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were turned away from her. An elderly woman was near tears because she had to move her sixty-year-old son into a nursing home. A woman in nurse’s scrubs was trying to convince her friend to try Botox. Two men in polos and khakis were discussing printer ink and the Cubs. There was a man sitting alone, reading a magazine. He was dressed like a lawyer, but his hands were very clean and rubbed white around the cuticles, and he had a yellow pen-size flashlight in his shirt pocket. Nada guessed he might be a doctor and tried to remember if there was a hospital close to Michigan Avenue. A young woman sitting along the wall was leaning across the table, talking to her companion. She occasionally moved her hand in front of her mouth and frequently scanned the room with her eyes. She was in her twenties. A dyed blonde. Slightly pudgy, but not unattractively so. She had seven piercings in her left ear but was trying to fill in three of them. When she moved her arm, Nada could see a slight discoloration under her collarbone. It wasn’t a birthmark. More like a tan line. Like she’d been wearing a necklace in the sun and had recently removed it.

It was a pattern of dots. Nada had seen it before. High up on one of the big oak doors in Jameson’s foyer. Like bowling pins seen from above.

“You think he’s automatic now.” Nada wasn’t sure about the second-to-last word. Automatic didn’t make any sense.

Her companion said something. His back was to Nada, but she could see part of his face in the reflection of a framed poster on the wall. Lip flap is never perfectly symmetrical and so she had to focus to try to make sense of it. Something about a “religious freak”?

“I hear the Sheik’s been to his place a bunch the last six months,” the girl said.

The man said something about how this Sheik, or the religious freak, if they weren’t the same person, liked gambling too much.

Nada was never very good with coincidences. She saw far too many of them. People who think the world makes sense are surprised by coincidence, but Nada found it everywhere. She knew if she sat in this coffee shop and continued eavesdropping on conversations, she could identify some connection between every single person there—shared dermatologists and ailments, alma maters, favorite books.

Occasionally, she would give in to the paranoia. Bea liked to say that Nada was good at obtaining information but not so good at making sense of it. Here she had a girl who used to wear a necklace with the same pattern she’d seen in Jameson’s house. That could be nothing. Probably was nothing. But they were also talking about a Sheik who liked to gamble, and hadn’t Wayne mentioned somebody called the Concrete Sheik who was visiting the Colossus casino last time she was there?

This couple had stood in line behind her, which meant they could have followed her inside.

“It seems like there’s gotta be a much easier way,” the girl was saying now. “It’s so crazy over the top.”

He said something about its being only a couple of days. That it happened almost every summer anyway. This was just (something—“controlling” maybe?) the timing.

They started talking about personal things—boyfriends (the man was gay, it turned out), jobs. Nada decided they had nothing to do with her. Just one of those moments when her spider wanted to stir up trouble.

She left the coffee shop and walked three doors north, stopping at the entrance of a Japanese luxury electronics showroom. She waited there until the dyed blonde and the gay man left the shop and turned south, walking away from her into the heat.

28

IN THE PANELED DINING ROOM with the big Rauschenberg on the windowless north wall, Reggie Vallentine was having, but not enjoying, a late and mostly silent dinner of pumpkin ravioli with his wife, his son, and the widow of the man he had murdered.

Elizabeth Gold, tall and straight in the Vallentines’ Stickley chair, wore expensive clothes and expertly applied makeup and had a few sandbags against the tide of aging in the form of recent surgical improvements around the eyes and ears. She wore a small