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get so bad?’
    Mrs Sachs shifts in her chair. She’s uncomfortable, and Doyle knows it’s not because of the seat. This is deep, personal shit he’s asking her now, but it has to be put out
there.
    ‘Patricia made a big mistake. The man she married was a bum, a parasite. He was also a control freak. She didn’t talk to me about it much, but I knew Joe made her life miserable. One
time, I saw a bottle of anti-depressants in her bag. I think . . . I think he even beat her sometimes. If she wanted out, then who could blame her? So what Mr Repp was suggesting, about her running
away from it all, it didn’t seem so crazy.’
    ‘Did you speak with her husband about the disappearance?’
    ‘Not in any depth. Joe doesn’t do depth. Far as he’s concerned, Patricia is dead. He got a lot of money from it, and he’s happy with that. It tells you everything about
him you need to know.’
    Doyle hesitates before voicing his next words. Dashing the hopes of desperate mothers is not his favorite pastime.
    ‘Okay, let’s suppose that Patricia did survive somehow, that nobody she knew saw her leave the WTC, and that she then decided to use it as the ideal opportunity to change her life
forever. She would then have to go into hiding. She couldn’t go home, couldn’t pack a bag, couldn’t go anywhere she might be recognized, couldn’t take any money from an ATM.
She would have to go it alone, using only what she had on her. That’s a tough stunt to pull off.’
    Mrs Sachs nods all through this, as if to say,
Yes, yes, don’t you think I haven’t already considered all this?
    ‘But not impossible,’ she says. ‘People disappear all the time, don’t they? They fake their deaths and just go. They leave everything behind them.’
    Doyle hears the touch of agony in her last sentence, and he knows he has to reach out for it.
    ‘I think that’s why you came to see me today, isn’t it, Mrs Sachs? If Patricia is still alive, if she has run away from her past life, then she has run away from you too. She
has left you behind, left you with all the hurt of believing your daughter has suffered a tragic death. Do you really think she could do that to you, to her own mother?’
    Mrs Sachs raises her face and catches some of that spring sunshine herself. It glints off the wetness in her eyes.
    ‘I’m not very well, you know, Detective. I have diabetes and high blood pressure and an enlarged heart. I don’t know how much longer I have to live. I have few friends and no
family, unless Patricia is alive. When Mr Repp came to see me I was overjoyed. I was filled with hope. But you know what? You’re right. The pain of believing that Patricia could abandon me in
this way, without a word or a message of some kind – well, that’s come to hurt even more than believing she died on that awful day, along with all those other poor souls. So now I need
the pain to end. If she’s alive, then maybe she can tell me why she did this. If not, well . . . Either way, I need to know the truth. It’s all I have left.’
    Doyle taps the photograph a few times. ‘I’ll look into it,’ he says. ‘You mind if I keep this for a while?’
    When she shakes her head, he reaches for the envelope. Before he can withdraw his hand, Mrs Sachs takes hold of it.
    ‘Thank you.’ Then she gets up from her chair and shuffles away.
    Doyle looks with sadness at the retreating form. And even when she has disappeared from view, he continues to stare for several minutes.
    He jumps when he hears the booming voice.
    ‘We got a homicide. And it’s messy.’

THREE
    For the briefest of moments Doyle experiences a surge of excitement. This city isn’t the murder hot-spot it once was. In fact it’s become pretty tame lately. A
homicide landing on one’s desk these days is almost a cause for celebration for an NYPD detective.
    So when he looks up and finds the square-jawed face of Lieutenant Cesario pointed decidedly in the direction of the only other