He moved down to read the tag. It had her name and an address in Manhattan's Lower East Side, just south of the Williamsburg Bridge.

That small detail triggered the dormant analytical part of his brain and made him lift the sheet off her left arm. The detective on the phone had said she'd died of an overdose, and there, as stark evidence, was not only the single fresh wound of a needle mark in the pale, skinny crook of her arm, but ancient signs of similar abuse clustered about it like memories refusing to disappear.

"Yes, that's her," he finally answered, stepping back, allowing the attendant to flip the sheet back over Mary's face with all the detached flair of a custodian covering a sofa. Willy stepped out into the city at night-huge, enveloping, teeming with life, extending for miles beyond reason. He looked around at the vaulting, gloomy, light-studded buildings looming over him like haphazardly placed monoliths, their black profiles outlined against a sky whose stars had been blotted out by the dull ocher stain of the city's reflected glow. He knew it was a cliche, but he couldn't shake the feeling of being just one of a million insects lost in an enormous ant farm, each a part of something whole, and yet, perhaps precisely because of that, utterly isolated. Mary had been one of them, and now lay dead, unnoticed and unmourned, for all he knew. He'd been one of them, too, and was feeling the ambivalence of being back in the fold. He wondered if erstwhile prisoners of Alcatraz felt the same way when they returned as ancient tourists.

The air had turned cooler and felt good against his forehead. He was hot and slightly dizzy, still teetering over the abyss between his past-exemplified by this city and the body in the morgue-and what he'd once thought was his future, but which all of a sudden was feeling impossibly remote. He stood on the sidewalk struggling to make sense of this time warp, worrying that the weight of the past would prove too heavy to shake off.