Mal gave me his sickly smile again. “Got me a good lawyer. Case went bye-bye, only I got to go into a program.” He shrugged. “It’s not so bad. Addicts pay as much for methadone as they do for smack.”

I felt like hitting him in the head. I couldn’t hold him accountable for Claudia’s choices, but the fact that he’d lured her back with free “samples” of heroin when she’d tried to get clean made me loathe him. “Just tell me where you’ve seen her.”

“Maybe I… hey, is that her?” His brown eyes widened as he looked over my shoulder. I glanced back and he pulled free of my grip and ran into the clinic. Kicking myself for falling for the world’s oldest trick, I went in after him.

“This crazy lady, she’s harassing me,” he was telling the turtle at reception. “That’s her! Call security.”

The receptionist turned her tired turtle eyes on me. “You’re going to have to leave the building.” I took a last look at Mal’s gloating face and walked out, biting my lip.

CHAPTER 7

“There are so many things wrong with this picture,” I said to Jesse. “I can’t believe we’re sitting here. Did we really think Claudia was going to wander by?”

“I’m an eternal optimist,” answered Jesse. “I’m looking over a four-leaf clover right now. Claudia’s kickin’ up trouble and she’s going to want to check out the carnage. Look at all the cop cars up and down her block. She’ll love this.”

I stared out the window of Jesse’s car at Rivington Street. This had been my neighborhood not long ago, but it had had a facelift since I’d left. Earlier I’d marveled at the new construction over the Lower East Side, but I’d had to admit that the further east I went along Rivington, the less of it there was. By the time I got to the block between Ridge and Pitt streets, a strip of road away from the housing projects, gentrification had petered out and everything looked familiar and dodgy. But that was in sunlight. At night, and at a little distance, the redbrick building where Claudia lived didn’t look so worn out. The disintegrating but still ornate facade had a certain romance to it in the yellow glow of the street lamp.

“I don’t know if I want to find her or not. The police want to talk to her about that dead body.” I rolled the bracelet from my father around my wrist and wondered when my stomach would untangle its knots. The freckled face of the girl in the morgue floated by my eyes. Had she drowned by accident? Maybe she’d bumped her head, or had a seizure. Her drowning in Claudia’s apartment didn’t mean my sister was involved.