The apartment on East Seventeenth Street didn’t have any furniture in the front room except for a single, low-backed chair made of cracked black leather and a heavy steel reading lamp that cast a sharp, circular pool of white light across the bare oak floorboards.
The rest of the room was nothing but dead corners and grey shadows, the kind of space that looked less like a home and more like a safety-deposit box someone had cleaned out in a hurry before the bank closed for the weekend.
Elias stood by the unpolished zinc counter in the kitchen, his fingers resting against the cold, condensation-filmed glass of an unopened bottle of mineral water. He hadn't turned on the overhead fluorescent tubes; the ballast in the ceiling had an annoying, high-pitched buzz that made the base of his skul
