“Damn,” he said. “I hadn’t got ’round to that part yet. You got any idea where she might be at?”

“Jesse! I thought she was dead this morning, remember?”

“I was thinkin’ maybe she left a note or some such in the apartment.”

“No note,” I answered. “By the way, the friend who identified her body is suddenly missing.” When Renfrew had tried calling Kaylee Quan, her office, home, and cell phones rang off into voicemail ether. So when someone discovers a dead body, you let them give you a phone number and then they waltz off into the sunset? I’d asked. Renfrew had reminded me that witnesses don’t get put in a holding cell. “I might be able to get a clue if I could get into the apartment again, but the police are there now.”

“You need to come on home so we can cook up a plan. We can call your sister’s friends, track her down that way.”

“The junkie network. Yeah, that will work.” I stared into the street, willing the cops to beat it.

“You comin’ home now?”

“Soon. I’m going to walk a little, clear my head.” That wasn’t a lie, but I didn’t believe that exercise or crisp air would do anything to relieve my anxiety. Somehow the earth had given way under my feet. All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream, I thought, remembering a line of Poe’s. It was as if the year I’d spent in Spain hadn’t happened, and I was back where I was a year ago, agonizing over my sister.

When I left the bakery, I headed west on Rivington, noticing that the buildings got nicer and the ratio of trendy bars to bodegas increased dramatically. At Attorney Street I turned and followed it north past Houston. Along the way I dropped into the little hidey-holes Claudia was fond of. It was too early in the day for her to be listening to live music in the back room at the Parkside Lounge, but I could picture her caging a free meal at a church or hanging out at her favorite tattoo parlor. I went as far north as Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran, an austere, redbrick church on the eastern edge of Tompkins Square Park. Claudia had made extensive use of its soup kitchen and legal-referrals center in the past, but she wasn’t there now, nor in the park.

The next logical spot to look for my sister was west along St. Mark’s Place. Her spiky-haired goth friends at Andromeda Tattoo claimed they hadn’t seen Claudia in months, maybe back in the summer, or was it spring? It was a cold January day, and when the wind hit my face it made my eyes water. I made it up to Cooper Square, pausing at the door of Greenwich House before I could pull myself together and step inside.