The day that Lieutenant Hank Donaghue walked into the alley beside the Biltmore Arms Apartment Building on 121st Street in South Shore East was the day the alleged soul of Martin Liu departed its body and began the next segment of its journey from nothingness to eternity. It was a warm afternoon in early June four years ago and the wind was blowing in off the river. Summer had not yet completely settled in, but the heat was right behind the door, waiting to come through.Uniformed police officers shifted from one foot to the other at each end of the alley, their presence preventing onlookers from ducking beneath the yellow crime scene tape for a closer look. Detective Joe Kalzowski stood off to one side, questioning the elderly African-American woman who had called 911. She lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of the Biltmore Arms and had spotted the body from her bathroom window. A second witness, the elderly woman’s 14-year-old grandson, waited with one of the responding officers, staring at the body on the ground with a mixture of shock and fascination. Dr. Jim Easton, the Assistant Medical Examiner, crouched beside the body, withdrawing the long thermometer with which he had measured the temperature of the corpse’s liver. Members of the crime scene unit had already claimed the victim’s wallet, containing his driver’s license, credit cards and sixty-five dollars in cash, and were now taking photographs and bagging scraps of trash to be brought along for further study.Hank knelt beside Easton, who grimaced up at him over his glasses.“Looks like cause of death is going to be exsanguination, roughly five hours ago,” Easton said, putting the thermometer away.“Not much blood.”“Right. Your primary scene is somewhere else. This is a dump site. Shot somewhere else, died here.”Hank looked at the bullet wound in the body’s left leg, just above the kneecap on the inside of the thigh. “Sloppy work. Shot from the front?”“Yeah. Through and through, very close range. He wasn’t running away.”“Self-inflicted? Accidental discharge, maybe?”Easton pursed his lips for a moment and then shook his head. “Awkward angle.” He shuffled around behind the body and held his own hand out so that his wrist was twisted back on itself. “Have to be something like this, but only if he were struggling with someone, and there are no contusions on his wrist that would suggest a struggle for a gun. We’ll test his hands for GSR, but I’ll tell you right now, someone else did this to him.”Hank looked at the nose, which had been bloodied and broken, at the split upper lip and at the bruises on the forehead and both cheeks. He shook his head. “Worked him over first.”“Felt like some broken ribs,” Easton agreed, smoothing his blond mustache. “Maybe internal injuries.”Hank noticed that the young man’s clothing was nearly new. His hair was neatly groomed and his hands looked soft. The scattered packets of merchandise and paraphernalia suggested a drug deal gone bad. It was definitely the wrong part of town for a 24-year-old Asian with little street experience to be selling junk, as the neighborhood, from 118th Street all the way south to Kensington, was territory claimed by the African-American R Boyz gang.Hank frowned. A CSI had already done a field test on one of the packets that indicated heroin, but it wasn’t a heroin kind of neighborhood. If the kid had been selling, he definitely didn’t have a clue as to how to go about it. Something didn’t add up. If the kid had been shot somewhere else, then he wouldn’t be here trying to sell—Hank’s cell phone rang. He stood up and moved a few steps away from the body before taking the call, then he put the phone away and went over to Kalzowski, who was wrapping it up with the elderly woman.“Joe, I gotta go.”Kalzowski frowned. “What is it?”“Jumper downtown. There’s no one else. You okay here?”Kalzowski’s eyes flicked to the packets and syringes scattered on the ground near the body. “Yeah, pretty cut and dried, I’d say. Go ahead, I’ll handle it.”“All right.” Hank ducked under the yellow tape and peeled off his latex gloves as he approached one of the uniformed officers, a sergeant named Booth.“Can someone give me a ride downtown?”Booth squinted at Hank. “The jumper?”“Yeah.”“No problem.” Booth snapped his fingers a couple of times. “Jamieson! Take Lieutenant Donaghue downtown, will you?”As Hank waited for Jamieson to unlock the passenger door of the police cruiser, he glanced back at the alley. Another wasted life. Between the buildings the late afternoon sun flickered and cast its blinding light across his face. Hank closed his eyes for a moment, aware of the warmth on his flesh and the glowing redness behind his eyelids. Then he slipped on his sunglasses and got into the cruiser.By the time they were flying across Harborfront Bridge into Midtown he had already forgotten Martin Liu’s name.