He moved away from the fire and dropped the satchel slung over his shoulder onto the table between us.

Maps spilled across the gleaming wood.

Though I betrayed nothing, I felt the cold blade of a chill at my spine. I could no longer see maps as I once had: innocuous travel guides for the disoriented traveler or bemused tourist. Now when I unfold one I half expect to find charred holes in it where the Dark Zones are—those chunks of our cities that have fallen off our maps, lost to the deadly Shades. It’s no longer what maps show but what they fail to show that worries me.

A week ago I’d demanded O’Duffy tell me everything he knew about the clue my sister had left at the scene of her murder, words she’d scratched into the cobbled stone of the alley as she lay dying: 1247 LaRuhe.

He’d told me they’d never been able to find any such address.

I had.

It had taken a bit of thinking outside the box, but that’s something I’m getting better at every day, although I really can’t take much credit for the improvement. It’s easy to think outside the box when life has dropped a two-ton elephant on yours. What is that box anyway but the beliefs we choose to hold about the world that make us feel safe? My box was now as flat, and about as useful, as a tissue-paper umbrella in all this rain.

O’Duffy sat down on the sofa next to me, gently, for such an overweight man. “I know what you think of me,” he said.

When I would have protested politely—good southern manners die hard, if at all—he gave me what my mother calls the “shush wave.”

“I’ve been doing this job for twenty-two years, Ms. Lane. I know what the families of closed murder cases feel when they look at me. Pain. Anger.” He gave a dry laugh. “The conviction that I must be a chuffing idiot who spends too much time in the pubs and not enough time on the job, or their loved one would be resting in vindicated peace while the perp rotted in jail.”