The afternoon rain had grown heavier, and the stretch of Pacific beyond Wes’s cottage was dark and choppy. He left his car in the short, curved driveway, went running across the sparse lawn to his porch.

After unlocking the front door he dived into the shadowy living room. “Casey?”

There didn’t appear to be any unusual disorder.

“Casey?” he repeated loudly.

From the bedroom came a small throat-clearing sound. He ran in there. “Is that you, Wes?” her voice inquired quietly.

“Yeah, why the—”

“Don’t go bellowing like a bulldog, I’m—”

“Bullfrog. What are you doing in the closet?”

The door creaked as she pushed it halfway open and stepped out. She was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt whose faded message advocated fair treatment for dolphins, and no makeup.

“Are you alone?” she inquired as she glanced around. She’d given up her crutches but still had a slight limp.

“What’s wrong?” He skirted the unmade bed, moving up close to the subdued blonde.

She put her hand on his arm. “I haven’t been completely and absolutely truthful with you.”

“Did you have something to do with killing Barnson?”

“Not that untruthful, for Pete’s sake,” she said. “I just meant, Wes, that I know a little more about the location of Neva Maxton’s body than I may’ve let on.”

“But you’ve heard about Barnson’s being dead?” Wes pointed in the general direction of north. “Up near Lake Tahoe.”

She nodded forlornly. “Yes, it was on the news while I was having breakfast,” she answered. “That prompted me, I have to admit, to do something kind of stupid.”

“Stupider than what you’ve already been doing, you mean?”

She pressed a palm against his chest. “Wait now,” she told him, frowning. “Except for slightly fudging the facts about how much I knew, everything I’ve told you this time around has been the truth.”

“Okay, so what’d you do?”

Casey sighed. “Well, I thought that since poor Dick Barnson was dead and gone, his attorneys and heirs and hangers-on would probably be descending on his mansion any minute,” she explained. “So I knew I’d better sneak over there quick and gather up the rest of my belongings that I had to abandon when I moved out in such a hurry.”

“That was stupid,” he agreed.

“True, but the point is...” She gave an annoyed shrug of her shoulders. “I walked in on those same two creeps who tried to chop me up the other night.”

“Jesus, Casey, did they—”

“They didn’t even see me,” she assured him with a very dim smile of triumph. “But I sure as heck saw them. They were ransacking Dick’s den. The big bald one was going over all his papers and files, and the other one was checking through his computer records.”

“Looking for what?”

“This.” From her hip pocket she took a floppy disk and held it up. “It’s the part of his memoirs where he gives the specifics about exactly where Neva’s buried. We even scanned in a little map he drew of the spot.”

“You snuck that out of there today?”

“No, I took it about a week ago and hid it away,” she said. “See, I had a feeling that something—”

“You had a feeling you were going up there and do some grave robbing.”

She gave an angry shake of her head.

“That wasn’t my motive at all,” she said. “I’ve told you that the McLeods have a long tradition in our native Ireland of being gifted with the second sight, don’t you know. I’d been up to having meself a premonition that—”

“You forget that you’ve also told me that McLeod is a name you took when you decided to become an actress,” he reminded her. “What the authentic McLeods over on the Old Sod can accomplish when it comes to seeing the future doesn’t have much to do with—”

“Listen, the point you have to grasp is that these jerks were at Dick Barnson’s mansion today, Wes.” She looked him straight in the eye. “You see what that must mean?”

“They still don’t know where she’s buried,” he answered. “Meaning he died before he told them enough.”

“That’s it exactly,” she said, nodding. “It’s all terribly clear what we have to do next.”

“Hide in the closet?”

“Oh, I only ducked in there when I heard you come stomping up the porch like a flock of elephants,” Casey said.

“All right, what scheme have you come up with now?”

“This isn’t a scheme, it’s a strategy to save both our lives.”

“Our lives — how’d I get on this hit list?”

She made an impatient noise. “When they come up empty at Dick’s place, they’re sure as hell going to come hunting for me again,” she said. “Alan Omony is their boss, and he knows that I know a lot about this whole business.”

She took a step forward to tap Wes on his chest. “Alan is a very persistent man. In fact, persevere is number seven on his list of thirteen steps to wealth and happiness. Or maybe it’s number eight. Anyway, the guy isn’t going to give up short of tracking me down and torturing the truth out of me.” She gave Wes a brief, pitying look. “Naturally, my dearest friend in the world is also likely to get hurt.”

He backed away from her. “I hope I’m wrong about this,” he said, “but I suspect you want to beat them to the treasure. Go up to Tahoe, find the body of this film noir actress?”

“Now you’re acting less like a dummy,” she said encouragingly. “That’s just exactly what we have to do, Wes. We get hold of that locket and the map inside, then we go right straight to the jewels. Once this is all out in the open, Omony’s minions will have no reason to keep chasing us.”

“We could put all this out in the open right now,” he suggested. “Tell what you know and let the police and the insurance companies do the digging and the hunting.”

She shook her head. “We really must have something to show everybody,” she told him. “Otherwise, they’re only going to say that this is another of my nitwit publicity stunts to promote my career. It’s unfair, but there it is, Wes.”

“You’re still figuring to make some money out of this whole mess, aren’t you?”

She held up her hand in a swearing-on-the-Bible gesture. “Absolutely not. I simply want to save our lives,” she insisted. “Granted that one of my essential beliefs used to be, before I mended my ways, that slogan they always put on the front of the sweepstakes envelopes — you may already be a winner. But no more, Wes, honestly.”

“Going up there will be damned dangerous.”

“That’s why I knew you wouldn’t want me to do it all alone,” she said, taking him by the arm.

The top floor was one long, narrow hallway with office doors fining both sides. Guns drawn, Becker and Timmons stepped out into the corridor. Becker held the elevator car until he saw the two uniformed figures at the far end of the hall more than a hundred yards away; then he leaned back into the elevator, pressed “1,” and came out again as the doors sighed shut. He heard the car start its long trip back down. Timmons acknowledged the two colleagues with an upraised hand, and Becker saw one of the figures bend down to lock the stairwell door on their end.

Well, that’s that, Becker thought. All the exits were now sealed.

He took a moment to look around. From where he stood he had a clear view of everything in the hallway. All the lights were in fact on, there were no obstructing objects like file cabinets or water coolers or potted palms, and the only break in the corridor was at this end, where it widened a bit to include a receptionist’s area complete with desk, computer, and telephone. There was no place to hide. Whoever else was here — if he was here at all — had to be in one of the offices.

Okay, Becker thought. Here goes. Another glance down the hall told him the other cops were already unlocking office doors and venturing inside. Signaling Timmons to stand by, he unclipped the ring from his belt, found the key to the first office on his right — 3201 — and turned it in the lock. The door swung open.

Becker crept inside. The office was large and cluttered. Plenty of hiding places here. While Timmons stayed put just inside the open door, Becker did a quick search. Nobody home. Before leaving he took a look through the tall window at the end of the room. At first he was puzzled: the entire city block below him, just behind and to the north of the building, was pitch black — no lights, no people, no anything. Then he saw perimeter lighting and a chain-link fence and, as he looked more carefully, the deep pit with heavy equipment parked at the bottom. Construction site.

Satisfied, he turned and went back to the hallway. “One down,” he whispered as he moved past his partner. He doubted whether Timmons had heard him; the guard, as it turned out, had been right about the air conditioning. It made a deep, steady rumble that seemed to come from everywhere at once, with an occasional knock or rattle thrown in. Becker couldn’t imagine having to listen to it all day long. If it did come down to a search for the device, the bomb squad would definitely have to get the a/c shut off first.

Slowly they worked their way down the corridor, checking rooms on both their left and right; 3202 was a restroom, and 3203 contained only a copier and a fax machine. The rest were offices. Ten minutes after starting out, while they were searching room 3208, the air conditioning cut off — or at least cycled down. The resulting silence was even more unsettling than the noise had been.

That was when they heard the shots.

Two of them, one right after the other. A second later, the crash of breaking glass. The sounds had come from the other end of the hall.

Both Timmons and Becker froze for an instant, then eased out into the hallway. Resisting the impulse to hurry, Becker flattened himself against a wall and waited for several seconds, his heart pounding and his gun sweaty in his hand. Finally he nodded to Timmons, who was trying to make himself small on the other side of the corridor. They both moved forward.

As they approached the west end of the floor, Becker saw that the five farthest office doors were open. He assumed that whatever had happened had happened behind the nearest door, since the other team would have started its search at the stairwell and come this way. Having heard no more noises, he and Timmons stopped just outside the door of 3246, cocked their revolvers, and waited a moment.

If one of the cops had just been trigger-happy and then knocked over a lamp, Becker said to himself, we’re all going to feel like fools.

Oddly enough, when he followed his gun around the corner and into the open doorway, the first thing he saw was a broken lamp lying in the middle of the room — but beyond that was a broken window, and on the floor beside the window was the sprawled body of a policeman. Off to the right, on the far side of a wooden desk, a second cop was looking through an open briefcase. He jerked upright when he saw Becker and Timmons; then all three relaxed.

Becker lowered his gun, his mind racing with a combination of relief and confusion.

Where was the suspect?

As he stood there dumbfounded, Timmons brushed past him to check on the fallen officer.

“He’s dead,” said the second man, who had immediately resumed his search of the briefcase. Becker studied him a moment. The man’s shirttail was out, his hat was off, and his blue nametag said Spellman in white block letters. He continued with the briefcase for several seconds, then closed the lid and pushed it away in frustration. “The bomb’s here somewhere,” he added. “We surprised him.”

As Timmons rose from the body, Becker walked to it, knelt, and looked at the nametag above the shirt pocket. Rice. Though he hadn’t known the man, Becker still felt a lump in his throat. He had, after all, spoken to him on the phone twenty minutes ago. After a pause Becker waved his gun barrel at the window. “That where he went?”

Spellman nodded. Though his voice had been fairly steady, his face was pale, his hands trembling.

Becker and Timmons exchanged glances; then Becker rose to his feet, holstered his pistol, and looked through the broken window. There was no construction site on this side of the building; when he leaned out the window, he looked down on a lighted city street. Thirty-two floors below, a crumpled figure lay on the sidewalk, surrounded by a growing crowd. For a second it looked as if the body might be wearing tennis clothes. Becker quickly dismissed that thought, blaming his poor eyesight. It was night after all, and the sidewalk was a long way down.

When he turned again to face the room, he saw Timmons helping Spellman to a chair. Watching them, Becker took out his cell phone and called Hendrix in the lobby. He told him the situation, then put the phone away and approached Officer Spellman. The man’s eyes were glassy and vacant.

“What happened?” Becker asked him as gently as he could. He was vaguely aware that the air conditioner had come on again.

“He killed Rice,” Spellman said in a monotone. “He killed him, then took a shot at me. I jumped behind the desk there.”

“You sure you’re not hit?”

Spellman blinked, then ran a hand over his chest and stomach in a gesture that would have been comical under other circumstances. “I don’t think so.”

“No struggle?”

“No time.”

“What happened next?” Becker said.

Spellman motioned with a lift of his chin. “He went through the window.”

Becker frowned. “Isn’t that safety glass?” he asked, studying the jagged hole.

“Beats me. He just put his head down and rammed through.” Spellman swallowed and said, “I never saw anything like it.”

“Okay, you just rest a minute.” Becker picked up the cell phone and punched numbers. “Hendrix? Free up one of the elevators, we’ve got a man coming down. Any sign of the bomb squad?... Well, when they do, send ’em up, quick. And see if you can kill that a/c, we’ve got a search to do here.”

He signed off and turned to Officer Spellman. “You go on down to the lobby, sport. I’ll tell your people you did good.”

The cop nodded dazedly but made no move to get up.

“You need some help?” Timmons asked him.

Spellman blinked, then focused on him and said in a faint voice, “No. No, I can make it. Thanks, guys.” He rose unsteadily to his feet, took a breath, and made his way out the door. Moments later Becker heard the elevator ding at the other end of the hall.

“What about the body?” Timmons asked.

Together they turned to look at Officer Rice lying dead on the floor ten feet away.

“He’ll get a hero’s burial,” Becker said. “But right now we’ve got work to do.”

Both of them took a deep breath and directed their attention to the office. It was pretty much in order except for the floor on the left-hand side of the room, which was strewn with books and boxes apparently taken from a line of storage bins and shelves along that wall. It was clear that the two other cops had indeed interrupted the bomber as he was preparing a place to plant the device.

“Spellman was right,” Timmons murmured, looking at the items scattered about on the carpet. “The bomb’s here somewhere.”

Becker nodded agreement. But something was nagging at him, something at the back of his mind.

“We should have a while, though,” Timmons was saying. A drop of perspiration ran onto his eye, and he brushed it away with the back of his hand. “Like you said, it’d be set for the morning rush hour, right?”

Even as Timmons spoke, Becker noticed the lamp again. The lamp worried him. If there had been no struggle, why was it broken? Had the suspect knocked it over in his dive through the window?

The cell phone rang. Timmons waited for Becker to answer it and, when he didn’t, answered it himself.

Becker was still staring at the fallen lamp. Not only was it broken, it was unplugged. Unplugged and lying in the middle of the floor. Becker frowned and concentrated, letting his eyes sweep the room. The open bins, cluttered shelves, carpet, window, walls—

“It’s the chief, sarge,” Timmons said.

Becker’s gaze stopped on two small holes in the wall just above the baseboard, beside the window. He walked over to examine them. They were bullet holes, spaced no more than an inch apart.

Bullet holes?

“Sarge,” Timmons said again. “The chief wants to talk to—”

Becker squeezed his eyes shut, searching his memory. Whatever was nagging at him had been there since they first entered the room and found the dead officer. And something else, too, something Spellman had told them...

His eyes snapped open.

The shirttail. There hadn’t been a struggle, yet Spellman’s shirttail was all the way out and his hat missing. It was as if he had not yet finished dressing. And the body on the sidewalk, decked out in what looked like tennis whites—

My God, Becker thought.

Without even looking at Timmons, Becker reached out and snatched the phone from his hand. “Chief?” he said.

“What the hell’s going on up there?” Chief Wellborn demanded. He was outside; Becker could hear traffic noises in the background. “I got a dead body on the sidewalk, and the guard here says there’s another one up—”

“Let me speak to him,” Becker snapped.

The chief, who was not accustomed to being interrupted, said, “Now, just a minute, sergeant—”

“The security guard,” Becker shouted, his face red. “Put him on!”

After a short pause the guard’s voice came on the line.

“Mr. Hendrix, this is Tom Becker. I want you to look at the dead man’s face.”

“Look at his... I can’t. His arm’s in the way—”

“Then move his arm! Look at his face, and tell me if you recognize him.”

A long silence passed.

“Hendrix?”

Still no reply. But Becker could hear him breathing into the phone.

“Mr. Hendrix?”

“I see him,” the guard answered, in a strange voice. “I see his face now...”

“It’s one of the two cops, isn’t it,” Becker said.

He heard the guard swallow. “Yessir, it is. It’s the other one, the one who didn’t talk to you on the phone. Spellman.” Hendrix paused, then murmured, “Why’s he in his underwear? There’s a pile of clothes lying way over there, bundled up and tied with a pants leg...”

“Mr. Hendrix, listen to me a minute.” Becker’s eyes were shut again as he spoke. “The man I told you was coming down in the elevator. Did you see him get off?”

The guard hesitated. “I didn’t see him, no, but I’m sure he’s down by now. By the way, I got a maintenance guy working on cutting off the a/c, and there’s a bunch of cops on the way up to you right now.”

“The bomb squad?”

“No, just cops. From all over.”

“Great,” Becker mumbled. “Put the chief back on.”

When the phone had been handed over, Becker said, “Chief, we’ve got some trouble here. The body in front of you is a cop from an East Side station. The bomber shot him and his partner, too, and got away. We need to get the explosives team up here on the double, and we need to put out a call to all units, with the following description...”

He spoke a moment more, listened, nodded, and signed off. Then he turned to Ed Timmons, who looked a bit like a business student who had just wandered by mistake into a class on quantum physics.

“He changed clothes,” Becker explained. “After they surprised him, he put Spellman’s uniform on and threw him out the window.”

Timmons swallowed. “So... he shot both of them?”

“Looks that way.” Becker’s eyes roamed the room again, clicking off each item even as he spoke. “I imagine he shot Rice first, then swapped clothes with Spellman before shooting him. That’s why there was no blood on the uniform.”

“But we heard the shots. They were close together—”

Becker pointed to the two bullet holes in the wall. “Those were the shots we heard. I figure he used a silencer to kill the partners, then used Spellman’s gun to put two rounds into that baseboard later, just so we would hear them, to back up his story. Then he used the floor lamp to smash the window and threw Spellman’s body out.”

Timmons still looked lost. “To back up his story? Why’d he need a story? How did he know about you and me at all?”

“I imagine he got that out of Spellman, during the change of clothes. There’d have been plenty of time.”

Timmons thought that over, then said, “Okay. Okay, if that’s what happened... then there’s still plenty of time for us, too, right? We have till morning to find it. That’s what you said.”

“I know what I said.”

“Then why do you look so worried?” Timmons’ face had gone very stiff “If that’s true, why do you keep wanting the bomb squad to hurry up and get here?”

Becker turned to look at him. “Because there’s a chance I’m wrong.”

“What do you mean, wrong?”

“The lights,” Becker said. “That’s been bothering me from the start. Why would he announce himself that way, turning on all the lights? Why not just use a flashlight? Was he arrogant? Was he careless?”

“Maybe he’s just stupid.”

“No. I don’t think so. Arrogant, maybe. Insane, probably. But careless, or stupid? No.”

“Then what’s the answer?” Timmons asked. “Why the lights?”

“What do you think?”

Timmons pondered that. He seemed to be having trouble getting his breath. “To get us here in a hurry?”

“That’s what I’m thinking now.”

“But... why?”

Becker just shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I think it means we better find that thing, just as quick as we can.”

As he spoke, the air conditioning sputtered and bumped one final time and then clicked off. “At last,” Becker said.

Timmons had already begun looking through the fitter on the floor and in the shelves, and Becker was crossing the room to join him when another thought struck him.

The briefcase.

He turned to look at it, recalling the way the man in Spellman’s uniform had it open, its contents hidden from their view, when he and Timmons arrived on the scene. Becker felt a sudden chill ripple down his spine.

Had that been an act? Had the suspect just been going though the motions, pretending to search the case in order to convince them that he was who he appeared to be? Or had he been doing something else entirely?

Like setting a timer.

No, Becker thought, his mind racing. He wouldn’t have waited that late to set it, even if he had been surprised by Rice and Spellman. The scattered contents of the shelves was a good indication that at the time he was interrupted he had been about to hide the bomb, not to arm it. That would surely have already been done.

But what had he been doing with the briefcase?

Becker approached the desk. As Timmons turned to watch him in the eerie stillness of the now-silent room, he took a deep breath, held it, and placed his ear against the side of the case.

It was ticking.

Becker’s heart lurched.

The bomb was in the briefcase.

And at that moment it all came together. The truth hit him like a slap in the face.

The bomber hadn’t been setting the bomb’s timer; he’d been resetting it.

Keeping his head down and motionless, Becker raised his eyes to meet his partner’s. He opened his mouth to tell Timmons to alert the others, to warn them away, but it was too late. Even now Becker could hear the footsteps of a dozen cops in the corridor. And all of them, he realized, were about to be killed. He and Timmons and the men in the hall and heaven knew how many more in the street below.

Because they were out of time.

Becker knew it; he could feel it in his bones. The bomber had already been gone for almost ten minutes, and the timer wouldn’t have been reset for a minute more than the man thought it would take him to fake his grief and get out of the building. He would want all the witnesses to go up with the blast.

At the very instant that all this was flashing though Becker’s mind, one of the policemen stuck his head through the doorway and looked in at him and Timmons.

“You guys the bomb squad?” the man asked.

Becker straightened up, his heart pounding in his chest. “We are now,” he answered, half to himself. In the same tone of voice he said with a glance at the new cop, “Get away from that door. All of you, he down in the hall and stay there.” To Timmons, whose face showed he knew, Becker murmured, “Be ready. You’ll have to get the window.”

Timmons hesitated, then understood. He stepped back as Becker drew his pistol and fired through the open doorway, four shots, his bullets shredding the lock on the door across the hall. Timmons was already moving, dashing out and across the hallway, lowering his shoulder and crashing through the ruined door of 3245. At the same moment, his ears ringing, Becker dropped his gun, picked the briefcase up by the handle, and ran after him. As Becker passed through the doorway and crossed the hall, he had a glimpse of a corridor full of cops, all of them lying on the floor and staring up at him with wide, frightened eyes.

Not as frightened as I am, he thought.

In the office across the hall Timmons had snatched up a heavy chair and slammed it through the window as Becker charged through the open door. Now the window was open as well, a gaping hole in the center of the glass. While Timmons dived out of the way Becker made a full three hundred sixty degree windup and flung the briefcase out and through the jagged hole and into space. It spun away into the black night like an oversized Frisbee.

Becker didn’t stop to watch its descent into the construction pit behind the building. He hit the floor three feet from his partner and folded both arms over his head, waiting.

Four seconds passed. Five... six... seven...

The explosion rocked the building and blew out what was left of the office window. It also, though they did not yet know it, blew out all the other windows on that side of Remington Tower. Most of the cops in the hallway, some of them hardened veterans, cried out like kids in a thunderstorm.

When the rumble finally died down, Ed Timmons raised his head and brushed a dusting of glass fragments from his hair.

“I was half right,” he said. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

“It’s the lancet that’s needed here, Dr. Tindle,” whispered Mr. Willard Labbett, surgeon. He spoke in hushed terms of respect, his speech only mildly slurred by gin. For whatever reason, the Oxford-educated physician had enlisted Labbett as his medical factotum, and Labbett was flattered that the natural enmity between a university-trained physician and a mere surgeon had been suspended. Dr. Tindle even condescended to ask Labbett’s opinion! “Your emetics are very well, but I’ve never seen a better case for bleeding. There’s the fever and all.”

Dr. Tindle looked down at the flushed girl child and hid his distaste. The child was a beauty by any standards. The impending doom of mankind would prevent her accession to tempting womanhood, but he already felt her stirring his baser nature.

“The lancet by all means, Mr. Labbett.”

His face grimacing with a suppressed grin, Labbett unfolded his tools. “We shall be needing a bowl for the bloodletting.”

Dr. Tindle placed his hand gently on Labbett’s arm.

“I should be honored if you would use my instrument for the purpose, Mr. Labbett. It is of the finest Greenwich steel, and superior, I think, to your own.”

“I am the one who should be honored, sir!”

Dr. Tindle smiled wisely. “Our combined skills are surely required in this case, Mr. Labbett. Together, we shall see the child through.”

He turned to the fretting mother. “With the help of God, Mrs. Phelps, a resolution to this crisis shall be forthcoming.”

Mrs. Phelps wiped away her tears with a stained handkerchief. “Please, doctor, save young Lucy! If only my brother were here! He, like you, is a man of medicine.”

Tindle frowned. Her brother a medical man? Perhaps it would be dangerous to proceed. But what of the clarion call of Gabriel? Tindle frowned more deeply. It would not do to be found wanting at the Judgment. God’s will be done.

“I promise you, Mrs. Phelps, that I shall do everything in my power.”

Randy Ryan’s apartment building was in Bloomfield Township, well north of the city, off Telegraph and Long Lake. It was a long low single story brick structure, capped with a massive layer of icy snow. The eaves were fringed with long, lethal-looking icicles stabbing downward. For Bloomfield, the place seemed low-rent and highly transient. Might as well have put “Divorced Dads Welcome” on their sign out front.

The parking lot sported a white ’Vette and a blue Crown Vic but no large black Ford Expedition with white fuzzy dice dangling from the mirror. I wedged my Mustang in a parking spot between the Vic and a mountainous pile of plowed snow.

Huddled in my peacoat, fists clenched in pockets for warmth, I crunched across the hard-packed white stuff toward the door of Apartment 3. Already I knew what I’d find. Second-hand mismatched furniture. Worn appliances. Neutral colors on the walls, the trim, in the carpet. TV and maybe a CD player. And few personal touches except — if Shyla’s description of their relationship was any indication — a picture or two of her arm-in-arm with her dad, smiling at the camera.

Five minutes later I left, my expectations fully confirmed. Only there was just one picture, of Shy-la alone, probably her high school graduation portrait a couple of years earlier. Her hair had been brown then and longer. She looked younger and more innocent, one to whom less had happened. Same blue eyes, though.

Of Ryan himself there was no recent sign. As Shyla had told me, the sinks were dry, the bed was neatly made, and what looked like several days’ worth of mail scattered the foyer carpet. To the front storm door were stuck three yellow tried-to-deliver sticky notes, from UPS or OOPS or somebody like that. The earliest one was dated December thirtieth.

I’d knocked on the other seven doors. The two that answered claimed no knowledge of Randy Ryan, past or present. I reboarded the Mustang and, heat on high, headed south on Telegraph. Normally four lanes each way, Telegraph was down to two narrow lanes now. They were walled with high white drifts that were already turning gray-black from tailpipe crud. The traffic ran slow and sullen, the lights especially lengthy at Quarton and Maple.

Worst of all was the sprawling interchange where Telegraph intertwined with the Reuther and the Lodge freeways. There the cars, the SUV’s, and the big rigs crept along in ten foot lurches. They noisily merged and disengaged like icy, metallic, salt-encrusted lovers, tailpipes sending up thick streams of inky exhaust like plumy cats’ tails into the frigid midmorning air. I just lived through it, smoking a cigar, playing Buddy Guy’s latest on the CD, tolerant, patient. Downright tranquil even. Surely in no hurry to meet Randy Ryan’s estranged wife.

She greeted him at the top of the stair. “What a surprise, to see my son twice in the same week!”

“I’m sorry, Mother. Didn’t you get my message?” Once more Lin Po cleaned and dried his bicycle.

The little round woman peered across the street. “Here comes the messenger now, that loafer! He knows not to expect a tip from me, so he waits in the comfort of the tavern until you come, to make his delivery.”

But the courier was not entirely moved by greed. “Deputy Inspector Lin Po? I have a message, to your hands only.” Then he turned to Lin’s mother. “Have also one for you, Grandmother.” He received a tip, after all, but from Lin Po’s hand.

The message was from Inspector Koon, Ninth District, and Lin Po read it the second time aloud: “Deputy inspector: I have been informed that you will be in my district on personal business, and I would be honored if you would stop by my office, at your convenience, of course.”

“Isn’t that nice, so polite.” His mother shuffled to the kitchen. “Inspector Koon must be a very nice man.”

“Or a very angry one. Maybe he is too polite.” But Koon couldn’t have heard from Lin Po. He had never sent his report to anyone. Only his own chief inspector could have mentioned the report. A chill cramped his stomach.

“Mother, what is the gossip about the construction accident, first day of New Year?”

“Oh, the usual, you know. Some say that Lo Pan, god of carpenters, has been offended, since steel was used instead of the traditional bamboo scaffolding. Others point to the red soil that was found in the diggings, saying it is dragon’s blood. No priest was called when the dragon was disturbed, which is the height of foolishness as anyone will tell you.”

“And what do you say, Mother?”

“Same I said to you. Bad fung shui, that place.”

Lin Po could not bring himself to accuse his mother of betraying a confidence. But he slept poorly, worrying about the meeting with Inspector Koon. And once again the two talking fish appeared in his dreams.

Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn was at his desk at headquarters bringing his memoirs up to the hour and wishing he’d had something other than coffee on his afternoon break when Lieutenant Savage appeared in the doorway. “You want to pick up line two, Cy? Stamaty thinks he’s got a homicide over on Ninth Avenue.”

Less than twenty minutes later Auburn parked his car next to Stamaty’s van at the laundromat and joined him in the van.

“You alone?” asked Stamaty.

Auburn spread his hands. “Totally solitary.”

“But you’ve got a warrant?”

“Not this trip.”

Stamaty squirmed in his seat and shook his head. “You guys operate funny. I told you—”

“The lieutenant wants me to check it out first. If there’s probable cause, he’ll send Kestrel with a search warrant.”

“If there’s probable cause? Didn’t you tell him about the green fibers and the toothmarks?”

“I told him. What are those women looking at?”

“Us. It’s the sign on the door. People always think I’ve got a body in the back. Listen, Cy, there’s a ratty old green quilt on Strode’s bed. Warrant or not, you or Kestrel or somebody else from your lab better get your hands on it quick.”

Mrs. Helm’s boardinghouse was a tall, narrow, white frame building with peeling paint and rusted spouting, nearly indistinguishable from its neighbors. Auburn’s ring at the door was answered by a stout woman in a voluminous apron.

Her cheeks blazed with rouge, and her sturdy square-toed shoes looked as if they had been polished with a tar brush. He showed identification.

“I just had another person here,” she said, “a white man, not no more than an hour ago, asking me all kinds of questions.”

Auburn nodded patiently. “Mr. Stamaty works for the coroner. I’m from the police department.”

The parlor was full of her perfume — an old woman’s perfume, heavy and sweet, like overripe fruit. “I never knew such a fuss to be made about somebody dying in their bed.”

Auburn took note of his surroundings — the chessboard, the mandolin, the potted ferns, the matched porcelain partridges with the chipped sides turned towards the wall. For some women the battle against dust is a consuming passion. Evidently Mrs. Helm wasn’t one of these.

“Mr. Stamaty’s department had one or two reasons for thinking Mr. Strode’s death might not have been natural.”

Her heavy eyebrows bunched up like storm clouds. “What do you mean? What kind of reasons?”

“The coroner’s preliminary investigation suggested that he died of suffocation.”

“You mean something cut off his air, like?”

“Something or somebody.”

Her frown deepened. “But the poor soul died in his bed. How could he have suffocated?”

“It’s only a preliminary impression. There may be nothing in it, but we have to follow up on it for the coroner.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions and look around the house.” He slipped a three by five file card from his pocket and made a notation in an upper corner. “If you don’t mind.”

They went over the details of Frank Strode’s final illness and death. “I understand Mr. Strode has no known next of kin,” said Auburn. “Who’s in charge of his affairs?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, somebody will have to take responsibility for making funeral arrangements and settling his estate. Do you know if he had a lawyer?”

“I know full well he didn’t. Mr. Strode didn’t trust nobody. Wouldn’t even put his money in the bank.”

“Kept it all here in the house, did he?”

“I guess so. I really wouldn’t know.”

“Did he have any close friends in town?”

“Just the other gentlemen that lives here in the house. Which they get along together sometimes like a cageful of tigers.”

“Any particular trouble between Mr. Strode and any of the others recently?”

“Only that he’s been talking high and mighty the last couple of weeks since he got a promotion over to the factory. Plus his usual pickiness and feistiness.”

“Have you or the tenants had any visitors at the house in the last two or three days?”

“No, sir. I’m pretty strict. No visitors after dinner, no liquor in the house, no bad language—”

They were interrupted by the entrance of a gaunt, elderly man in a tweed suit that had gone out of style three times and come back in twice. “This is Mr. Gardner,” she told Auburn. “He’s the one that found Mr. Strode dead this morning. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get on with dinner.”

Auburn identified himself. “Sit down, sir, and please make yourself comfortable,” said Gardner with the flamboyant gestures and grandiloquent manner of a frustrated actor. His broad brow and steely eye promised intellectual power and strength of character, but a sensual mouth and an irresolute chin reneged on the deal. Auburn took particular note of his hands, which were chalk-white with tapering fingers — the idle hands of an aesthete.

“Surely Strode’s death isn’t really a police matter, is it?” asked Gardner. “I mean, the chap from the coroner’s office said he was just making routine inquiries, and now...” He watched in evident dismay as Auburn entered his name on a file card.

“At this point it’s not exactly routine any more,” admitted Auburn. “All I can tell you is that the forensic examination of Mr. Strode’s body turned up some questionable findings, and I’ve been assigned to take over the investigation from here on.”

They reviewed the events of the morning. “Are you sure Mr. Strode was dead when you covered him up?”

“Good Lord, yes!” exclaimed Gardner. “I told the other investigator and I’m telling you, Strode was as dead as a frozen mackerel. What sort of questionable findings, if I may ask?”

“Did you hear anything unusual during the night?”

“No, but I sleep very soundly.”

“Were you and Mr. Strode particularly good friends?”

Gardner looked into a remote corner of the parlor and cleared his throat. “Not particularly good, no. But of course we had practically nothing in common. I’m a literary type, if you will. Started out teaching high school English, but now I do all the technical writing and advertising copy for Gromacki’s — the furniture factory, you know, up in the next block. In fact all of us here in the house work there.

“Strode was one of those poor devils that have had littleness thrust upon them, if you follow me. A good deal of native shrewdness, but lazy. Dropped out of high school because he thought it was smart to make cigarette money by working as a stock boy in a grocery warehouse while his Mends were still bisecting triangles and analyzing Paradise Lost. Sort of slid into the gutter and stayed there. A miser and a confirmed bachelor.”

“How did he get along with the other boarders?”

Gardner passed his hand over his forehead like a silent movie actor signaling discreet reflection. “Let me give you a clue, sir. We walk to work in all weathers, the lot of us. But only Frank and Boyd Bland walked together. Bland’s a blue-collar worker at the factory, the sort of chap who never quite adjusts to life outside the womb.” He leaned closer and dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “I suspect he may have been a drinker at one time. I understand he came from a good family but got himself into some kind of trouble early on in life — disinherited, I don’t know... But Strode was always friendly with Bland — I think because Bland was plainly his inferior. Drebbel and I incurred Strode’s contempt because we were educated, cultivated, successful...”

Auburn had a little difficulty reconciling the notion of success with his present surroundings. “I think you said Mr. Drebbel also works at the factory?”

“Correct, sir. Hans is an engineer — still works full-time at seventy-two. Sort of a know-it-all. Devious, manipulative, but nothing very impressive in the brain department. He’s been working on some kind of pneumatic stapling gun for seven or eight years and still hasn’t got it right.”

“And what about your landlady? How did she and Mr. Strode get along?”

“Mrs. Helm? Oh, she mothers us all in her rough-and-tumble way. Basically a decent soul even if her grammar does grate on the refined ear like a rusty hinge.”

“Does she have any family of her own?”

“Not that I know of. She’s been widowed for years.” The mantel clock struck four. “Here’s Bland already.”

A squat little dumpling-faced man probably not much over fifty drifted aimlessly into the room and, discovering Auburn’s presence, gazed at him with the timid, panicky manner of a cornered mouse. Gardner made introductions.

“Sit down, Mr. Bland,” said Auburn. “I hear you and Mr. Strode were pretty good Mends.”

“Yes. I miss old Frank already.” Bland swallowed hard, and Auburn thought he was going to cry. His flabby, spade-shaped hands looked like the ineffectual flippers of some clumsy mud dwelling creature. “We looked out for each other, Frank and I. But he said he might be moving out pretty soon.” Hugh Gardner made a surreptitious exit into the hall, and a moment later they heard him going up the back stairs.

“I understand you work at the furniture factory, too, Mr. Bland. What sort of work do you do there?”

“I’m in dunnage and pack-out. Frank was trying to get me a better job in receiving; now I guess I’m probably stuck where I am.”

“How did Strode get along with the other two boarders — Gardner and Drebbel?”

Bland scrutinized the palm of his left hand as if he were looking for a splinter. “Not very well. They had a lot of arguments.”

“What about?”

“Different things. Frank just got promoted at the factory. Personnel director. He said there was stuff in the records that made the other guys look bad. Said he might get them fired if they didn’t get off his back.”

Auburn made a mental note to get a look at those records as soon as possible. “What were they on his back about?”

“Different things. They used to gang up on him, make fun of him because he never went to college, things like that.”

“I’m just going over a few details about Mr. Strode’s death. Do you remember the last time you saw him alive?”

“Last night, late. I checked on him around eleven thirty to see if he needed anything before I went to bed.”

“And was he all right?”

“Said he felt cold and weak. I pulled his quilt up around his shoulders.”

“What kind of a quilt?”

“A green comforter. Frank used to wear it around the house like a bathrobe.”

“Let’s go upstairs and see if we can find it.”

The second story of the house was just as blatantly unmodernized and grubby as the first. An indefinable smell, suggesting dirt and decay, seemed to rise from the mud-colored carpet and emanate from the papered walls. A dark, narrow hall ran straight from the front stairs to the back stairs with two bedrooms on each side and a bathroom sandwiched between those on the left. Frank Strode’s room was at the rear, behind the bath.

Auburn noted the findings Stamaty had reported and retrieved the fragment of clock crystal from under the bed, observing that there was no dust on its upper surface. Bland said he was sure Strode had an alarm clock with a crystal like that, but he couldn’t remember how recently he’d seen it on the nightstand.

There was no sign of a green quilt in the room.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve got other things to do,” said Auburn. “I’ll just look a little further on my own, thanks.”

Although Boyd Bland almost certainly had nothing else to do, he accepted his dismissal demurely and vanished down the back stairs.

The oblique position of the heavy steel bedstead seemed to accentuate the awkward smallness of the room. Originally it must have been a hospital bed, and several screw-clamp fittings remained attached to the frame. Auburn stood for a few moments in the middle of Frank Strode’s room, trying to get a feel for the personality of its late occupant by surveying the things he’d treasured and used to adorn this bleak little chamber.

On a corner shelf stood a very old plaster Mickey Mouse figurine that might have been of some value as an antique if it hadn’t been smashed to bits at some time or other and put together again with glue that had oozed out of the joints and turned canary yellow on hardening. An Art Deco ashtray on the nightstand, with most of the electroplating scorched off, contained about two packs’ worth of cigarette butts. The reek of stale cigarette smoke hung in the air like a fog and permeated everything in the room. In a dresser drawer Auburn found stacks of baseball cards and a collection of miniature liquor bottles, all of them empty.

Something had happened in that room last night — something fatal to Frank Strode. And by no stretch of the imagination could it have been an accident.

He made a lightning search, more intent on thoroughness than on putting things back as he’d found them. Everything in the room was cheap, shabby, damaged, or worn out, and not a single article of real worth was to be found. None of the keys in the keyfold fitted the lock of the empty dresser drawer.

It was about four thirty when Auburn widened the sphere of his search. Stepping softly, he had a quick look around Gardner’s stuffy and book-cluttered room, hazarded a glance into the closet, and got out again. Across the hall in Boyd Bland’s room everything was in hopeless disorder. Magazines, cardboard boxes, paper bags, empty soft drink cans, and articles of clothing were strewn everywhere as in the aftermath of a cyclone. Although a thorough search was obviously impracticable, Auburn satisfied himself that the green quilt wasn’t there.

His next stop was the bathroom, where the plumbing was antiquated and the enormous medicine cabinet stuffed with the makings of a pharmaceutical museum. Auburn saw packages and brand names that he remembered from his childhood but hadn’t seen since. An assortment of patent medicines and a cache of old prescription bottles filled three shelves. He started to investigate these but then resolutely shut the cabinet door and left the bathroom.

On his way to the back stairs he took a quick look into the last bedroom, which by default must have been Drebbel’s. Here the decor was spartan, the geometric order of things almost painful. A drawing board stood in the corner, and on a small table in front of the window were ranged tools, mechanical parts, and scraps of hardware. Auburn’s hand was on the closet doorknob when the tenant of the room walked in.

“Anything I can help you with?” asked Drebbel with a brittle pugnacity that Auburn would have sworn was nine-tenths bluff.

“Police officer, sir,” said Auburn, hauling out his badge.

“I know who you are,” said Drebbel. “Go ahead. No skeletons in there.” A smile played fitfully over his rubbery cheeks. Auburn took note of the gold pen and pencil set in his shirt pocket, the blanched burn scar on his neck, the knobby, sinewy hands, the deformed left little finger.

“I’m just having a quick look over the house.”

“So I heard. Something fishy about Strode’s death?” The thick lenses of Drebbel’s glasses magnified his eyes grotesquely, creating the illusion of exaggerated alertness, if not morbid curiosity.

“In a way, yes. Got a minute?”

“Certainly. Just wanted to take off my tie before dinner.” He proceeded to do so, hanging it with elaborate care on a rack on the inside of the closet door and incidentally giving Auburn a clear view of the interior of the closet. “I’m John Drebbel, by the way.”

Auburn had a file card in his hand. “Were you particularly close to Mr. Strode?”

“Oh no. Not at all. Mere acquaintances, you might say, even though he lived right across the hall. Surely his death isn’t really a police case, is it?”

“Just routine for now. What kind of a man was Mr. Strode, would you say?”

Drebbel pursed his lips and sucked in his cheeks. “A very ordinary man. No education or culture to speak of. Low self-esteem. Passed himself off as a suffering hero.” As he finished voicing each observation he emphasized it with a curt nod.

“Pretended to know secrets about people. Claimed he had a lot of money stashed away here somewhere.”

“What about that? Did he have money here?”

“Possibly. Strode didn’t have much use for me personally, and he certainly didn’t confide in me about his financial affairs.”

“Was there someone else in the house he was closer to?”

“Boyd Bland. They used to pal around together like a couple of lost souls. You’ve already talked to Bland, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“A sad case. The sort of chap of whom it might be said that a great future lies behind him. His family had money, I believe, and he’s a lot brighter than he acts, but something went wrong somewhere. Drugs, drink, I don’t know. It’s his personality structure that’s pathological. Passive-dependent. For him, life’s a spectator sport. Of course, he’s Mrs. Helm’s pet — the son she never had.”

“How did Mr. Strode and Mr. Gardner get along?”

Drebbel turned the full glare of his monstrous eyes on Auburn.

“This is getting to be a regular gossip session. Gardner’s nothing but a windbag. Not very bright — a plodder. Prides himself on his cunning, but he’s as transparent as that window pane. I know what I’m talking about: I play chess with him every night. He didn’t do anything to Strode, and neither did any of the rest of us. The only one in the household with enough backbone to kill anybody is Mrs. Helm. You should see that woman swat flies.”

He meant it jocularly, and Auburn pursued it in the same vein. “Any reason why she’d want to kill Strode?”

“To the contrary. The dead don’t pay rent. After old Ambrose died, it took her six months to get Bland in here because she won’t have liquor in the house. No, the autopsy will show that Frank just pegged off with a bad case of the flu. We old geezers do that, you know.”

The parlor clock struck five as they were going down the back stairs, which creaked worse than the front ones. They found the others just sitting down to eat in the stark, gloomy dining room. A low-hanging chandelier above the table shed a wan ivory glow over framed photographs of the Arch of Triumph and the Sphinx hanging on the wall above the buffet.

“I’m sorry to disturb you at mealtime,” said Auburn, addressing them all, “but we need to do some further investigation yet this evening. I expect to have an evidence technician here within half an hour or so. I’ll have to ask you all to stay in the house until we’ve finished.”

If Stamaty’s and then Auburn’s own operations in the house that afternoon had stirred up a ground-swell of uneasiness among the tenants, the last announcement nearly set off a panic. But he was deaf to their protests and even forbade anyone to go upstairs until he returned.

He needed some fresh air, and besides, the smell of Mrs. Helm’s beef stew was making him hungry. First he visited the dark alley behind the house and went through the trashcans with the help of a flashlight. In a brown paper bag with coffee grounds and eggshells he found a big old alarm clock, its crystal broken and missing a segment.

He went to his car and, less wary than Stamaty had been of putting sensitive material on the air, he radioed headquarters to request background checks on the surviving occupants of the house on Ninth Avenue, including Mrs. Helm. Then he reported briefly to Lieutenant Savage, expressing himself with sufficient vagueness and ambiguity to prevent electronic eavesdroppers from picking up anything substantial.

“I’m voting with the gentleman who has his office in the courthouse,” he said. “The subject was helped on his way, and one of the focus group did the helping. Maybe all of them did and divided up the residuals. Anyway, we need to disassemble the premises, and we’d better request a document before—”

“It’s lying right here on my desk. Get back over there and sit on them until Kestrel shows up.”

“How come you’ve already got a warrant?” asked Auburn, abandoning the doubletalk.

“Update from the gentleman at the courthouse. Kestrel will tell you.” Savage hung up.

On returning to Ninth Avenue, Auburn found Mrs. Helm and her boarders still in the dining room, sitting somberly over their coffee. The two candy bars and the bag of peanuts he’d nibbled in the car had taken away most of his hunger, but the smell of stew lingering in the air brought some of it back.

When he asked to talk privately with Mrs. Helm, she took him into her sanctum, a long narrow room off the kitchen that had probably been an enclosed porch in the original design of the house.

“There are a couple of other things I want to ask you, ma’am. What day is your trash pickup here?”

“Trash pickup? Friday. Which they’ll have double their work this week after I clean out Mr. Strode’s room.”

“I’ll ask you not to do any cleaning or throwing out just yet. We don’t know whose property Mr. Strode’s things are now, legally. There may be a relative somewhere, or he may have left a will. What arrangements were you planning to make with Mr. Schell for the funeral expenses?”

“Well, I just don’t know. It was different when Mr. Ambrose died. I had power of attorney for him.” She pondered a moment, her brows twitching convulsively. “What are you looking for up there, anyway?”

“Well, a couple of things actually. Mr. Stamaty and I both thought it was a little strange that the top drawer of Mr. Strode’s bureau was unlocked and empty. Would you happen to know if he kept anything in there?”

“No,” she said, studiously avoiding his eye. “I don’t mess with the gentlemen’s personal things. But that drawer never had no key.”

“Then there’s this green quilt from Mr. Strode’s room. A couple of the boarders remember seeing it on the bed lately, but now it seems to be missing. Do you know where it might be?”

“The undertakers must have wrapped him up in it when they took him away.”

“They say they didn’t. Besides, Mr. Stamaty saw it here earlier this afternoon.”

The doorbell rang, but before she could get to the parlor, Gardner admitted Kestrel, the police evidence technician. Standing just inside the door with a camera case in one hand and a field investigation kit in the other, Kestrel gave signs of profound relief when Auburn appeared from the back of the house. They went upstairs to escape prying eyes and curious ears.

Auburn showed Kestrel the room where Strode had lived and died, and Kestrel handed Auburn the search warrant and a memo faxed from the coroner’s office. While Auburn read by the light of the dim ceiling fixture, Kestrel stood in the doorway surveying the room with the eye of an artist. Austere in manner and sparing of speech, he was a perfectionist at his work, more comfortable with cameras and microscopes than with suspected felons or recalcitrant witnesses.

“Before you get too deeply involved in here,” said Auburn, “I want to see what you think about this medicine cabinet.”

A minute or two later he was back downstairs, formally serving the search warrant on Mrs. Helm. He started his serious searching in the basement.

In spite of the sketchy lighting system, fetid drains, and a rank stench of mildew that assailed him like a wire brush up each nostril, he made a good job of it but found nothing. Mrs. Helm and her boarders were watching the news when he went up the back stairs and climbed a further flight beyond a door opposite the bathroom to reach the attic. Here the smell was dusty and mousy and the cobwebs lay so thick that they obviously hadn’t been disturbed for months or years.

He rejoined Kestrel in the bathroom. “There’s not much hope of lifting prints with all this dust,” said Kestrel. “But somebody’s been into this stuff lately.”

Auburn examined the row of bottles ranged on the chipped and discolored washstand. There were three brands of patent medicine for swelling, all with the same active ingredient.

“Mean any thing to you?” he asked.

Kestrel grunted. “Not my field.”

Auburn looked at his watch. “What time does Stamaty go home?”

“Depends. Sometimes he doesn’t.”

“I’m going to try to catch him at the office. Not from here, though. Keep an eye on the folks while I’m gone.” Kestrel glared at him but said nothing.

Phoning from the laundromat, Auburn found Stamaty at home celebrating the birthday of one of his numerous children. “Nick, did you do a toxicology screen on Strode?”

“That’s routine. Reports won’t be back till Friday.”

“Do they test for ammonium chloride?”

“I wouldn’t think so. What’s that — some kind of chemical fertilizer?”

“Pills for swelling. Over the counter. Ring any bells?”

“No, and I haven’t got anything here to look it up in. Let me give you the number of the Poison Control Center.”

“Thanks, I’ve already got it.”

As Auburn was returning to the boardinghouse he saw a familiar figure scuttling along the sidewalk in the deep gloom of evening with a small suitcase under its arm.

“Leaving town, Mr. Bland?”

Bland nearly jumped out of his skin. “Oh no. Just stepping down to the bus station.”

“With your suitcase? Why don’t we go back to the house and see what’s in it?”

Bland offered no resistance as Auburn took charge of the suitcase. Gardner and Drebbel barely looked up from their chess game as Auburn led Bland through the parlor and back to the kitchen. He put the suitcase on the kitchen table and called up the back stairs for Kestrel to come down.

“This seems to be locked, Mr. Bland,” he said. “Got the key handy?”

Bland, cowering in the corner, passed a tremulous hand over a tremulous jowl. “That’s not my suitcase,” he said “Mrs. Helm asked me to put it in a pay locker down at the bus station for her.”

“Do you know what’s in it?”

The door to Mrs. Helm’s room flew open as if on cue, and she bowled into the kitchen. “Those are some things of my sister’s she asked me to put away safe,” she said.

“Would you please open the case, ma’am?”

“I don’t have the key.”

Kestrel inspected the catches briefly, then wrenched them open one after the other with the can opener blade of his pocket knife. He turned back the lid of the suitcase. Inside was a tattered green quilt, redolent of stale cigarette smoke like everything in Strode’s room. Rolled up in it were several thousand dollars in bundles of bills done up with red rubber bands. Kestrel pulled out the long-sought quilt and spread it on the kitchen table.

Auburn made a formal arrest, charged Mrs. Helm with murder and robbery, and read her her rights, vaguely aware that Gardner and Drebbel were lurking in the dark dining room. “He was such an aggravating person,” she fumed. “Always whining about something not being right. And lately he was just unbearable, bragging about how important he was over to the factory. Plus he wouldn’t never pay his rent till I threatened to put him in the street.”

Sometimes Auburn got a little cheeky when things were falling into place at the conclusion of a case. “And on top of that,” he suggested, “he blabbed once too often about this collection of miniature portraits of the presidents he had in his dresser drawer, didn’t he?”

It took her a moment to catch on. “Oh, he never made no secret of that money. He was always talking about how much he saved by never getting married, and how he wouldn’t put it in the bank because his folks was ruined in the Depression. He kept it locked in that top dresser drawer, and he wore the key on a chain around his neck. The key’s in there with the money somewhere.”

“Was that why you killed him? For the money? And because he was talking about moving out?”

Mrs. Helm glowered. “I never said I killed him. You said that. I took the money after I found him dead, mostly to pay for his back rent and his funeral.”

“You found him dead? When was that?”

“Right after midnight. I went up to see how he was feeling before I went to bed, and I found him dead.”

Auburn’s stomach was churning, and his mouth was dry. He got a drink of water at the kitchen sink before proceeding.

“Not quite dead, Mrs. Helm. Pretty close to it, maybe, but not quite. I found some old medicine bottles up in the bathroom. The marks in the dust show that those bottles have been handled and opened recently. The medicine in them is ammonium chloride, a nonprescription diuretic. An overdose causes dehydration, acid buildup, and extreme weakness. How many of those pills did you put in Frank Strode’s soup and juice every day?” He didn’t credit Mrs. Helm with enough toxicologic savvy to know that even a large overdose of ammonium chloride probably wouldn’t be detected by the pending laboratory tests.

She swept Auburn and Kestrel with a scowl of defiance. “Those pills was my husband’s, which he’s been dead for seventeen years from blood pressure. I take them myself sometimes when my feet is swollen. But I never gave none of that medicine to Mr. Strode.”

“You gave it to him, all right. Maybe it didn’t work as fast on him as it did on Mr. Ambrose—”

“Mr. Ambrose!”

“—or on your husband.”

Her complexion turned the color of slate. Auburn took another drink of water.

“When you went up there last night and saw that he was too weak to put up a fight, you burked him — sat or knelt on his chest and held the covers over his face until he stopped trying to breathe. He put up just enough of a struggle to knock the alarm clock off the night stand and break it.”

“I never done that.”

“Yes, you did, and I’ll tell you how we can prove it. Mr. Schell, the undertaker, found Mr. Strode’s mouth and throat full of green polyester fibers, and there were fresh cuts inside his mouth from his teeth. After Mr. Schell called us, Mr. Strode’s body was removed from the funeral parlor to the coroner’s morgue, and this afternoon an autopsy showed three fresh rib fractures.”

“That don’t mean I had anything to do with it.”

“Look at this quilt. What are those black marks all over it?”

“I don’t know,” she sulked, looking everywhere but at the quilt. “Probably some dirt Mr. Strode got into.”

“That’s black shoe polish, Mrs. Helm. And I don’t think Officer Kestrel and the people at the forensic lab will have any trouble proving it’s chemically identical to the polish on the shoes you’re wearing right now.”

He was far too polite to point out that, in addition, probably she alone in that house had sufficient avoirdupois to have burked Strode.

“After Mr. Stamaty was here, you took another look in Mr. Strode’s room and noticed those marks your shoes had made on the quilt. So you hid it, and you sent Mr. Bland to get it out of the house along with the loot.”

They took Mrs. Helm downtown to be booked, leaving her surviving boarders (two of whom had learned to play chess while serving stretches in prison) to fend for themselves and thank their stars they kept their meagre financial resources in the bank and had always been punctual with the rent.

Hortense, after reading the letter, folded it up and put it away at the back of a drawer, saying, in a resolute voice, “I sha’n’t go.”

To begin with, although she had formerly attached some slight importance to this trinket, which she had regarded as a mascot, she felt very little interest in it now that the period of her trials was apparently at an end. She could not forget that figure eight, which was the serial number of the next adventure. To launch herself upon it meant taking up the interrupted chain, going back to Rénine and giving him a pledge which, with his powers of suggestion, he would know how to turn to account.

Two days before the fifth of December she was still in the same frame of mind. So she was on the morning of the fourth, but suddenly, without even having to contend against preliminary subterfuges, she ran out into the garden, cut three lengths of rush, plaited them as she used to do in her childhood, and at twelve o’clock had herself driven to the station. She was uplifted by an eager curiosity. She was unable to resist all the amusing and novel sensations which the adventure proposed by Rénine promised her. It was really too tempting. The jet necklace, the toque with the autumn leaves, the old woman with the silver rosary — how could she resist their mysterious appeal, and how could she refuse this opportunity of showing Rénine what she was capable of doing?

And then, after all, she said to herself, laughing, he’s summoning me to Paris. Now, eight o’clock is dangerous to me at a spot three hundred miles from Paris in that old deserted Château de Halingre, but nowhere else. The only clock that can strike the threatening hour is down there, under lock and key, a prisoner!

She reached Paris that evening. On the morning of the fifth she went out and bought a jet necklace which she reduced to seventy-five beads, put on a blue gown and a toque with red leaves, and at four o’clock precisely entered the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont.

Her heart was throbbing violently. This time she was alone, and how acutely she now felt the strength of that support which, from unreflecting fear rather than any reasonable motive, she had thrust aside! She looked around her, almost hoping to see him. But there was no one there... no one except an old lady in black, standing beside the holy water basin.

Hortense went up to her. The old lady, who held a silver rosary in her hands, offered her holy water and then began to count the beads of the necklace which Hortense gave her.

She whispered, “Seventy-five. That’s right. Come.”

Without another word she toddled along under the light of the streetlamps, crossed the Pont des Tournelles to the Ile Saint-Louis, and went down an empty street leading to a crossroads, where she stopped in front of an old house with wrought-iron balconies.

“Go in,” she said.

And the old lady went away.