The Syndrome

“This is ridiculous!” Adrie

“Get some help,” Petrescu replied. “And a lawyer. You’re definitely go

Her apartment was about two blocks from the police station, and they covered the distance in a fog of disbelief. “What are you going to do?” Adrie

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t go back to your apartment.”

“I’m not so sure you should go back to yours,” Duran replied.

A hapless shrug. “I live there.”

They crossed Mount Pleasant Avenue together, heading for the alley behind Lamont Street. It was 6:30, and just about dark. “Y’know,” Duran said, “after a while, Bonilla’s going to turn up missing. And when he does, the police are going to look… bad.”

Adrie

A smile flickered in the gloom on Duran’s face. We… ? Then they were in the alley, crunching their way toward the garage across cobblestones and broken glass. “You don’t have a front door?”

She shook her head. “It’s an English basement. I have to go through the garage.” They walked a little farther until she turned to him, and said, “This is it.” They were standing in front of a garage door, the kind that rolled up into the ceiling. Adrie

“Ta daa!”

Wait a minute, Adrie

He sensed her indecision, and understood it. “I’ll get a hotel,” he told her. “There’s a lot to think about.”

She looked relieved. “Well… stay in touch. Once they realize Eddie’s missing…”

“I’ll let you know where I am,” he promised, and turned to leave.

Adrie

Hearing her, Duran turned. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s just the door,” she explained, and tried the lock again. This time, the latch turned, and the door swung wide. Adrie

They went in together, and found what looked like a landfill where an apartment was supposed to have been. The contents of every drawer were scattered across the floor. The mattress was overturned, and clothes lay in heaps amid lightbulbs and books, boxes of cereal and shoes.

Adrie

“What are you doing?” Duran asked.

She looked up at him, furious with tears. “It’s Nikki…”

Duran looked away, then took a deep breath. “I think we ought to get out of here,” he said. Adrie

“What’s that?” he asked.

She shook her head, and showed him what she’d found: a piece of glass, barely a centimeter long, with what looked like bits of wire in it. “It was in the urn.”

Duran glanced at the object, but it meant nothing to him. “I really think we ought to leave,” he told her. “We could get a hotel for the night—somewhere obscure. The suburbs, maybe.”

“Look at this,” Adrie

“Believe what?”

“This must be part of the… I don’t know… cremation machinery or something. That’s gross—that they get other stuff mixed in with someone’s final remains.”

“Right,” Duran said. “I really think we ought to get out of here. They might come back, you know?”

Adrie

He shook his head. “They think we’re nuts.”

“I know,” she said. Then she walked into the kitchen and, turning on the taps in the sink, rinsed her sister’s ashes from her hands.

Chapter 20

They spent the night in the most obscure hotel they could find, which was the Springfield Comfort I

It wasn’t a bad room, really, but it was a box, a box with matching queensize beds, a television, a table, and a desk with a lamp that didn’t work.

Adrie

“Now what?” she asked, her voice dull, eyes on the parking lot.

Duran looked at her. “You’re asking me?”

She turned, and found him sprawled, loose limbed, on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. She felt a momentary flourish of a

“Well, I’m not the Answerman,” he replied. “I don’t know what to do.” She glared. He went on. “Maybe a pizza,” he suggested.

“A pizza?”

“Yeah. And a shower. I—”

She burst into tears.

Seeing Duran like that, she realized for the first time—it hit her all at once—that their predicament was not going to end any time soon. And when it did end, the ending might not be a happy one. Until now, she’d been nurturing the naive belief that things would somehow sort themselves out and, when they did, she’d be back where she’d started—in her real life, with her real job.

But now she knew this wasn’t going to happen. This wasn’t something that she could organize her way out of. She was stuck—indefinitely—with a madman in a cheap hotel in the suburban wilderness. Her apartment was trashed. Her sister was dead. The man who’d helped her was dead. The police thought she was nuts. And people were trying to kill her.

That was the situation, and there was no room in it that she could see for picking up her little black suit at the cleaner’s, or prioritizing her to-do list on the Amalgamated case. Her life was in ruins. And so she cried, which so startled and embarrassed Duran that he rushed into the bath room, emerging seconds later with a handful of Kleenex. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her, offering her a tissue. “Don’t cry.” Which only made it worse, because that’s what her mother used to say.

And her real mother—“DeeDee”—had been a disaster.

Pregnant at fifteen. On welfare at sixteen. On heroin at eighteen. Autopsied at twenty-four. Too much of a good thing, according to the medical examiner.

Nikki had been old enough to remember her mother’s last overdose and she’d told Adrie