“I first became aware that I was in trouble one night in Washington Square Park, not long after I killed the woman from the bank. That park had become a regular haunt of mine, although God knows I wasn’t the only one. In the summer it was a regular open-air dormitory. I even had my own favorite bench, although I didn’t get it every night…didn’t even go there every night.

“On this particular evening—thundery and sultry and close—I got there around eight o’clock. I had a bottle in a brown bag and a book of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. I approached the bench, and there, spray-painted across the back of another bench near mine, I saw a graffito that said HE COMES HERE . HE HAS A BURNED HAND. ”

“Oh my Lord God,” Susannah said, and put a hand to her throat.

“I left the park at once and slept in an alley twenty blocks away. There was no doubt in my mind that I was the subject of that graffito. Two nights later I saw one on the sidewalk outside a bar on Lex where I liked to drink and sometimes have a sandwich if I was, as they say, in funds. It had been done in chalk and the foot-traffic had rubbed it to a ghost, but I could still read it. It said the same thing: HE COMES HERE . HE HAS A BURNED HAND. There were comets and stars around the message, as if whoever wrote it had actually tried to dress it up. A block down, spray-painted on a No Parking sign: HIS HAIR IS MOSTLY WHITE NOW . The next morning, on the side of a cross-town bus: HIS NAME MIGHT BE COLLINGWOOD . Two or three days after that, I started to see lost-pet posters around a lot of the places that had come to be my places—Needle Park, the Central Park West side of The Ramble, the City Lights bar on Lex, a couple of folk music and poetry clubs down in the Village.”

“ Petposters,” Eddie mused. “You know, in a way that’s brilliant.”

“They were all the same,” Callahan said. “ HAVE YOU SEEN OUR IRISH SETTER? HE IS A STUPID OLD THING BUT WE LOVE HIM. BURNED RIGHT FOREPAW. ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF KELLY, COLLINS, OR COLLINGWOOD. WE WILL PAY A VERY LARGE REWARD. And then a row of dollar signs.”

“Who would posters like that be aimed at?” Susannah asked.

Callahan shrugged. “Don’t know, exactly. The vampires, perhaps.”

Eddie was rubbing his face wearily. “All right, let’s see. We’ve got the Type Three vampires…and the vagrant dead…and now this third group. The ones that went around putting up lost-pet posters that weren’t about pets and writing stuff on buildings and sidewalks. Who were they?”