“His teeth,” I said, seeing the man’s sneering smile. “They were short and discolored.”

“You have a good visual memory,” Rodriguez said, his hand and charcoal moving on the paper while I added details as they came to me. After a while, he turned the pad around so I could have a look.

“Almost,” I said, directing him to expand the jaw, lower the brow, and make the mouth wider while keeping the lips thin. He erased and redrew according to my direction, the two of us in sync. After another fifteen, twenty minutes, he turned the pad around again.

“Jesus. That’s him. How did you do that?”

“You did it,” Rodriguez said. “I only followed your direction.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said and stared at the sketch, a sense of accomplishment accompanied by a chill of recognition.

Inspector Cabenal studied the sketch, said INTERPOL would run it through their identification databanks and fax it out to all the Paris precincts.

“I think he may have killed several people,” I said, the young monk and Quattrocchi in my mind.

“You need to write a statement, everything that occurred, everything you remember,” Cabenal said.

I thought I had answered all her questions, more than once, and said so.

“Not all,” she said. “Do you prefer a laptop or a pen and paper?”

I chose the laptop and typed for a long time. I described, in detail, how I’d received Quattrocchi’s email and came to Florence, my first day in the library, the thrill of opening the journal and beginning to read. I wrote of Brother Francesco’s warning—Ha un amico a Firenze?—and how I suspected it might have been the cause of his death. I wrote of my search for the booksellers in Florence and Paris and their suspicious deaths. I wrote about Étienne Chaudron and his girlfriend, their bloodied faces and dead bodies sparking in my mind as I did so. I saw the missing journal page behind the Vermeer painting and the initials in Chaudron’s forgeries and wrote it all down, every detail, every event that had happened since I’d left home, thinking as I typed that this was what I had hoped to tell the world—not the deaths but the discovery. Instead, it was a police report that no one outside of a few INTERPOL officers would ever read.

The only thing—the only person—I left out was Alex. She was gone.

It was all gone, what I’d hoped to discover, what I’d hoped to do with the knowledge. It felt like a folly, and a deadly one.

I stopped typing and scrolled through the pages. It looked like a proposal for a book I would never write.

I glanced again at the forensic artist’s sketch and saw the man who had attacked me in Étienne Chaudron’s living room, on the drizzly Parisian street, and again in the park, his knife slashing at Smith—a juddering horror film, the images etched into my mind forever along with a thought: no question the man would be coming back for me.