PROLOGUE

“Do ye hear the children…They are weeping bitterly!
In the playtime of the others, in the country of the free.

They look up with pale, and sunken faces,
And their look is dread to see,

How long will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,
Our blood splashes upward, and its purple shows your path!
But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper

Than the strong man in his wrath.”

-The Cry of the Children by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How could you refuse a child who asks you to find her killer?

The answer’s simple: you didn’t.

You couldn’t investigate a child’s murder and keep it from getting under your skin. Every cop with this kind of case worked at it with a personal level of zeal most bad guys found terrifying. Just try to look at those big tearful eyes and not be moved. We understood better than most just how fragile and vulnerable the young and innocent were. And for someone orsomething to exploit that earned our unrelenting enmity. The irritating shit sitting across from me right now was catching a glimpse of it. Abel Trautman, Headmaster of the Orphanage of Saint Jerome Emiliani, was a spindly, sallow skinned man. His body was angular and gaunt, with the kind of harsh hatchet-faced features that had likely served him well in keeping the kids in line. He didn’t strike me as a kindly or patient man, if the cricket paddle on the wall behind his desk was any indication. He was taller than me, but I’d found all petty tyrants were small on the inside.

He was equally unhappy with me; his disproportionate sense of self-importance taking a gut check when I barged into his office without an appointment and unannounced. I’d run the gauntlet of indignant nuns and staff, holding my Night Warden badge out in front of me like a battering ram, and hadn’t stopped until I’d found his office. Now that same badge, little more than a piece of brass molded into the image of an old hand lantern, sat on his desk between us with all the subtlety of a grenade. “I’m sorry, ah…Mr. Hain, is it-?”

“-Night Warden Hain, yes,” I corrected him. I did try to be polite earlier.

Or did I?

“Night Warden, of course,” Trautman amended, a bit defensively. “But I really don’t have any more information regarding the child in question that I hadn’t already given the local police.” There was a Newton’s Cradle on his desk and he set one of the metal balls in motion to tap rhythmically against the others. It was meant to be an unconscious act, of course, but it was also his subtle way of telling me the seconds were ticking down to the end of this interview. I let the moment stretch, taking in the polished mahogany desk, Trautman’s plush leather armchair, his fancy wristwatch. Individually, maybe not a big deal. Together, a bit out of place for an obviously underfunded institution like this, if what I’ve seen of this dismal place so far was any indication.

“Sarah Appleton,” I replied, pinning him with an unfriendly look.

“Pardon me?”

“The child in question,” I said, slowly. “She has a name. It is Sarah. Sarah Appleton.” Three days after the ghost of my wife Llewellen had appeared to me back in Central Park, I still remembered the peace that gripped me instead of the usual soul numbing grief whenever