nassau County junkyards in treasure hunts for elusive carburetors or gaskets or tailpipes. But now she knew that that persona was merely the facade, beneath which was a much darker person, someone she hadn’t known at all.

Within Amelia Sachs’s soul was an edgy force, something that made her doubt and made her question and compelled her to take risks, however great. She suffered for this. But the reward was the exhilaration when an innocent life was saved or a dangerous perp collared.