Inherit the Dead

thought that he saw a pair of eyes alight on him and remain there for just an instant too long, features indistinct beneath the hood of a sweatshirt, body hidden beneath layers of winter clothing, but then a crowd swallowed the figure up. Had it been a man or a woman? A boy or a girl? Did she look like Angel? He had no idea—it had all happened too quickly.
    I’m not just jumping at shadows, thought Perry. I’m jumping at the hope of shadows.
    He moved on, but took a circuitous route back to his apartment, making a long loop onto First Avenue to buy milk that he didn’t need. The prickling went away, but the memory of it did not. He entered his building and waited until he was certain that the door hadclosed properly before he turned his back on it, and the stairway to his fifth-floor walk-up seemed darker than before. When he opened the door to his apartment, he paused for a moment before entering, but if there was anyone hiding in there, he wished them luck: his apartment was so small a game of hide and seek would have lasted about two seconds. There was a bedroom with just enough room for a bed, a kitchenette with just enough room for a stove and half-size fridge, and the living area crowded with all his PI equipment.
    What it did have was shelving: lots and lots of shelving. It was what had attracted Perry to it in the first place. With a little work, he was able to create spaces for his collection of vinyl and his books. He had an iPod that he had loaded with music from the CDs that were now in storage, but he rarely used it. He preferred vinyl, and not because of the difference in sound, although he had read about a study in which music played on vinyl had calmed mentally disturbed patients while music played through a computer had made them angrier, which didn’t surprise him in the least. No, what Perry liked was the ritual involved in listening to vinyl. With an iPod, you could press a button and listen to music for days, but the problem was that you could also do lots of other stuff at the same time: laundry, cooking, answering e-mail, dozing off. But vinyl demanded your attention: you had to put the record on the turntable, make sure the surface and the needle were clean, and then wait until the needle found the groove. After that you only had twenty minutes of music, so you might as well sit down and listen because pretty soon you’d be back on your feet again to change the side. Your focus became the record and, by extension, what you were hearing. Perry didn’t like music as a background. Either you immersed yourself in it or you didn’t listen to it at all. Jazz, classical, country, folk, rock: it was all the same to him. If you liked it enough not just to buy it but also to keep it, then the least that it deserved was your attention.
    He kicked off his shoes and put on the latest Sun Kil Moon album, bought from the band’s Web site. He looked around his apartment as the music played, Mark Kozelek’s voice almost as deep as his own, as though he had found a way to put his own sense of dislocation to music. Those first years outside the department had been the hardest: he had lost not one family because of what had occurred, but two. The NYPD had been as much a part of his life as the woman and child who shared his home. Now both families were gone, but he was still here: he had survived the loss of both, even though he would have sworn years before that such a thing would not be possible.
    And although he could not have said that he loved what he did—the insurance cases, the missing persons, the casework for lawyers seeking to get clients off the hook regardless of their innocence or guilt—it suited something deep in his nature. Perhaps he had always been more inclined to a solitary existence than he might have wanted to believe, although he continued to fight it. Women passed through his life, or he passed through theirs: sometimes, he wasn’t sure which was the truth. He lived alone; his ex-wife had a new man in her life; his daughter was growing up too fast—but he kept trying, as much for Nicky’s sake as for his own. He tried never to miss his scheduled calls with her, though it happened, and he paid his child support even when it left him broke for the rest of the month. He gave his ex, Noreen, no cause to complain because he was desperate to hold on to his daughter.
    The thought brought him back to Julia Drusilla. Despite all that she had said about her daughter, there had been