More than a decade in this city—hell, close to two decades—and Harry Witte still hadn’t gotten used to the summers. It was a wet, choking heat. The hand of a drowned woman tight around his throat. That hand closed swollen fingers as he stepped out of the offices and into the night. He had misgivings about leaving Sam with the client. Not about the money—Sam could pull out of a miser’s gold tooth, and the miser would thank him. About the client. Edmund Hearne was a man who wore gloves because he worked dirty. Harry could tell that much on the first look.

He joined Cian and Irene at the Model T. They drove across town. Overhead, the stars shone in a sky that was more purple than black. Those stars had an aquatic brilliance, a wavy illumination as though he were looking up at them from the bottom of the sea. On the humid heat came the scent of roast chicken and potatoes and a whiff of bathtub gin, all mixed with the gritty black smoke. St. Louis was a lady who wore smoke like sackcloth. She had one of God’s own cigars in her mouth and she puffed like a champion. At night, the smoke took its time on the streets, parading long legs for men to see.

Harry watched those long, smoky legs. It was easier than looking at Irene. Or, for that matter, at Cian.

“We still don’t know anything,” he said. “It might be nothing.”

“Twelve dead men isn’t nothing,” Cian said. “Twelve dead men who talk at the same time isn’t nothing.”

“But it could mean something else. We were only there by chance. If we hadn’t been following Jones, we never would have gone to the mounds. Maybe this is a new group of children. We hadn’t heard anything about sacrifices. We haven’t heard anything in months.”

No response.

“Maybe it’s nothing,” Harry added.

“Maybe,” Cian said. He was holding Irene’s hand tight, as though she might fly away. She looked like she might. The window was down. The wind pulled her hair back. She looked beautiful and lost and if the Devil were fishing, she looked ready to take the right bait.

“Freddy will have some ideas too,” Harry said. “Don’t worry, Irene.”

She nodded. It was the kind of nod that said yes, that’s right, I’ll have the Waldorf salad, please don’t speak again. It was the kind of nod that made Harry Witte tighten his trap.

They didn’t speak again in the car.

When they got to Freddy’s building, they all went inside. It was a new building. A modern building. Limestone on the outside, pores already clogged with St. Louis’s perpetual smoke, and inside clean, geometric designs of brass under electric lights. It was a bright, shining place. The kind of place where you wiped your feet and touched as little as possible. They rode the elevator to Freddy’s floor. The brass showed warped reflections. Grinning reflections. As though Harry Witte had missed one of the universe’s great jokes.

He didn’t like the building. And he didn’t like the sense that he’d missed something.

But what he really didn’t like was when he knocked on the door and Pearl answered.

Pearl Morecott was beautiful. She had been beautiful at thirty, when he’d met her, and she was beautiful now, past forty. She was beautiful the way a good painting was beautiful. The cracks and the wrinkles only added. She had a robe on, and her hair was up and damp, and she was hiding behind her own eyes when she saw Harry. He thought she hated him. He didn’t blame her.

“Harry.”

“Pearl, I was looking for—” He stopped. Tried not to look at Cian or Irene. There was a guilty look on Cian’s face. A tired, knowing look, like he’d let a good secret go flat. That look put the brakes on Harry’s words. He tried again. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“No. I suppose not, but—hell, Pearl, what is this? What’s going on?”

“Drop it, Harry.” That was Cian. That was a growl and that was a warning.

This time he did look at Cian. The same guilty, tired look. But something else too. Anger. Hot anger. And the green grass of defiance smoking on those coals.

Irene didn’t meet his gaze, but she was looking at something else anyway. One hand was across her belly. The other was in the pocket of her enormous cotton dress. On the revolver, Harry guessed.

“Freddy’s not here,” Pearl said. “If that’s why you’ve come. Unless—” She looked at Cian.

Cian shook his head. “He’s fine. Handling a new client back at the office.”

She nodded. Then, for the first time, she seemed to see Irene. Pearl stepped forward, pulling her robe close, and threw a glance at Cian. “Irene, sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

Irene blinked. She still had one hand on the gun. One hand on her belly. Her eyes were dreamy, and they hadn’t been sweet dreams. “It’s the baby,” she said. And then she started to bawl.

Pearl folded Irene in her arms, cradling the sobbing woman against her chest, staring at Harry over Irene’s head. It wasn’t a hateful stare. That was what made it so awful. If it had been hate, steel bared and burning, well hate Harry Witte could handle. What he saw, though, was a barricade. All the driftwood that had gathered during the years he had known Pearl. She’d built herself a wall, and she watched him from behind it, and he couldn’t tell what kind of watching it was. It made him want a drink. Or, better yet, an opium pipe. It made him want to be away, wherever that was, and he still didn’t know if that would be enough.

“What did you do?” Pearl asked. A matter-of-fact question, as though something had gone wrong in the wash. “Well, don’t stand here in the hall. Come inside.”

She led them into Freddy’s sitting room, with its modern furniture in light-colored wood, with a tray on the coffee table holding two highballs, as though Pearl were expecting company.

She was, Harry realized. Not company, though. She was expecting a man. Of course she was. This wasn’t even her apartment. It was Freddy’s apartment. Freddy’s and—

Freddy’s and Sam’s.

Harry sat down harder than he meant to. Not hard enough to knock the thought out of his head, though.

And then the next thought: Sam was young enough to be her son.

And then the next: Well, fuck both of them.

And he hoped it didn’t show on his face.

It did, though. He knew that it did.

“I need a drink,” Harry said.

“I’m sure you can find one,” Pearl said as she helped Irene to a seat. “There’s a whole city out there waiting for you.” Then, to Cian, “What’s wrong?”

He told her. Harry listened, but only halfway. His brain had taken a corner too fast and was now tumbling down a rocky slope. He still hadn’t hit the bottom.

“And you don’t know who put those men there?” Pearl asked. “Who killed them? Or why?”

“No,” Cian said.

“How many men were there?”

“What?”

“How many men?”

“I don’t know.”

“Harry?”

Harry shook his head. “I didn’t count.”

Irene’s sobbing had quieted. She wiped her mouth and nose. “Twelve. There were twelve of them.”

“Twelve.”

“Does it mean something?” Irene asked.

“Everything means something. The number twelve shows up in many religious texts.”

“There were thirteen posts,” Irene said. “One was empty. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

But Harry knew Pearl well enough to taste the lie.

“Freddy went to an asylum,” Pearl said. “St. Margaret’s. You might be able to find him there.”

“At this hour?” Harry asked. “What is he doing?”

“You can ask him yourself,” Pearl said. She stood up. The robe parted to show one calf and part of her thigh. “Good night, Harry.”

He stood up, straightened his jacket, and waited. There wasn’t anything else, though. At least, nothing for him.

“Irene should stay with me,” Pearl added. “If that’s all right with you, Cian.”

Cian nodded. He kissed the top of Irene’s head, pressed her fingers in his, and went to the door. Harry followed. Pearl watched him from behind her battlements. Not frightened. Not even hating. He would have put a hundred bucks on hate and lost it all.

In the car, Harry said, “She’ll be fine, Cian. We’ll make sure she’s fine. You don’t have—”

Cian looked straight ahead, hands pinching his knees, and said, “You left Oliver alone with Jones.”

“Well, sure, but Sam was there.”

“Sam wasn’t going to stay. Not unless you told him to.”

“You think I should have.”

Cian’s mouth made a line sharp enough to cut.

“If you have something to say,” Harry said, “say it.”

“You’re being a fool about him.”

“It’s been eight months. I think he’s proved himself.”

Silence from Cian. Silence even sharper than the line of his mouth.

“You think I’m wrong.”

Silence spent on a sharpening stone.

“He’s saved my life twice. Once when we went after that woman at the tannery. And then again, when we were investigating the union, and that big guy had a wrecking bar on me.”

Cian Shea might know how to speak, but tonight, it was more in theory than in practice.

At the next corner, Harry turned too fast, and the tires squealed.

“He saved your life too.”

“I know what he’s done,” Cian said.

After that, Harry rolled down the window. He needed the air. He needed the sound of the air because he was afraid to cut himself on that silence.

St. Margaret’s stood on the next block. She was stone with slumped shoulders and she was old. The kind of old that wears down even a building as solid as the asylum. A hundred years ago, St. Margaret’s must have been impressive, but it had never been beautiful. Impressive had decayed into precarious looming, like an elderly relative who needed a cane and wouldn’t admit it. Like the city. And like, unfortunately, St. Margaret’s most notorious resident. Harry didn’t like the building, and he didn’t like it because of who was inside.

Richard Qualls.

Freddy was turning over old stones and he wouldn’t find anything good.

Harry had made the same mistake.

“That’s it,” Harry started to say.

And then the asylum exploded.

The force of the explosion threw St. Margaret’s roof and upper stories into the air. They had a languid grace, slate and stone fluttering on a cloud of fire, an acrobatics of perfect destruction. The lower walls were blown out, forming jaws of rubble that swallowed the upper levels. A wave of heat and rubble roared down the street. Shards of masonry slammed into the Model T. Metal screeched. Glass shattered. The automobile spun, teetered, and then slammed back onto the road.

And the sound. The sound didn’t come padding on quiet paws. It pounced. It batted his head back and forth. It was a man-eating sound.

“Good God,” Cian said.

“Freddy,” Harry said.

He tried to get the Model T turned back towards the asylum, but the two of the tires had been shredded. They abandoned the automobile and went on foot. That single block was a forever distance. The explosion had punched through the buildings on either side of the asylum, and fire played on exposed lath and timber, waving bright fingers. Through the ringing in Harry’s ears, he heard the screams start, and he knew they were screams that would go on for a long time. The fire perked up at the sound. That was the nature of fire.

A dozen yards from the rubble of the asylum they stopped. The heat made a wavering, translucent envelope. There was nothing left of the building. No place where Freddy might have survived. Even a pancake would have been flattened when the building came down.

Harry should have felt sick. Instead he just felt like he was still ringing, like a bell rocking back and forth. He put his fingers to his ears. No blood. That didn’t seem right.

People had gathered on the street, and a red fire engine came down the street, and the screams had found their stride.

“We should go,” Cian said.

Harry nodded. He started to turn away.

Then, through the haze of smoke and heat and dust, he saw something moving deep in the rubble. A shape that wasn’t even much of a shape. It might have been thick patch of smoke. It might have been his eyes.

But his skin prickled, and he knew it wasn’t smoke. He knew it wasn’t his eyes.

He turned for Cian and realized he was gone. Cian had moved up the street to a second crowd that was forming. When Harry turned back to the ruined asylum, the figure was gone.

When he reached Cian at the second crowd, he saw the message painted in huge letters along the street. The murmurs had already started among the crowd of be-robed women and bespectacled men. Words that respectable folk, this kind of folk, used as kindling for a respectable fire.

Anarchists. Bolsheviks.

Death to Tyrants and Oppressors of the Laborer, the painted letters said.

Harry touched his ears again. Still no blood.

When he looked back, the fires burned on.