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I had been braced for a shrine. I was not braced for how quiet it was.

The hall was lined with photographs of a woman. Hundreds, framed, hung edge to edge in an unbroken tapestry from floor to ceiling. Elena Roake laughing on a beach. Elena in a wedding dress. Elena asleep on a sofa with a book on her chest and a cat on her feet. She had a wide mouth and a mole beside one eye and the kind of face that made you want to know what she was about to say. In every single photograph she was looking at whoever held the camera.

“Six years,” Sabine said, softly. “He’s never taken one down.”

“No.”

“He never remarried. He never left. He moved into the house they’d meant to retire in, and sat in it, and put up a wall of her.” She swallowed. “I stood in this hallway for twenty minutes, Maksim. And I thought, if it were you. If it were you, and someone had taken him. What would I do?”

I did not answer. I did not have to.

She showed me the study.

It was on the second floor, at the back, a small square room with the curtains nailed shut. A long table stood in the middle, and on the table a map of North America under glass. It had been pinned, thickly, in red. There were forty-one pins. I counted. One for each place where a vampire had been seen in the last six years: Prague, Chicago, Montreal, Boston, Vancouver. Beside each pin, in a spidery hand, a date, and a name where one was known. Beside several of the names, a small black cross.

Beside Halden there were three pins now.

There were three pins now: the Sable, the Ambassador Hotel, and a house on Delacroix Street, with a small neat label that read, P. — family. Mother, father, sister (20). Grounds unsecured.

I looked at it for a long time.

“He does not know that I know,” I said finally. “That is the mercy. He believes he has time.”

“He is right.”

“How much?”

“Not much.” Sabine set a folder in my hand. “There’s a schedule in the desk. A man named Brandt has been driving back and forth between Providence and Halden every third day. Last Sunday, he left with a large black bag. Yesterday, he called from a road in New Hampshire. I don’t know what’s in the bag. I think it’s silver.”

“What kind of silver?”

“The kind that goes in a person.”

The room seemed to grow very cold.

“There’s something else.” She pulled a sheet from the folder. “This was in the wastebasket. A printout. A photograph.”

It was grainy, taken in bad light, through the glass of an arena, from a great distance. It showed two men in penalty boxes, side by side, with a pane of Plexiglas between them, and one hand, a large pale hand with long fingers, pressed flat to the glass and meeting another.

Across the bottom of the print, in Roake’s hand, was a single line.

This is how you find the throat.

We worked for three days.

I will not describe it. It was a blur of rented cars and cold houses and phone calls from Tamsin, Marcus, a woman in Chicago called Wren. We walked through Roake’s records. We broke into his storage unit. We found a file of newspaper clippings about a boating accident on Lake Winnipesaukee in 1988. We found a bank account, and a burner phone, and a receipt for eighty pounds of silver wire.

We did not find Roake.

On the fourth night, in a kitchen in a rented house, Sabine set a bottle of my wine down hard on the counter and said, “You have not slept.”

“I do not sleep.”

“You have not eaten. “

“I ate a rat in a parking garage.”

“That’s disgusting. That’s not eating. That is a coping mechanism.” She stared at me. “You are not thinking clearly. You are worse than useless. You have been looking at your phone for four days. You have not once put it down.”