“Hell.” I looked over my shoulder. The tenement was out of sight. “I don’t know. Half a block from Haven, on the north side of the street. For god’s sake, it’ll be the one with the bloody girl on the stoop.”

“I’m not coming until I know who this is.”

“Gilda Carr.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Entirely,” I said and cut the line.

The sidewalk was crowded with morning traffic, but the commuters parted for me. I dropped onto the stoop and dragged my face across my shoulder to scrape off the blood. The pain exploded like a fireball. I might have cried, but I didn’t want to salt the wound. I tried to tear the hem off my dress, to press against the cut, but my fingers were too bloody to rip the fabric.

I slumped against the side of the stoop, eyes squeezed shut, until I heard a siren. Thorne bounded out of the car, slim and shaved, his badge sparkling and his gun gleaming on his hip.

“You look good,” I said.

“Gilda. I . . . I don’t understand.”

“You were never meant to. Virgil’s on the top floor. Follow the screams.”

Thorne’s driver crouched beside me as his boss ran up the stairs. He had crooked teeth, soft eyes, and a moustache that would make a walrus jealous. By his uniform, his name was Asbury.

“A nasty cut there,” he said.

“It can wait. Thorne will need you upstairs.”

“He told me to tend to you, so I’ll tend. And he also wanted me to make sure you don’t run off. A girl covered in blood, reporting a murder—she’s someone we don’t want to lose hold of.”

He took a wad of bandages from the car, swabbed my face as best he could, and wound the fabric around my cheek.

“He’s a good cop, your boss?” I said.

“As good as any I’ve ever met. That man’s afraid of nothing.”

He finished his dressing. The bandage squeezed my cheek. It stung, but not unpleasantly.

“You’re good with this gauze.”

“A week at Amiens will turn any man into a field surgeon.”

He looked at his bloody fingers, then at the spotless pants of his uniform.

“Please,” I said. “Dry them on my dress.”

“I couldn’t.”

“It’s already ruined. Go ahead.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you ever know a cop named Koszler?”

“First name?”

“Emil. A tall fellow with the Fourth Precinct.”

“Of course! Emil. We shared a beat one winter, a few years back. My god, I haven’t thought of him in ages. He quit, I heard. Became a priest, of all things.”

“He didn’t seem cut out for life as a cop.”

“Few are.”

We sat, silent, until Virgil padded out the door. He looked smaller than he had an hour earlier, and exhausted. He did not look at me.