I looked at those hands, and I said, in a voice I did not recognize as my own, “You can’t go in.” He let go.

And before he walked away, he asked me a question that I have not been able to forget since, and that told me, more completely than the patch had, everything I needed to know.

Chapter 6 — Predators Have Manicures

I stood by the coffee machine after he was gone, a cup of scalding black liquid burning my palm, and I understood that I had spent the last twenty minutes doing something I had never done in forty years of friendship: watching Luca Vance the way a hunter watches a dangerous animal, looking for the monster beneath the man.

And I could not find it.