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CHAPTER 1

Sheridan Street in Jamaica Plain goes uphill from Center Street for about two hundred yards, crests, and heads down toward Chestnut Avenue.

It's a narrow street, lined with two- and three-family clapboard houses. Many of the houses had been broken up into apartments and a lot of the apartments were occupied by students and recent graduates.

The rest by people who worked without a tie.

On a bright, cold day in early March the last shame of winter lingered in the hard compounded mounds of snow and sand, blackened by exhaust and soot.

Frank Belson jammed his car up onto the ice-cluttered sidewalk and parked, the way cops like to, at an angle, with the rear end of the car sticking halfway out into the street. There were two squad cars already parked the same way.

The house in front of us had a small front porch and two front doors. It had been painted a weak green some time ago. The coroner's wagon was in the narrow driveway and yellow scene-of-the-crime tape was strung across the sidewalk on either side of the house. Some neighbors, mostly women with small children, stood around across the street. It was a neighborhood where men worked and women stayed home.

Belson had his badge clipped to his overcoat lapel. The uniformed cop at the door looked at it and nodded and looked at my lapel.

Belson said, "He's okay. " And the cop said, "Sure, Sarge," and we walked past him into the house. There was a front hall with stairs leading to a second-floor apartment, and a door to the left, open into the living room of the first-floor apartment. Inside there were several city employees taking pictures and looking around the room. In the middle of the room, with his coat still on and his arms folded across his chest, was Martin Quirk. He was staring down at a corpse.

Belson said, "Here's Spenser, Lieutenant.

Quirk nodded without looking at me. He continued to stare down at the corpse. I looked too.

We were staring at a black woman, maybe forty to forty-five. She was naked, her hands and feet had been bound with what looked like clothesline, her mouth had been taped shut, and her opaque brown eyes were blank and still. There was blood between her thighs and the hooked rug beneath her was dark with blood. Between her breasts there was a single red rose.

"Another one," I said.

Quirk nodded, still without speaking, staring down at the dead woman.

There was no sign of emotion. Belson went and leaned against the doorjamb and peeled the wrapper from a small cheap cigar and put the wrapper in his pocket. He slid the cigar in and out of his mouth, once to moisten it, and then lit it with a kitchen match that he struck with his thumbnail. When he had the cigar glowing he blew out the match and put that in his pocket too. The rest of the cops did what they'd come there to do. No one asked what I was doing there. No one asked Quirk what he was looking at. The room was thick with silence.

Quirk jerked his head at me, said "Frank," and walked out of the room. I followed, and Belson swung off the doorjamb and in behind me as we went out of the house and down the steps to Belson's car. Quirk and I got in the back seat.