“How was Santa Claus?”

“A dirty old man with a fake beard. Go fix yourself a drink,” Fanny said, and hung up.

He put down the receiver and went back to the bar unit, wondering when Fanny had developed psychic powers of her own. His lip felt bruised from Hillary’s trance-induced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in reverse. He had not kissed another woman since the day he married Teddy, nor did he feel he’d kissed one now. Whatever had transpired in the living room of Denise Scott’s apartment had been robbed of all sexuality by the fierceness of Hillary’s quest. She might just as well have been pressing a necromancer’s stone to her mouth, and he’d been frightened, rather than aroused, fearful that she truly did possess a power that would drain his soul from the shell of his body and leave it a quivering gray mass on the carpet at his feet. He had every intention of telling Teddy what had happened the moment she got home. He wondered when the hell that would be, stirred himself a martini, very dry, and then plopped two olives into the glass. He was turning on the Christmas tree lights when the phone rang.

“Steve, it’s me again,” Fanny said. “This is hopeless. We’re going to have to look for a hotel someplace.”

“Where are you now?”

“On Waverly and Dome. We walked here from Coopersmith’s. The twins are freezing, they were both wearing only ski parkas when we left the house this morning.”

“Waverly and Dome,” he said. “Try the Waverly Plaza, it should be right around the corner from you. And call me back when you’re settled, will you?”

“Yes, fine.”

“I’ll be here by the phone.”

“Have you had a drink yet?”

“Yes, Fanny.”

“Good. That’s the first thing I’m going to do when we find a bloody place to stay.”

“Call me back.”

“I will,” she said, and hung up.

He went to the fireplace, tore yesterday’s newspaper—the one with Gregory Craig’s obit in it—into strips, and tossed them under the grate. He piled his kindling carefully on top of the shredded newspaper, stacked three logs on top of that, and struck a match. He was on his second martini when the phone rang again. It was Fanny reporting that they had managed to get two rooms at the Waverly, which they wouldn’t have got if she hadn’t pulled rank and told them that the poor shivering darlings over there were the wife and children of Detective Stephen Louis Carella of the 87th Precinct. He had never considered himself a man with any clout, but apparently his being a city detective had got Fanny and his family a pair of rooms for the night.

“Do you want to say hello to the kids?” she asked.

“Yes, put them on, please.”

“They’re next door, watching television. Just a second.”

He heard her calling to the twins through what was obviously the door to connecting rooms. April came on the line first.

“Daddy,” she said, “Mark won’t let me watch my show.”

“Tell him I said you can watch your show for an hour, and then he can watch his.”

“I never saw so much snow in my life,” April said. “We’re not going to have to spend Christmas here, are we?”

“No, darling. Put Mark on, will you?”

“Just a second. I love you, Daddy.”

“Love you, too,” he said, and waited.

“Hi,” Mark said.

“Let her watch for an hour, and then you can put on whatever you want, okay?” Carella said.

“Yeah, okay. I guess.”

“Everything all right now?”

“Fanny ordered a double Manhattan from room service.”

“Good. How about Mom?”

“She’s drinking scotch. We almost froze to death, Dad.”

“Tell her I love her. I’ll call in the morning, okay? What are your room numbers?”

Carella put the receiver back on the cradle. He finished his drink, and then cooked himself some hotdogs and baked beans, and warmed a jar of sauerkraut, and ate off a paper plate before the fire, sipping at a bottle of beer. He cleaned up the kitchen afterward and went to bed at 9:30. It was the first time he’d ever slept alone in this house. He kept thinking of what had happened with Hillary earlier today. Someone swimming. A woman. Tape. Drowning. Tape Drowning. You stole. I heard. I know. I’ll tell.

His lip still ached.

He didn’t know quite what to do about switching back with Meyer. He had no desire to deprive him of his holiday, but at the same time he knew a door-to-door canvass of the Harborview building might prove an empty exercise tomorrow, when many of the tenants might be off sharing Christmas/Hanukkah with people elsewhere in the city. He decided to hit the building today, and the first call he made—from home—was to Meyer.

Sarah answered the telephone. She told him her husband was in the shower and asked if he could return the call when he got out. Carella said he’d be there for another hour at least. He was already wondering how he’d get to work this morning; his car was still at the curb under what looked like seven tons of snow. He hung up and called Hawes at home.

“Cotton,” he said, “I want to hit that building today.”

“Okay,” Hawes said.

“There are twelve floors, five apartments on each floor. If we split them between us, that gives each of us thirty apartments. Figure an average of fifteen minutes for each stop, we’ll be putting in an eight-hour day, more or less.”

Hawes, who was not too good at arithmetic, said, “Yeah, more or less.”

“You can go over there whenever you like,” Carella said. “I’ll be leaving here in an hour or so.”

“Okay,” Hawes said.

“You want to start at the bottom or the top?”

“My father told me to always start at the top.”

“Okay, fine, I’ll work my way up. Let’s plan on a lunch break at about one. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

“Right,” Hawes said, and hung up.

Carella was himself in the shower when he heard the phone ringing. He turned off the water, grabbed a towel, ran out into the bedroom, and caught the phone on the sixth ring. Meyer was on the other end.

“I was in the shower,” Carella told him.

“We have to stop meeting in the shower,” Meyer said. “The fellas are beginning to talk.”

“I was calling about tomorrow.”

“Yeah, what do you think?”

“I’ll have to hit that building today.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry, Meyer.”

“Listen, you didn’t kill those people,” Meyer said. “How do you like the snow? Is it a white enough Christmas for you? How are you getting downtown?”

“By subway, I guess.”

“Like the poor people,” Meyer said. “Listen, don’t worry about tomorrow, okay? That was our original deal anyway.”

The floor-by-floor, door-to-door canvass of 781 Jackson took Carella and Hawes a bit less time than they’d expected. Carella reached the building at a little after 10:00, a half hour after Hawes had already started on the top floor. They broke for lunch at 1:00, as they’d arranged, and were through for the day at 4:30. They stopped for coffee and crullers at a greasy spoon near the building and went over their notes together. It would later take each of them several hours to type up a collaborative report in quintuplicate from the notes they’d individually made. One copy of the report would go to Lieutenant Byrnes. Another copy would go to Captain Frick, who was in command of the entire precinct. The third copy would go to Homicide, and the remaining two copies would be filed respectively in the Craig and Esposito case folders. Normally, there would have been only four copies, but this was a case with a companion case, and vice versa.

They had, until now, thought of the Esposito murder as the true companion case, despite the cross-indexing that labeled the Craig murder a companion case as well. Now they began to look at things in a somewhat different light. They were both experienced cops, and they knew all about smoke-screen murders. One of Carella’s earliest cases—this was before Hawes had joined the squad, even before Carella and Teddy were married, in fact—had seemed to focus on a cop hater who was running around shooting policemen. But that had been only the smoke screen; the killer had really been after a specific cop and was spreading vapor to mist over the true purpose. Before Hawes’s transfer to the Eight-Seven, he’d investigated a case in which the killer had chopped off the hands of his victim and then killed two other people elsewhere in the city and chopped off their hands as well. He was after insurance money, and he’d chopped off his true quarry’s hands because he didn’t want a fingerprint identification that would have disqualified the claim. The second and third murders were smoke-screen murders, designed to lead the cops into believing they were looking for some kind of freak who went around dismembering his victims.