Keeping far away from the dead was no insurance against ghost revenge, but it made people feel safer. April, too. Despite the possibility of attracting Bernardino's negative afterlife attention, she needed to be there with him. Maybe it was loyalty. Maybe it was the ghost factor itself that encouraged her to stay with him. If there was the slightest chance that his unsettled spirit was still lingering around him, she wanted that spirit to be assured that she would not abandon him. She would find and punish his killer. She would return his care of her during his lifetime by helping to free his spirit for a happy afterlife with the wife who'd preceded him. She wanted to attend his autopsy.

Her determination to be with Bernardino drove her past Mike's objections and back into the city to follow her own path, but other people had a different agenda for her. Mike took her to headquarters downtown.

First she was questioned by Chief Avise himself, then Poppy Bellaqua. They wanted to know if she had spoken with the man, if he had said anything. She couldn't remember. They'd asked if she'd seen him. She couldn't remember that either. Now the artist who sketched the faces on the wanted posters that the police distributed to the newspapers and TV had the assignment of getting a description from her. And they all used the same words. They were all talking to her the way they talked to civilian victims: as if she'd gone deaf and stupid as well as mute.

She was ensconced in Mike's airless, windowless office in the Homicide Task Force on the second floor of the Thirteenth Precinct on Twenty-second Street, close to the Police Academy, where she'd been trained to remember a lot better than this.

"You up for it?" Greg asked again gently.

April had worked with him many times before, helping witnesses remember details buried deep in their subconscious. It was an iffy business. Nothing these days was proving to be more unreliable than eyewitness testimony. A lot of people over the years had been falsely accused and falsely convicted of crimes they hadn't committed on the basis of what people said they had seen, sometimes just to help the police close the case. That would not happen here. She had not seen the man's face. She hardly saw his shape. She did not remember talking or fighting with him, only the grip around her neck.