After we left Sylvia, Jimmy and I went to meet Harrigan at a dive bar in the Bowery. I’d heard of the place, an old-man bar so narrow that a drunk who tipped backwards in his barstool would hit the back wall at shoulder level instead of falling over completely. No matter what you ordered, your drink would be warm and brown in a dirty glass. Very Harrigan. He probably got his mail delivered there.

“I know that place too,” said Jimmy. “Got a buddy works there.” Jimmy apparently had buddies in every bar and restaurant in town. “It’s quite the dump. Remember, even at the end of the world, there’s always a dive bar.”

“Your buddy working there now?”

“Probably. He hasn’t got much else to do. Why? You got something in mind?”

I did. Harrigan had told us almost nothing about himself or his plans and I didn’t anticipate him changing that tactic any time soon. Normally I wouldn’t care — a lot of times it doesn’t pay to be curious — but something about his story made me want to know more. Perhaps it was his mention of Maggie, I wasn’t sure. In any case, I figured it was worth a shot seeing what I could find out.

“Can you get your friend to let you in the back door?” I asked. Jimmy nodded. “OK. Go in, look for Harrigan, and surprise him. Not the kind of surprise that will make him open fire, but he won’t be expecting you coming that way anyway. Get his attention. Be, well, you.”

He grinned. “Can do, chief.”

I’m not sure how Harrigan knew we would meet him at the appointed time and place as he’d asked rather than skipping town, but I was beginning to see we didn’t have a whole lot of options. Harrigan would find us — he already had once — and if he didn’t, the serial killer would. Given the choice — well, there was no choice, and all of us knew it.

We got to the bar and split up, Jimmy going around the back alley while I waited out of sight from the bar’s front window, waiting to hear him enter the bar. I had a hunch Harrigan wouldn’t just be sitting there nursing his brown drink — like most solitary people in bars, he’d be busy with the phone. I was right; as soon as I heard Jimmy hollering “Harrigan my man!” I took a glance through the window and saw Harrigan sitting in the middle of the bar, phone in hand. He wasn’t exactly startled by Jimmy’s appearance, but even unflappable Harrigan couldn’t expect everything, and I doubt he’d anticipated this. “What up, dude?” Jimmy threw up his hands in greeting, almost as if he were about to salaam.

Bingo: Harrigan turned, ever so slightly, so that his phone’s screen wouldn’t be visible to Jimmy — but might be to me if I could get closer.

I slipped quickly, silently, into the bar; I knew I only had seconds before Harrigan was aware of my presence but I hoped that would be enough time to get a glimpse of the email he’d been reading. A glimpse was all I got; instantly Harrigan recovered, pocketing his phone and leaning back so he could get both of us within his field of vision. Ignoring Jimmy, he addressed me. “Find out anything useful, Jane?”

For a moment I thought he was talking about my little spying caper until I realized he was talking about Sylvia. I’m sure that’s how he meant me to misunderstand it, though; of course he’d realize instantly what I’d been up to here. It was quite possible he’d never been fooled at all, not even for a second. I didn’t care. It couldn’t surprise him that I didn’t trust him.

“A name and an address,” I said shortly.

Harrigan nodded. I thought the nod was for me to continue, but instead he’d been signaling the bartender, who set three more brown drinks before us and took away Harrigan’s empty glass. Harrigan picked up the center brown drink and sipped it slowly, then set it down again, his every movement suggesting a complete lack of curiosity. Jimmy, standing next to him, already knew everything I was about to say and yet even he seemed far more eager for me to speak than Harrigan.

Bastard. He won this round for sure.

While I summed up what I learned from Sylvia, I thought about the one thing I’d seen on Harrigan’s screen, on the “from” line of the email. A name: Carson-Mills. It was the name of a multinational medical technology company, and it had been rumored to be one of the secret financial backers of the Lao Baby experiments back in the ‘80s. For a while, when rumors of the lab’s atrocities were circulating, Carson-Mills strenuously denied any connection to that enterprise. Later on, though, when interest in the possibility of a longevity drug, a longevity surgery, a longevity implant began to supersede concerns about ethics and morality, suddenly ever medtech, biotech, and pharma company in existence seemed to encourage the idea of a connection to the lab — which, coincidentally, tended to drive their stock prices ever higher.

The question was why Carson-Mills would be contacting Harrigan, or Harrigan them. Perhaps one of his clients worked there. It was possible Carson-Mills was his client, but that seemed highly unlikely. They would have their own corporate spies, and I couldn’t see Harrigan fitting in with that bunch. Harrigan seemed more like the type who would recognize one of them instantly and would be three counties away before the spy even realized it — or, if Harrigan was in a bad mood, would loosen a few of the spy’s teeth with his fist.

So my plan yielded almost nothing of use, and meanwhile I was divulging everything I knew. An imbalance, to be sure, but I had to admit it made sense to have Harrigan as an ally, at least for the time being. The serial killer was still out there looking for me. If Harrigan was offering protection, I’d be a fool not to take it.

And so, not wanting to be a fool, I picked up my disgusting drink and said, “Let’s go find Ruth Baxter.”

Harrigan nodded again. Jimmy held up his drink as if making a toast and then made one — “to Canada.” It also happened to be where I was headed next, a most unexpected destination with the most improbable companions.

+

They actually had a connection, he and Jane. Everyone in New York did, eight million people separated by no more than two or three degrees, sometimes even less than that. As it turned out, they had both once taught for the same online college, him in chemistry, her in history. History — that was a good one. She was probably counting on being able to teach it from memory in a couple hundred years. She had quit a number of years back to do something else, while he was still there, quizzing random strangers on the periodic table of elements, as though any of it mattered any more. He hated chemistry, hated studying and teaching science in general, had only done so because of his father. It didn’t take long for him to realize what a huge mistake this had been, as he had no aptitude for it whatsoever. But at least this path had enabled him to find out everything he needed to know about his next target.

Her name had been something else back then, Emily or Emma, or maybe it was Mary or Maria, in any case with the improbable last name of Lowe. But he recognized the photo required of all faculty members of the college so that students would know they were dealing with real people, which wasn’t always the case at some of the newer online schools. He’d stared a long time at that photo. It was one she would never have to update, no matter how old it got, no matter how old she got, an evil even greater than Dorian Gray and his portrait.

And as it had been in that old story, evil really was seductive. He observed she’d managed to take in two others to protect her. Couldn’t they see what she was? No; all they saw was youth and beauty. Because they couldn’t hold on to those things for themselves, at first they worshipped it in her, in them. That would change, though — and he would lead the way.