We sat there for about an hour, the waitress refilling our coffees until I started to get jittery, strung out. I soon found out what the sadness I’d detected was about. He told me he’d been married and that his wife, after they’d separated, had taken a dive off her condo terrace. She’d been on a cocktail of anti-depressants.

“Because you got separated?”

“Not exactly.”

He seemed to be trying to make a decision about whether to tell me.

Then he laid it on me, staring down into his coffee. They had married right after they finished college, where they met, and she’d gotten pregnant almost immediately, even though they hadn’t planned it. They separated a couple of years later, after their daughter had been snatched right off a swing in a neighborhood playground while his wife was being kept busy talking to the vampire’s accomplice, another “mother” who vanished like smoke immediately after his wife started looking frantically for their baby.

Mark glanced up from his coffee, his jaw muscles twitching.

“Oh God, no,” was all I could manage. I thought of Dollar Man, and what Khalika said after I told her about him. “They’re everywhere, like filth flies. You get where you can smell them.”

“Yeah, no gods around that day, I guess. Nobody minding the store.”

Of course, like everybody this has ever happened to, he said, she never forgave herself, even if Mark managed to carry on. He had to, he said, or go mad.

“She got on the anti-depressants in desperation, couldn’t function at all. She slept most of the time, hardly ate. Her dosage was upped several times, until she started to hallucinate, walk in her sleep. Maybe that’s how she managed to jump. We kept in touch, of course—loved each other—but it became impossible to live together with the grief, the guilt. There’s no place to put it, except on each other. It’s like drowning.”

I could see he was kind of uncomfortable telling me about it, but I think he must have felt an instant kinship with me, two survivors of a plane crash hanging on to the same floating debris. You don’t want to revisit the scene again, day after day, year after year, but somehow debris keeps floating to the surface—even in dreams—demanding to be examined before it’s pushed down again.

Although things could never be the same, after a certain time, maybe they could just be different and, like a lot of men, he threw himself into the work. He would never give up, he said, looking for his daughter, finding who took her. He’d already called in every marker, picked the brains of anybody who might be able to point him in the right direction. He would never be able to let it go, he said—not until the day he died.

Clenching and unclenching his long fingers, popping his knuckles, he told me of recurring nightmares. He’d see his baby in a stroller, from a distance. Somehow, he would know her by the curve of her cheek, her tiny perfect hands holding on to the bar in front. Before he could get to her, his feet would get stuck in something gluey, deeper until it engulfed him, then the entire street. In another, he had to watch her, as he was held down by a crowd, being tossed into a car, like a rag doll, before it sped away, her face and hands appearing in the rear window, screaming, her mouth a black O, as strangers kept him pinned to the sidewalk. Sometimes the car was a van. Other times, there was no vehicle at all. He’d just look down and she would be gone. Somebody tried to comfort him by saying, in absurd dream logic, “Don’t worry, she’s all grown up now, she’ll be back when she’s ready;” in another, “Why don’t you check the closets?”

“Her name is Sofia,” he said, as if she were still somewhere alive, if he could only figure out where and how to get to her.

It was hard to take in from a man who looked so young, who was, in fact, so young. But it was all there in his eyes, his posture, his low voice that he couldn’t quite keep from cracking. Then I thought of what they found in Dick’s safes—in the house and at the agency. I didn’t know what was happening upstairs at Naked Envy until Khalika filled me in. The crew Dick owed the money to weren’t even aware of it. Mark said it looked like a national, possibly worldwide kiddie porn film operation—including sex slavery and even snuff—was being run out of both the modeling agency and Naked Envy. Mark said he was beginning to think the hit was ordered from one of the heads of this hydra, certainly not the goons Dick was making payments to.

Except for sharing his awful story, Mark was otherwise all business that first day.

He asked me to tell him every single detail I could remember about the night of the murders. He was unclear about why I would not have told his colleague about my sister. DB’s theory about Dick possibly being involved in the filthy foursome’s orgy tapes wasn’t shared by Mark.

“He wouldn’t have risked it. Not on moral grounds, but because his associates wouldn’t have been pleased. These slimy bastards run a tight ship when it comes to talent. It’s all about control. No freelancing.”

I told him Khalika was around so infrequently, that she was so young when she split, I didn’t think it was important, didn’t even want to involve her in the whole ugly mess, that she had enough trouble surviving out there, even if she was smart.

“It’s an old habit,” I admitted. When Khalika ran away for real, we agreed I wouldn’t mention her to anyone, especially not the authorities. I told Mark that before we went to the barn, Dick was having one of his routine eruptions at the dinner table and demanded that we “get the fuck out of his sight,” and we’d happily complied. Khalika hung out for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Then she split. Mark stared at me, enough seconds ticking by to make me start tapping my fingernails on the table.

“I don’t know, Violet; I’m trying to put a puzzle together where the pieces have been scattered like gory confetti. I’d like to get in touch with Khalika. I have a feeling she knows more than you do, and that maybe you don’t even know how much you know. I don’t know how you both came out of your upbringing without more consequences.”

“Well, Khalika definitely got herself in plenty of jams, but she’s so street-smart, she always found a way out of them. I mean, she’s way smarter than I am.”

“Do you have any idea where she is now?”

“Nope, and I won’t until she’s ready to resurface. You won’t find her. She’s the black cat that merges with the night. You know, like Rhiannon in the song.”

I felt that warning twitch at the base of my spine, around my tail bone. You shouldn’t have told him about me, it said, as if Khalika were sitting beside me, hissing in my ear.