After dinner, Jaime helped his grandmother clean up the dishes and then went to his room. Like all the other rooms in the apartment, his room was large, with a giant window facing Manhattan. He pulled out his sketchbook and sat down at his desk. He leafed through the pages, examining the drawing he’d made of the dress in Thomas Jennings’s shop, the featureless oval in place of the face, the list of women who could have owned the dress, the sketch of the Morningstarr Tower. He pulled another sketchbook from the packed shelf along the wall. Unlike his other sketchbooks, this book was filled with drawings of the same character. Page after page showed a beautiful brown-skinned woman wearing different costumes: a blue unitard with high red boots; green camouflage cargo pants and a matching green T-shirt; a flat, gold breastplate, thigh and shin guards, a helmet with little wings on it. In some, she carried a sword, in others, she carried a staff, in still others, she had a belt studded with ninja stars.

None of them were right.

Yet.

He turned back to the sketch of the plain dark dress from the Jennings shop. Maybe he would try a simple costume this time. Something old and timeless that wouldn’t compete with the woman wearing it.

Jaime turned to a new white page, licked the tip of his pencil. With the view of the city he loved filling the window in front of him, he tried, once again, to conjure a superhero to help him save it.

CHAPTER FOUR

Duke

Five miles away from Jaime’s Hoboken apartment, in a glass tower in Manhattan, a tall, pale man with a vague resemblance to a smug turtle leaned back in a leather chair, his feet up on his huge mahogany desk. The man’s name was Jackson “Duke” Goodson, and he was having a good day.

First, he was having a good day because he wearing a brand-new hat. It was, like all his other hats, a cowboy hat—this one a soft, mushroom-y beige with a brown leather band. When he’d walked into the office that morning, his secretary, Candi, said, “Good morning, sir! Love the hat!” She said it every morning about every hat, but he never got tired of it. He was quite well-known for his cowboy hats. In any one of the newspaper profiles written on Duke Goodson—and there were many—you could always find a line that went something like: “Duke Goodson was easy to spot in the crowd due to his trademark cowboy hat,” or, “Goodson, clad in one of his customary hats, is a good son of the South, born and raised in Oklahoma.” That his real name wasn’t Jackson “Duke” Goodson, that he hadn’t grown up anywhere near Oklahoma, that he just wore the hats to distract from his four-thousand-dollar Italian suits, well, that just made the profiles all the more enjoyable to read.