Down Here

The waiter cleared away the remnants of our meal, asked us if we wanted dessert. Laura Reinhardt raised her eyebrows at me. “I could go for a little tórta,” I said.

She held up two fingers.

“Now, that may have been going too far,” she said, patting her lips with a white napkin when she was done. She leaned back in her chair, seemed to think better of it, and bent toward me. I lit another cigarette for her.

“Tell me about the book,” she said.

“You’ve been reading about the death-penalty cases—the ones where they find out, years later, that a man sentenced to death was innocent all along?”

“I’ve seen things on TV, that’s all.”

“It’s a national scandal,” I said, locking her eyes with my sincerity. “In Illinois, the last governor canceled every single pending execution before he left office. He said he just couldn’t be sure that people on death row are really guilty. In one case, this guy was accused of raping and murdering a little girl. Turned out it wasn’t him.”

“How would they—?”

“Sometimes, it’s DNA,” I told her. “Sometimes, believe it or not, the actual criminal confesses—usually when they’ve caught him on a whole bunch of other things. Sometimes, it’s as simple as an alibi they never checked out. But it always comes down to the same thing, which is what my book’s about.”

“Innocence?”

“No. I mean, innocence is a part of it, but that’s not the theme, not the . . . drive-force. I’m trying to go deeper. These things aren’t due to incompetence. Well, some of them are, sure. But the dark underbelly to all this is the kind of people who become prosecutors. I’m not talking about corruption, either—although that happens, too—I’m talking about people who have lost their way.”

“Prosecutors?”

“Prosecutors. Some of them lose sight of the difference between fighting crime and fighting criminals.”

“I don’t see the difference myself,” she said. “If you fight criminals, you do fight crime, isn’t that true?”

“In that order, yes,” I agreed. “But not when it’s reversed.”

“How could it be—?”

“A child is murdered. A woman is raped. A building is torched, and a fireman dies when the roof collapses. A . . . You know the type of crime I’m talking about. Public outrage. Lots of media attention. Demands for results. The pressure on prosecutors is tremendous. And, sometimes, they can be so hyper-focused on the crime that they ignore the criminal. It’s almost like, if they can put someone in prison, the crime is ‘solved.’ It just . . . consumes them. Like going snow-blind.

“And it’s our—the public’s—fault, too. How do we judge prosecutors? On their conviction rates, right? So, if a DA has any sort of political ambitions, he’d better clear his cases. That’s where plea bargaining came from, originally. It is a bargain. The criminal gets a much lighter sentence, and the prosecutor doesn’t take a chance on losing a trial.”

“But why would an innocent person agree to a plea bargain?”

“They don’t,” I said, lighting another cigarette. I left it in the ashtray next to the candle-in-Chianti-bottle that had been burning since before I sat down. “And that’s where the gate to hell opens. That’s when the pressure builds to get a result. Any result. That’s when an innocent man goes to prison.”

“A man like—?”

“John Anson Wychek. You understand what they did to him, don’t you? I don’t mean the wrongful conviction,” I said, holding up my hand to stop her from speaking, “I mean the rest of it.”

“I know it ruined his—”

“Ms. Reinhardt . . .”

“Laura.”

“Laura, the fact that you couldn’t be closer to the situation and even you don’t understand the scope of the tragedy, well, that proves why my book has to be written. Look, your brother was convicted of a single crime, right?”

“Yes. They said he—”

“In fact,” I interrupted, “he was convicted of more than a dozen.”

“What? How can you—?”

“Laura, these cases don’t have to be solved. They just have to be cleared. Do you understand the difference?”

“I guess I don’t.”

“When your brother was convicted of that one crime, the police ‘cleared’ a whole bunch of other crimes, naming him as the perpetrator. I don’t mean they charged him with the crimes. I don’t mean he was ever tried for them. But, as far as the police are concerned, those crimes are closed cases now.

“They never could have proved those cases against your brother. He was innocent, and I think they must have known that. So they never brought him to trial. But with that one single conviction they announce that all the crimes—all the similar crimes that were committed throughout the entire metropolitan area!—are solved. And John Anson Wychek, well, he’s the guilty man.”

“They never said—”

“They don’t have to say anything to you. All that counts is the press. And for the press, it’s an instant no-story. They can’t print that your brother is guilty—he’d sue them for millions. But they can’t pressure the DA to ‘solve’ the cases, either. See how it happens?”

“My God,” she said, eyes widening.

“Yes,” I said. “I know just what you’re thinking. Somewhere in this city, maybe somewhere close by, a vicious serial rapist is walking around loose. That’s the hidden penalty society pays every time we stand by and allow an obsessed prosecutor to railroad an innocent man.”

“And you think John’s story could change all that?”

“For what I want, I think he’s perfect,” I said, pure truth beaming out of me, like I was radioactive with it.

The check came inside a small leather folder. The waiter dropped it off and vanished. I opened it up. Much less than I’d expected. I put a fifty inside the folder, closed it back up.

“Wouldn’t credit cards make a better record for your accountant?” she asked.

“The only accountant who’ll ever see this bill is the publisher’s. And they’re not going to care.”

“You’re not one of those guys who pays cash for everything, are you?”

“Me? No. I use credit cards when I have to, I guess. Probably more of that old-fashioned thing. I’m a long way from paying bills over the Internet.”

“Because you’re worried about the security?”

“The security?”

“You know,” she said, raising her eyebrows just a touch. “Identity theft, stuff like that.”

“Oh. Well, you can’t work where I do without hearing about it. But . . . no. I guess I just don’t see what’s so great about doing it any new way.”

“Sometimes, to make things better, you have to try new ways,” she said.

The waiter came back, picked up the leather folder, and walked off without a word.

“What’s the next step?” Laura Reinhardt asked me.

“That depends on you,” I said.

“But you’re going ahead, doing a story on my brother, even if I don’t . . . cooperate, I guess is the word I was looking for.”

“I . . . I can’t say that. Not for sure. My contract is for a book on the consequences of false—or, I should say, ‘wrongful’—imprisonment. I thought your brother would be the ideal way to present the material, but he’s not the only candidate. Let’s face it, if he was, I wouldn’t have much of a book.”

“I don’t under—”

“If this kind of thing was an isolated incident, it makes a good news story, but it’s not a book,” I told her. “What I’m talking about is a phenomenon. An epidemic. There’s a lot of reasons for wanting your brother to be the centerpiece. I admit, it would be easier for me, with everything based right here in the city, but there are others who would fit the bill.”

The waiter came back with the leather folder. I opened it. Found a ten-dollar bill, a single, and some change.

“You’re a gambler, huh?” I said to him.

“OTB’s right down the street,” he said, flashing a grin.

I extracted the single, closed up the folder, and handed it back to him.

“Thank you, sir,” he said, nodding as if a deeply held belief had just been confirmed.

^“Can I give you a lift anywhere?” I asked, as we stepped onto the sidewalk.

“I have my own car,” she said. “But I’d appreciate you walking me over to it. This neighborhood has changed a lot since I was a little girl.”

“My pleasure.”

She walked with a compact, efficient stride, matching my normal pace easily, despite the difference in our heights.

“Did you and your brother eat at that same place when you were kids?”

“No. It wasn’t really for family outings. I mean, it is, but I only went there with my father. Like for special treats, just the two of us. There was a Jahn’s close by, too. I always had a sundae I used to think they made just for me—pistachio ice cream with butterscotch topping.”

“You ate that voluntarily?”

“I’m a lot more adventurous than I look,” she said, with a little giggle. “I liked eating something the boys were afraid of.”

“Just hearing about it scares me,” I admitted.

“That’s mine,” she said, stopping midblock. She reached in her purse and took out a set of keys. A chirping sound identified her silver Audi convertible as clearly as if she had pointed her finger.

“Very nice,” I said. “You don’t see many of those in the City.”

“The TT?”

“Convertibles. Costs a fortune to garage them. And if you don’t . . .”

“That’s true,” she said. “But where I live, indoor parking’s part of the deal.”

“I’ve heard about places like that.”

“You don’t look as if you’re starving,” she said, fingering my new suede jacket.

“I’m not,” I said. “But this coat’s not part of my wardrobe; it pretty much is my wardrobe.”

“So I can’t interest you in some of our more . . . adventurous investing prospects?” she said, smiling.

“Maybe after my book hits the charts.”

She crossed the street, opened the door to her convertible.

“I had a very nice time . . . J.P.,” she said, almost formally.

“I did, too. I wish . . .”

“What?”

“Never mind. I . . . I don’t want to . . . Look, Laura, I know you’ve got a lot to think about. About what I told you, I mean. Or people to talk it over with, or whatever. But can I ask you just one thing?”

“What would that be?”

“Will you call me, either way? I mean, if the answer’s ‘no,’ even then?”

“If you want, sure. But couldn’t we just say, if you don’t hear back from me by—?”

“I would much rather you called,” I told her. “And I promise you, if the answer’s ‘no,’ I won’t try to talk you out of it.”

She climbed into her car, got behind the wheel, looked up at me. “I’ll call you,” she said. “Count on it.”

^“All right, Schoolboy. You got a look, but did you set the hook?”

“Tried like hell, Prof. But I can’t know unless I feel a tug on the line.”

“Yeah,” he said, unconvinced. “Your girl, she’s holding the case ace, right?”

“Wolfe? If I’m right about Wychek already recanting, sure. But we can’t know if—”

“And we got the boss hoss for a shyster, too, right?” the Prof pressed.

“Davidson’s as good as there is,” I agreed.

“But you still got my boy and the T-man working those computers like they trying to find the cure for cancer,” the little man said. “And you, you got no doubt, but you still out and about.”

“Am I missing something here?” I said.

“Not you, bro. It’s me that don’t see.”

“Why I’m still working?”

“Don’t play dumb, son. Every one of us know what you got in this. And when it looked dicey, dealing us in, that was fine. But now . . . ?”

“What, Prof?”

“Tell me there’s some green in the scene,” the little man pleaded. “Tell me you a man with a plan. A scheme beats a dream, every time.”

“It’s not a—”

“Don’t have to be no sure score, honeyboy. But there’s a longshot that we got money on somewhere in all this, true as blue?”

“True as blue,” I promised.

^“He wants to meet you, again.” Pepper’s voice, over my cellular.

“Did he say why?”

“Another file, is all he said.”

“Couldn’t he just leave it with—?”

“I got the impression he couldn’t even copy it.”

“Tell him—”

“I did,” she cut me off. “Tomorrow night, Yonkers Raceway. In the outdoor grandstand at the top of the stretch. It’s a Thursday; he’ll find you easy enough, he said.”

I moved the first two fingers of each hand across the tabletop, miming a trotting horse. Not a pacer, a trotter—Max knew the difference. Then I turned an imaginary steering wheel, spread my hands to ask a question I already knew the answer to.

^“You know how I like it, honey,” Michelle insisted.

“Word for word,” I acknowledged. Then I started again, from the beginning.

Michelle made a moue of annoyance when I told her I didn’t recall whether Laura Reinhardt had worn any perfume, never mind what it might have smelled like. But mostly she stayed patient, her long red fingernails resting on the tablecloth.

“Maybe it’s just her . . . habit,” Michelle said, when I was finished. “There’s no way to tell unless we could talk to someone else she met for the first time.”

“What habit?”

“Playing.”

“Just what she said about flirting?”

“No, stupid. Talking about her . . . When a woman mentions a body part, she either wants reassurance about it, or she wants you to pay attention to it.”

“I don’t—”

“Yes, I know,” she cut me off. “Look, I’m not talking about asking. That’s more . . . intimate. You don’t ask a man if he thinks a certain dress makes you look fat unless you have something going with him.”

“She didn’t ask me—”

“She didn’t ask you anything, sweetheart. She told you all about ‘secretarial spread,’ though, didn’t she?”

“I . . . Yeah, she mentioned it, anyway.”

“But you couldn’t see what she was talking about, right?”

“Not with her sitting—”

“Exactly. Now, sometimes, if something bothers a woman, they can’t keep themselves from picking at it. The way magazines are today, I’m surprised more young girls don’t starve themselves to death or run around getting plastic surgery. So—a woman says to you, ‘I know I have a big nose,’ you’re supposed to say, ‘What?,’ as if it never occurred to you. But she tells you she has a big butt, what are you supposed to say then?”

“I don’t know.”

“For once, that was just as well,” she said, grinning. “There is no right answer to that one, not in the situation you were in. You can’t deny it, because you haven’t seen it. And you can’t say you like big butts, because this wasn’t supposed to be a date.”

“So what you said about habit . . . ?”

“Either it’s something that really bothers her, and she can’t keep herself from referring to it—there’re women who are compulsive like that, God knows—or it’s her way of getting sex into your mind.”

“She didn’t do any of the . . . other stuff.”

“Like bump her hip into you by accident when you’re walking together? Or licking her lips after she has some ice cream?”

“I . . . I’m not sure,” I said, trying to remember. “But she . . . It was more than that. More than not that, I mean.”

“Well, the way you left it, the next move is all hers, anyway.”

“What are you saying?”

“That she can’t tell, either.”

“Huh?”

“Burke, sometimes you are the thickest-skulled . . . Look, baby, let’s say the girl was interested in you. Not in this book you’re supposedly writing, or in doing something for her brother, or whatever. Just in you, okay? So she shows you a couple of little things, sees what you do. But you, being you, don’t do anything.

“Now she’s confused. Maybe you missed her signals. Maybe you weren’t interested. Or maybe you were interested as all hell, but you’re trying to be a professional—the book and all—and you didn’t want to blow it. See?”

“I can’t read her, honey. All I can tell you is, she’s not from down here.”

“‘Down here’ is not an address, baby,” she reminded me.

I moved my head. Not so much a nod as a bow, to the truth, letting my little sister’s core sadness reach out to hold hands with my hate, like the first time we met. “So you’re saying, even if she blows off the book, I could maybe—?”

“What could you possibly lose?” Michelle said. “You know what the Prof always says: When you’re looking to score, a window works as good as a door . . . ?”

“And a nun lies as good as a whore,” I finished for her.

^“You got an e-mail!” Terry, on the phone.

“Me?”

“Hauser. It came to the e-mail address on his site, and bounced right over to us. Just like the Dragon Lady said.”

“Read it to me.”

“It just says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta.’ The word ‘knew’ is in italics, well, not really italics—but if you put asterisks around a word it means—”

“Just read the whole thing to me, kid, okay? Then you can fill in whatever I don’t understand.”

“Right. Okay, it says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta. It’s back to the gym now for sure. I enjoyed our conversation, and I would like to have another. And to hear more about your project. Call me.’”

“Was it signed?”

“Yes. Just the letter ‘L.’”

“Okay, can we just—?”

“Wait,” he said. “Let me tell you what else, remember? Okay, first of all, after the word ‘torta,’ there’s the Internet symbol for a smile.”

“Like one of those happy-face things?”

“No. It’s just keystrokes, like from a regular typewriter. You take a—”

“Never mind, kid. Sorry to have interrupted you. What else?”

“After she says ‘for sure,’ there’s an exclamation point. And where she says she enjoyed your . . . conversation, there are three periods between the two words, like a pause.”

“Like you just did?”

“Egg-zact-lee!” he said. Dealing with my slow learning curve, the kid had learned to take his happiness where he found it . . . just like his mother. “The only other thing is, the letter ‘L’ that she signed it with? That was in lowercase, with no period after it.”

“Does that mean something?”

“Well, it could . . .” he said, doubtfully. “But there’s no way to tell. Some people use that lowercase ‘l’ to stand for ‘love,’ some people use a lowercase initial to be modest, or even to be . . . submissive, I think. But with e-mail, you can never really tell, because people write it and send it off so fast, they never check what they type. So sometimes you think something means something, and all it means it that whoever wrote the e-mail was sloppy.”

“Not this one,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Whatever she is, she’s not sloppy.”

“Oh. Well, you want to answer it?”

“Couldn’t I just call her? That way, she’d know I got her message.”

“You could, sure. But the message just came in, and it’s almost midnight.”

“I see what you mean. Anyway, I’m not supposed to have her home phone number—it’s not listed.”

“The e-mail came from her home account,” Terry said. “So we have that now, too.”

“What good does that do us?”

“I don’t know, not for sure. But the Dragon Lady says she might be able to tell us some things from the headers and the IP number—”

“Terry . . .”

“Sorry! I just got . . . Anyway, sure, you can answer her. But if you do it now, she’ll know you’re awake, and she might want to IM. You can’t do that from your computer—the one we left there—not without me there. She’d know pretty quick you weren’t used to doing it.”

“Doing it? I don’t even know what it is.”

“See?”

“Yeah. Hey, wait a minute, T. Would she have any way of knowing when her mail was received?”

“Not unless you have the same . . . Ah, never mind, the short answer is no.”

“Okay, let me think for a second. I have to go meet someone tomorrow night, so it can’t be then. For her, I mean. How about this? We send her a message around three in the morning . . . like I couldn’t sleep, so I turned on the computer and found her e-mail.”

“That’s easy. All I have to do is queue it to . . . Never mind,” the kid said, cutting himself off again. His learning curve was a lot flatter than mine.

“All right, how about this, then: ‘Me, too. All counts, except the gym. I’m meeting a source tonight, but I’ll call you at work, okay?’”

“That’s cool,” Terry said. “You’ve got the e-mail rhythm down just right.”

“Beginner’s luck.”

“How do you want to sign it?”

“Uh, how about ‘J.P.’?”

“Caps, with periods—like initials?”

“Perfect. Thanks, T.”

“Hey, this is fun. And it’ll give Clarence another excuse to talk to the Dragon Lady, too.”

It was just going on eleven the next morning when I dialed her number.

“Hi!” she said, when they put me through. “Boy, you keep late hours.”

“More like erratic ones,” I told her, setting the stage.

“I was planning to call you if I didn’t hear from you,” she said. “I realized, as soon as I sent the e-mail, that you might not check it for days. Some people don’t.”

“That’s me,” I admitted. “Only it’s weeks, not days. I don’t get a lot of e-mail at that address; mostly, it just comes to work.”

“I’m surprised, with that sexy picture of you on the site,” she said, teasing.

“Don’t remind me,” I groaned. “That was the publisher’s idea. They said there has to be a photo on the book jacket, anyway, so it would be better if . . .”

“I think it’s cute,” she said.

“You and my mother,” I said. “That’s about it.”

“Mothers are like that, aren’t they?”

“I guess they all are,” I said, thinking that was the biggest lie that had ever come out of my lifelong liar’s mouth.

“‘Meeting a source.’ That sounds so mysterious. But I guess, when you think about it, that’s what I am, too, right? A source.”

“I hope not.”

“What do you mean?” she said, softly.

“It’s . . . kind of complicated,” I said. “I’d rather tell you in person.”

“All right. Not tonight, I know. Tomorrow?”

“Just name the—”

“Can you pick me up after work? I know the traffic is hellish at that hour, but it would be a real treat not to have to ride that miserable subway. Especially this time of the year. Double-especially on a Friday night.”

“No problem. Is there a place to park around there?”

“You won’t need one. Just be out front—you have the address, yes?—at seven.”

“Oh. Sure. I thought you meant we’d eat someplace close to where you worked, and then I’d drive you home.”

“Would you prefer that?”

“To what?”

“To what I have in mind.”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Journalist’s instincts,” I told her.

Sands hadn’t mentioned a specific time to Pepper, and Max wanted to get there early enough to plot out the first race, anyway. I scored a prime parking spot around back, right near the entrance closest to the grandstands.

We bought a program and found seats about midway up and over to the left side, facing forward. The grandstand was more than three-quarters empty. Over an hour to post time—all the tote board showed was the morning line.

I started working on the program, Max watching avidly. I’d taught him to handicap years ago, and he understood all the arcane symbols I used to make notes. But what he was really checking was to see if my scientific method squared with his mystical one. Between gin rummy and casino over the past twenty years, Max was into me for a good quarter-mil. He wasn’t any better at picking horses, but his faith was too pure for him to be deterred by mere experience.

There was nothing I liked in the first. A sorry collection of pacers going for a twenty-five-hundred-dollar purse. You could claim any of them for four grand, and the only sure thing was that there wouldn’t be any takers.

But there was one that drew my eye in the second—a shipper from the Midwest that looked good on paper. I noticed she was a front-runner, with a nice clean stride. No breaks on her program, unusual for a trotter. She always seemed to tie up a bit in the last quarter and get shuffled back, unless the pace was leisurely enough for her to hold on at the end. She was coming out of Sportsman’s Park—a five-eighths-mile track, favoring closers—but Yonkers is a quarter-mile, with a very short run to home.

The mare I liked was in a twenty-K claimer. A couple of the other horses had pretty decent last outs, so I expected her to go off at a nice price. I wasn’t crazy about the post she’d drawn, but, with her early speed, I thought she could grab the rail from the five-hole before the first turn.

I put a big question mark at the top of the first race, then drew a box around the one I liked in the second.

Max made a circling gesture.

I nodded agreement. We’d wheel the Daily Double, putting the five horse in the second race against all the entries in the first. If my horse won the second, we’d have the Double. But even then, it didn’t mean we’d show a profit. The Daily Double wheel was eight bets. At a deuce per, we’d have to win and get a payoff of more than sixteen bucks to come out ahead.

You might think, what kind of Double wouldn’t pay off more than that? But if the crowd liked one of the horses in the first race well enough to send him off real cheap, the chalk-players might be spinning their wheels, too. So we could win and still end up short.

Max knew all this. He held up his hand, for “Wait!” I nodded agreement—we’d see if the money got distributed nice and even on that first race before we made our play.

Max took the program from me and started working on that first race, paying special attention to each horse’s mother’s name.

I spotted Sands a few seconds before he saw me. He had a giant paper cup in one hand; I was pretty sure it wasn’t popcorn.

I stood up, like I was stretching. Sands walked past us, then sat down at an angle, so he could watch us without turning his head.

I strolled over, sat down next to him.

“Who do you like in the first?” I said.

“I see you brought a friend,” he answered.

“He’ll stay where he is, if you want.”

“Is he who I think he is?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard about him for years. Friends of yours, stories get so wild about them, people never seem to know if they’re real or not.”

“Your call,” I said.

“Some of your friends, people don’t even know if they’re dead or not,” Sands said, dropping his voice.

“People don’t know a lot of things,” I said. “But it never seems to stop them from talking about them.”

“Nobody’s doing a lot of talking about her now.”

I knew he meant Wolfe. “Meaning they do know something?” I said.

“You’re too cute for me,” Sands said. “I get enough of that on the job. The way things are today, the smart guys are wearing their vests on backwards. Why don’t you go back to your friend? I’ll let the place fill up a bit before I stop by.”

Max and I each bet a sawbuck on his pick in the first. Or, I should say, we bet twenty bucks together—if we didn’t go partners, it wasn’t any fun for either of us. Max came back from the window with a ten-dollar wheel on the Double, too, meaning we had a hundred invested, total.

By the time they called the pacers for the first race, it was dark enough for the track lights to come on. Max’s horse, Dino’s Diamond, was a ten-year-old gelding who had been racing since he was a kid. He slipped in behind the gate like a journeyman boxer climbing through the ropes. Another tank town, another nickel-and-dime purse—getting paid to be the opponent.

The pace car made its circuit, then pulled in the gate. None of the horses seemed to want the lead—they hit the first turn in a clump. On the backstretch, Max’s horse fitted himself sixth along the rail. “Saving ground,” the track announcer called, but it looked more like phoning it in to me.

The horses came around the second turn Indian-file, Max’s pick still where he started. Two horses came off the rail, one drafting behind the other as they challenged the leader. Max’s horse closed up the gap they left. When the two challengers stayed parked out past the three-quarter pole, the file passed them by, moving them out of contention. At the top of the stretch, the leader was tiring, but none of the others seemed to have the will to make a move.

I felt a sudden stab of pain in my forearm. Max, using his rebar forefinger to tell me what my eyes had just picked up—the lead horse, exhausted, was drifting wide . . . and Dino’s Diamond was charging the inside lane like a downhill freight.

It was photo-close, but Max’s horse got a nose in front at the wire. Max stood up and bowed to the valiant warrior who had found his way home one more time. His flat Mongol face was split in a broad grin.

I spent the next few minutes acknowledging the celestial perfection of Max’s handicapping methods, admitting that we should have wheeled his pick instead of mine—sharing in my brother’s joy.

Dino’s Diamond paid $35.20, making us major winners, no matter what happened in the Double. Max would brag on this one forever, starting with Mama.

It was one of those times; anyone I’d have to explain it to, I wouldn’t want to.

They had just called the trotters for the second race when Sands sat down next to me.

^“There’s three more,” he said, without preamble.

“Three more not in the—?”

“Yeah.”

“Why not?”

“No complaining witnesses.”

“Then how would you know they were cases at all, never mind his?”

“One of them, he was almost caught in the act. But the vic denied it ever happened.”

“A hooker who—?”

“No. Stop asking questions. I can’t hang around here. Just listen. It was on the Lower East Side. A neighbor hears sounds of a struggle. Glass breaking, a scream. She calls it in; she’s too scared to go out and see what’s happening herself, so she turns off all the lights in her apartment, peeks out the window. And there’s the perp, going down the fire escape. She doesn’t get enough for an ID, but it’s our man, no question, right down to the ski mask and the gloves. In fucking July.

“By the time that one went down, everyone knows there’s a serial rapist making the rounds, so the uniforms don’t bother to knock. The door goes right in. And there’s the vic, still tied up, blood coming out of her. Nails on one hand all broken. She must have put up a hell of a fight. Place is ransacked, too.

“But the woman, she says nothing happened. She was playing with the ropes—‘experimenting,’ is what it says in the report—then she fell down and hurt herself. Utter, total bullshit. But she doesn’t budge an inch.

“The uniforms don’t know what to do. Fuck, neither would I—whoever heard of something like this? I mean, sure, people playing sex games, they get carried away, someone gets hurt . . . so they don’t tell the truth about how it happened. Anyone who works ER around here is going to see a few of those every year. But this one, with the witness and all, it was for real, all the way.

“So they call in the detectives. Nothing. They even try a social worker. Blank. Zero. Nada.”

“Christ.”

“The second one, she gets found by her aunt. Comes to pick her up in the morning for church, can you believe it? We get a statement. Same pattern, right down to the mouthpiece.

“Then, a week or so later, out of the blue, the vic calls up, says she doesn’t want to ‘press charges.’ Like it was some bitch-slap incident or something.

“Okay, so the plainclothes guys go to see her, too. A total washout. She’s not talking. Not saying it didn’t happen, just saying she’s not going to cooperate.”

“So they figured she probably knew the perp?” I said.

“That is what they figured. And we were going to put surveillance on her. If she was covering for the guy, or, better yet, blackmailing him, we could end up with a solid ID.”

“What happened?”

“She moved. To fucking Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Lock, stock, and barrel. They tried to get a wiretap going, but the judge laughed at them, said they were a mile short of probable cause. And what was the crime, anyway?”

“Maybe she just wanted out of New York,” I said. “Some people do that, put a lot of distance between themselves and . . . whatever happened to them.”

“I don’t know,” Sands said.

“You said three.”

“Yeah. The first one, who denied anything happened? She turned up, later. Dead.”

“You think it was Wychek?”

“He was already locked up by then,” Sands said. “For the one Wolfe nailed him on. Besides, something else was going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was tortured,” Sands said, voice flat and hard, a shield against his feelings, like the booze. “Somebody worked her over with a stun gun. Or electricity. Had those burn marks all over her . . . in the worst spots.”

“In her own apartment?”

“Nobody knows where it was done. Where they found her was in a building that was getting rehabbed over in Williamsburg. One of the workers spotted her, hanging, when he opened up in the morning. It was in the papers.”

“She was hung?”

“Not to kill her. They did that with a bullet. Two of them, one in each eye.”

“A message.”

“Yeah. Maybe it was for the third one.”

“Huh?”

“Her best friend. Roommate. Wasn’t home when the rape—the one she said never happened—went down. That one—the third one— just plain disappeared. The detectives looked for her as soon as the original vic wouldn’t cooperate. On the books, she’s a missing person.”

“Missing and presumed.”

“Yeah.”

“So the homicide case is still open, too?”

“Yeah.”

“You got names and—?”

“I see you already got a pen,” he said, nodding toward the program.

Max nudged my shoulder, bringing me back from wherever I’d gone. I looked up at the board. The third race was two minutes to post.

Max pointed to the info I’d jotted down, held up three fingers, made a questioning gesture.

“I don’t know,” I told him. I drew a stick figure of a man, surrounded by a ring of swastikas. “But it looks like Wychek’s friends may have started taking care of him earlier than we thought.”

Max hadn’t left my side, so I knew he hadn’t gotten a bet down since the second race. I turned to that page in the program, made a “What happened?” gesture.

He held up the ticket. All the answer I needed. If my horse hadn’t gotten home first, he would have torn it up.

I found a place in the program with some white space showing, handed it to Max. He diagrammed the race for me in increments, drawing it as clear as a video.

My mare had left hard, cranked off a good first quarter, put some real distance on the field without a challenge, and maintained strong fractions until her second time past the clubhouse turn. Then they all came at her, slingshotting around at the top of the stretch. She was fading fast, but still game, staggering home a half-length ahead of the nearest horse. Paid $8.80 to win, anchoring our four-hundred-and-change Double, a personal record.

Max held up his hand, fingers spread, to emphasize that we didn’t just have it, we had it five times!

Neither of us wanted to stay around after that. The minute they get ahead, suckers say they’re “playing with the track’s money.” That’s why they’re called suckers.

^“Anything new?”

“Stone-fucking-wall,” Davidson said. “Cocksuckers must think they’re playing with an amateur.”

“I spoke to Wolfe; she doesn’t seem worried.”

“I wouldn’t play poker with her, I was you.”

“Yeah, I know. So you’re saying . . . ?”

“I’m saying that somebody’s cooking up something. I don’t give an obese rodent’s rump what that is, so long as it isn’t my client on the burner.”

“I’m still with it,” I promised.

“You maybe got something?”

“Maybe. A long maybe.”

“Want to tell me?”

“I’m your investigator,” I said, “not your client.”

^“No, no, no,” Michelle said, hands on hips. “You cannot wear that same jacket.”

“But you said it would be like a—”

“Never mind what I said. This is different.”

“How?”

“Stop being such a dolt, Burke! We already went over this. That girl wants something. And if I’m right, we have to go for it.”

“I don’t see why I can’t wear the—”

“She’s a money-girl, right?”

“I . . . No, I don’t think so. Everything we have about her background says middle-class.”

“Give me strength,” Michelle muttered. “Sweetheart,” she said, her voice a mockery of patience, “I don’t mean a from-money girl, like a trust-funder. I mean she works with money. That’s her thing.”

“So?”

“So I’m guessing she wants to see you know how to make some. Or you already have.”

“Maybe she just wants to go slumming.”

“That could be,” Michelle admitted. “But any woman who’s willing to buy a man a cell phone and let him use her credit card can get all the downmarket action she wants. We play it like it’s something else,” she said, firmly.

“What do I have to buy this goddamned time?”

“You don’t have to buy anything,” she said, triumphantly. “Remember that beautiful Bally jacket I got you when we were working that movie scam?”

“How could I forget? It cost—”

“Well, maybe now you see the value of the classics,” she said. “You wear that number over a nice shirt with a plain tie. . . .”

“A tie now?”

“She said dinner, am I right?”

“Yeah. But she said ‘dinner’ that first time, and you said—”

“Oh, do shut up,” she said, closing the subject.

That night, I motored up Third Avenue, taking my time—as if I had any choice, at that hour. Still, I was in place twenty minutes before I was to meet Laura. The Plymouth isn’t the kind of car any cop lets sit at the curb, so I circled the block, budgeting ten minutes for each pass.

I wasn’t far off. At 6:55, she was already standing at the curb, wearing a fuchsia dress. As I pulled over, I could see her shoes matched it.

“I hope I didn’t keep you waiting,” I said, out the window.

“Oh!” she said, as if startled. But she trotted around to the passenger door and let herself in.

“You look—” I said, deliberately cutting myself off, like I’d said too much.

“What?” she said, flashing a smile. Her lipstick was only minutes old.

“I was going to say ‘great,’ I guess. But I didn’t want you to think I was—”

“What? Being polite?”

“No, no. Being . . . unprofessional.”

“Hmmmm . . .” she said.

“Where to?” I asked.

“The Midtown Tunnel,” she said. “I’ll guide you once we get out.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, touching two fingers to my forehead.

^“This is quite an . . . unusual car,” she said, as we waited in line at the tunnel entrance.

“It’s one of my hobbies,” I said. “I restore muscle cars from the Fifties and Sixties. This is an original Plymouth Roadrunner.”

“Roadrunner, like in the cartoon?”

I “meep-meeped” the horn for her. She clapped in delight.

“Oh, that’s exactly it. Are these . . . cars valuable?”

“Well, it’s not a Bugatti or a Duesenberg,” I said. “This one was mass-produced, and not exactly to the highest standards. But clean survivors are pretty rare now. When I get it all done, it should be worth, oh, thirty-five thousand.”

“And how much will all that cost you?” she said, looking over the raggedy dashboard out to the gray-primered hood.

“Depends on how much of the work I do myself,” I said. “Like, see this steering wheel? It’s an original Tuff model,” I bragged. “Pretty hard to find.”

I tapped the thick-rimmed, smaller-than-stock wheel, with its center horn button and three brushed-aluminum “holed” spokes. It wasn’t exactly a bolt-in—the turn-signal lever had to be shortened, so I wouldn’t risk snagging my left leg when I got out—but the look was still semi-original.

“Were they fast?” she asked, rolling up her window as we entered the tunnel. “When they were new, I mean.”

“The Hemi Roadrunner was one of the legitimate kings of the street, back in its glory days,” I said, not mentioning that the reincarnation I was driving wasn’t a Hemi. Or that the hogged-out wedge motor in mine would have inhaled anything that was prowling the boulevards back then.

“Didn’t they come with air conditioning?” she said, reaching in her pocketbook for a tissue.

“Not the serious ones,” I told her. “Those were stripped to the bone.”

“That doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

“Different people, different pleasures,” I said.

“Did you want a car just like this when you were a kid?” she asked, as we exited the tunnel and got in line for the toll booths.

“I wanted a lot of things when I was a kid,” I said, wishing I could pull back the ice in my voice as soon as I spoke.

“Oh! I didn’t mean to . . . I’ve just noticed that some of the men I know, they collect all kinds of things they wanted when they were young. One of the guys I work with, he’s got every baseball card ever made, I bet.”

“Well, I say it’s my hobby, but this is the only car I have,” I said, chuckling to muffle what she had triggered with her innocent question. “And I’ve had it a long time, like a project that never gets completed.”

“Are you going to make it perfect?”

“Perfect?”

“Like, what’s the word I’m looking for . . . concours? I have clients who fix up old cars so they’re exactly like they were brand-new. Then they have shows for them.”

“No,” I laughed. “I’m going to make it perfect, all right. But perfect for me, not for anyone else. Besides, I don’t see a piece of Detroit iron like this making the grade in that company.”

We took an E-ZPass lane, letting the scanner read the box I had fastened to the windshield instead of having to pay the toll in cash. Very efficient system. Speeds the traffic flow. And keeps very good records. I have “spares” I can use when I want to go certain places to do certain things, but tonight wasn’t anything I cared if the government knew about.

“The LIE’s a pain at this hour,” she said. “But it’s still the fastest . . .”

“I’m in no hurry,” I said.

“It must be frustrating.”

“What?”

“Having such a fast car, and not being able to go fast.”

“Not all the time, no. But that’s okay. Sometimes, knowing you can do something is pretty much as good as doing it.”

“That’s how I feel,” she said. “About my work. But that’s a mistake I can’t make too often.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“In my job, being very good at something, even being brilliant at it, doesn’t count. Only results do. If you allow yourself to just, I don’t know, luxuriate in your abilities, like a bubble bath with soft music and candles, you can forget that the world—my world, anyway—isn’t about strategy, it’s about success.”

“I thought those were the same thing.”

“No,” she said, turning in her seat so her whole body was facing me, despite the seatbelt. “Strategy is what I love. The game of it. But if I come up with a perfect strategy to, say, put a deal together, and I don’t make the deal, my bonus is going to be light that year.”

“I think I know what you mean.” I goosed the throttle to switch lanes ahead of an overfilled minivan. “Kind of like my book, isn’t it?” I said.

“Strategy?”

“Not exactly. I mean, I already sold it. The book, that is. I’m talking about my idea for it. I know it’s perfect. But if I can’t bring it off, the book will still happen, but it won’t be as good as if—”

“That’s one idea,” she said. “I was talking more about . . . models.”

“Models?”

“Ways of doing things. Ones you develop over time, testing and retesting . . .”

“Like a system for picking winners at the racetrack?”

“A little more sophisticated than that, I hope,” she said, chuckling. “And a little more successful, too. None of those ‘systems’ really work, do they?”

“I never heard of one that did,” I told her, pure truth.

“Here we go,” she said. “You know the Maurice Avenue switch-off?”

“Sure,” I said. “I once worked as a cab driver. To get perspective for a piece I was doing.”

“Okay, now just follow it around until we get to Sixty-first.”

“That’s Maspeth, right?”

“Yes, it is. Not many people from the City know that.”

“That’s one of the things about having a car,” I said. “You go places where the subway doesn’t.”

“I have a car, too, remember? Turn . . . there! Yes. Now just go along until I tell you to turn again.”

“You like that Audi?” I asked her.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Whoever did the interior-design work on it was a genius.”

“Is it pretty quick?”

“It has a turbocharger,” she said, almost smugly. “I got a ticket when I went upstate for a ski weekend once. The officer said he clocked me at a hundred and ten. But he only wrote me up for eighty-five.”

“If it had been me, he would have written me up for a hundred twenty.”

“Because your car is so fast, you mean?”

“No. Because I’m about the polar opposite of a pretty girl.”

“That’s cynical,” she said, grinning to show me she didn’t really think so.

I followed her directions for a few minutes, watching the densely packed little houses give way to flatland.

“There!” she said.

“Where? That’s not a restaurant. It looks like—”

“An old factory?” she said, pleased with herself. “That’s what it was, once. Now it’s condos. And one of them is mine.”

“Okay, I get it. You want to change out of your work clothes before we—?”

“I do want to change,” she said. “But I also want to cook. Okay?”

“Beautiful,” I said.

^“What did this place use to make?” I asked her, following her directions to drive around to the back.

“Some kind of containers, I think. Metal. As I understand, the conversion to plastic would have been too expensive. And the work wasn’t there anymore, anyway.”

“This is pretty neat,” I said, looking at a vertical steel-barred fence with an inset gate.

“Use this,” she said, handing me a credit-card-sized piece of plastic.

I inserted the card in the slot, and the gate swung open. We were facing a four-story building that looked like poured concrete, painted the color of cigarette smoke. Laura reached in her purse, pulled out a remote garage-door opener. She pressed the button; a triple-wide steel door rolled up soundlessly as the gate closed behind us.

Inside, there were individual spaces for parking, enough for thirty or so cars.

“Use number seven,” she said. “It’s mine.”

I backed the Plymouth in carefully—the car in stall number six was her silver Audi.

“That’s slick,” I said. “You own the space on the other side of it, too?”

“Actually, I do. But I don’t just own the parking spaces; they come with the units upstairs. So I have six slots; you get two with each apartment.”

“You own three apartments?” I asked, cutting the ignition with the car in gear so the engine wouldn’t diesel on me—big-block Mopars will do that sometimes.

“Me and the bank,” she said, flashing a quick grin.

We got out, me extra-carefully, so that the Plymouth’s door wouldn’t ding her Audi.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said, standing by the front fender. “There’s a lot of space between the slots. This used to be the loading bay for the factory. Even with two slots per unit, we have a ton of space left over. See that?” she said, pointing to a chain-linked enclosure to my right.

“Yeah.”

“That’s for storage. Every unit-holder gets a certain amount of space in there, too. You supply your own lock.”

“Damn! Something like that in Manhattan would set you back a—”

“If you think this is a bargain, wait till you see upstairs,” she said.

^“There’s an elevator,” she said. “But I always walk. Sometimes, it’s the only exercise I get all day. Do you mind?”

Without waiting for an answer, she unlocked the stairway door and started up ahead of me. Halfway up the first flight, I realized Michelle had read Laura Reinhardt better secondhand than I had in person; if she was suffering from secretarial spread, I couldn’t see a hint of it.

Her unit was on the top floor. Two locks, deadbolt and doorknob. She stepped inside, flicked on a light, said, “Well?”

The apartment opened directly into a broad expanse of hardwood floor, bleached so deeply it was almost white. The side wall was exposed brick, beautifully repointed. At the end of the room was a corner-to-corner set of pale-pink drapes. She hit a switch and the drapes parted, revealing a floor-to-ceiling glass wall.

“Jesus!” I said.

I wasn’t acting. The wall opposite the exposed brick was a complex arrangement of brass piping, holding what looked like teak shelves. Hardcover books with somber jackets alternated with framed photographs and an assortment of small objects I couldn’t make out from where I was standing. Modernistic furniture was scattered about as if at random, but it looked so . . . tailored that I figured it for a professional’s touch.

“Come on,” she said, “I’ll give you the quick tour.”

I followed her into a kitchen that I knew the average yuppie would commit several felonies for. A stainless-steel refrigerator-freezer lorded it over a granite-block island and a black porcelain double sink. The cabinets looked like they had been fashioned from the same teak as the bookshelves. The stove didn’t appear to have any burners on it. A chrome table sat off to one side, with eight matching chairs. An eat-in kitchen, big enough to hold Thanksgiving dinner.

Before I could ask about that, she was on the move again.

“My office,” she said, pointing to a spacious room with a window facing the same direction as the one in the living room. It looked like high-tech heaven, mostly in carbon-fiber black. A flat-screen computer monitor; a multi-line phone with both wired and cordless handsets; one of those fax-photocopier-scanner things. Under a desk with a black marble top, a large paper-shredder—my money was on cross-cut.

“There’s more,” she said, pulling me by the hand.

We passed a blue-tiled bathroom, a bedroom—“It’s really a guest room,” she said—and then came to a room dominated by a big-screen TV and a single white leather recliner. “If I were a man, I’d probably claim this was a den,” she chuckled.

The master bedroom was a good three hundred square feet, with plenty of room for the queen-sized bed with a Mondrian-pattern headboard, and a garage-sized closet. The attached bath had a two-person Jacuzzi, and it didn’t cramp the area. One wall was a triptych of mirrors.

“How big do you think the whole thing is?” she asked, walking back toward the living room.

“Twenty-five hundred?” I guessed.

“Closer to thirty-five,” she said. “See what I mean about a bargain?”

“I guess that depends on what you paid. But I can’t imagine anything like this going for less than—”

“Right around four hundred,” she said.

“About the going rate for a decent two-bedroom on the Upper West Side.”

“You wish,” she said. “For that kind of money, you’re buying a rehab project.”

“Well, this one sure didn’t come the way it is now.”

“Oh, that’s true,” she said, perching confidently on one of the modern chairs. “But I didn’t have to do structural stuff. It wasn’t really all that expensive. And it’s a good investment.”

“That I can believe,” I said, sitting down myself.

“I’m going to go change,” she said, getting to her feet. “Take a look around, you’ll see what I mean.”

I listened to her heels click on the hardwood floors. Couldn’t pick up the sound of a door closing anywhere, but that didn’t tell me anything—the walls were thick, and the bedroom was a couple of sound-muffling turns away.

She’s gone from arm’s-length to “make yourself at home” pretty damn quick, I thought. But there were too many possibilities, dice tumbling in my head.

I stood up, made a slow circuit of the living room. In one corner, I found a white pillar so smoothly mounted it looked as if it had grown from the floor. On its base, a black-glazed pot sat in a tray of gray pebbles, still gleaming from its last watering.

Inside the pot was a bonsai tree. Magnificently sculptured, thick-trunked, with a complex branch formation . . . but no fruit, and only the occasional leaf. Dangling from the branches were dozens of tiny glass bottles: some clear, the others in shades of green, blue, red, and brown. Each bottle had markings of some kind—pieces of labels, smears of paint, logos, brand names.

I’d seen bottle trees before. In a lush back courtyard of a palatial mansion in New Orleans, and a dirt patch that passed for the front yard of a shotgun shack in Mississippi. But a miniature one? In the middle of a New York living room?

I fanned my hand rapidly in front of the branches, listening hard. The tinkle of the glass was so faint I couldn’t be sure I actually heard it.

“Like my tree?”

She was standing behind me, not quite close enough to touch. Wearing a tangerine kimono that came to mid-thigh. Her feet were bare, and her dark hair glistened, as if she had just showered.

“It’s . . . exquisite,” I said.

“I’ll bet I’ve been working on it longer than you have on that car of yours,” she said.

“Working on it? You mean, keeping it—?”

“No. I made it. I bought the bonsai, but you have to prune them to get the exact shape you want. It’s constant work. The bottles . . . I took a course in glass blowing, and I figured out how to do the rest.”

“How did you get them all marked?”

“It’s just a form of miniature,” she said. “Painting, I mean.”

“Another course you took?”

“Actually, it’s something I was always good at it. In school, sometimes I’d draw whole pictures no bigger than my fingernail. With a Rapidograph. For some projects, the most important thing is to use the right tool.”

“Did you want to be an artist? Wait, scratch that. You are an artist. I meant, did you want to make it a career?”

“Oh, never,” she said. “It was always just for me. From the beginning. Once I make something, with my own hands, I can never let go of it. I’ve always been that way. That’s the hardest part of what I do. I make deals, I put together packages, I devise strategies . . . but I can’t keep them. I have to let go of them. Otherwise, they’re worthless.”

“I never thought of it like that,” I said. “I guess because I’m no artist. I know some people write books just to be writing them. Because they need to, I guess. For me, that would be the waste. If nobody ever gets to read it . . .”

“Ah,” she said. “Your book.”

“I was just—”

“You like me, don’t you? Pardon my bluntness, it’s just the way I am. The way I have to be, in my business.”

“Yeah. I do like you.”

“So this is . . . confusing for you, yes? You want information from me. For your book. And, like you said, it’s not professional to, I don’t know what, get involved with a . . . Oh, that’s right, you said I wouldn’t be a source. Whatever you said I was, it wouldn’t be . . .”

I took a step toward her, put my hands on her shoulders. I’m not sure how the kimono came off.

She was slim from the waist up, with small round breasts set far apart, but her hips were heavy enough to be from a different woman. Her thighs touched at their midpoint, and her calves were rounded, without a trace of definition, tapering radically to small ankles and feet.

“You don’t smell like cigarettes,” she said, her face in my neck. “I wish I knew how you did that. No matter how many showers I take, or what perfume I use, I always—”

I parted her thighs. She was more moist than wet, tight when I entered.

The bed was too soft. I stuffed a pillow under her bottom, reached down, and lifted her legs to my shoulders.

“I hope you don’t think—” she said, then cut herself off as she let go, shuddering deep enough to make me come along with her.

^“I do that sometimes,” she said, later. She was lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, smoking. “Talk too much. When I’m nervous. It only happens in . . . social situations, I guess you’d call them. When I’m at work, I guard my words like they were my life savings.”

“Everybody has pressure-release valves,” I said. “They’re in different places for different people.”

“Where’s yours?” she said.

I put my thumb at the top of her buttocks, ran it gently all the way down the cleft until I was back in her sweet spot. “Right there,” I said.

“That’s a good place.”

“It’s not a place,” I said. “It’s a person.”

“I thought they all looked alike in the dark,” she said, teasingly.

“Looking isn’t what does it for me,” I said, moving my thumb inside her.

She rolled away from me, then tentatively put one leg over. “Do you mind?”

For an answer, I shifted my weight, so she was straddling me.

She made a little noise in her throat.

“Sit up,” I told her.

She did it. “Oh!” she said, bouncing a little.

^“You’re not going to take a shower, are you?” she said, much later.

“I can use the bathroom in the other—”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I just . . . I just like how you smell. Like you smell now. You can take one before you go, okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

^“Cooking is not one of my hobbies,” she said, later, standing in her ultra-kitchen. “And I never took a course.”

“You still want to go out? There’s a diner on Queens Boulevard that never closes. It’s not the Four Seasons, but it’s got a fifty-page menu—got to have something you’d like.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“I already feel like a guy who expected a Happy Meal and got filet mignon,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” she said, smiling. “And you already figured out we’re not going to get any talking done here, right?”

^“I’ll drive,” she said, electronically unlocking her car as we walked toward the stalls.

“Is there anything under here?” I asked, pointing at the concrete floor.

“Oh, there’s a basement of some kind. For the . . . power plant, I think they called it. The boiler, things like that. The utility people go down there to read the meters—they’re separate for each unit—and the phones lines are all down there, too.”

“I figured they had to be somewhere,” I said. “And running power lines up the side of a building like this wouldn’t be too stylish.”

“Not at all,” she agreed, climbing behind the wheel. She turned the key and flicked the lever into reverse without waiting for the engine to settle down—there was a distinct clunk as the transmission engaged.

She drove out of the garage, piloting the car with more familiarity than skill.

“Queens Boulevard, you said, right? I think I know the one you mean. On the south side?”

“Yep.”

“We’re not urban pioneers, you know,” she said.

“I don’t know what you—”

“Where I live. It’s not like it’s a depressed neighborhood. It’s solid, middle-class. A good, stable population. Low crime rate. Our building may be upscale for the area now, but that won’t be forever. It’s not like those people rehabbing brownstones across a Hundred and Tenth Street, in Manhattan.”

“And you’re not displacing anyone, converting a factory,” I said.

“That’s right. The people around us, they were thrilled when they heard what was going on. Instead of an abandoned building where kids can get into trouble, or that the homeless could turn into a squat, they get something that actually improves their property values. Adds to the tax base, too.”

Why are you telling me this? I thought, but just nodded as if I gave a damn.

She drove the Audi like an amateur, going too fast between lights so that she ended up stopping for all of them. Or maybe she mostly used the car for those upstate trips she had talked about, wasn’t used to city driving.

“There it is,” I said, “just up ahead.”

She made the left, swung into the parking lot. It was relatively empty—well past dinner, and too early for the night owls.

We walked inside, followed a young woman in a pale green dress toward the back.

“Would you prefer a booth or a table?”

“A booth, please,” I said. “As private as possible.”

“You can take that one there,” she said, pointing. “But this place can fill up just like that,” snapping her fingers.

“I know it can,” I said, slipping her a ten. “And if we end up surrounded, I know it won’t be your fault.”

Laura ordered a Greek salad and a glass of red wine. I made do with a plate of chopped liver, potato salad, and coleslaw, French fries on the side. Not Delancey Street quality, but decent enough. And I was hungry.

“What good would it do him?” she said, out of the blue.

“Your brother?”

“Yes. I did a little . . . well, ‘research’ would be too strong a word. Just a little looking around in the . . . genre, I guess you’d call it. The books I found, they’re either about how an innocent man was finally freed, or they’re an attempt to get him freed. Don’t you think that’s accurate?”

“Pretty much,” I conceded.

“Well, except for the people still in prison—I mean, anyone could see what good a book would do them—the other ones, the people who were the . . . stars, I guess you’d call them, didn’t they get money, too?”

“I guess in some cases they did. Like when you see their names as ‘co-writers,’ you can probably bet on it. Some, maybe not—they might have just wanted to get their stories told.”

“But they never have control, do they?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, I read about one man, Jeffrey MacDonald, I think his name was. He was accused of murdering his wife and children. Didn’t he . . . cooperate with a journalist? And it backfired on him?”

“MacDonald played his own hand,” I said. “And, anyway, there’s no similarity. Your brother’s already free. And he’s not charged with any crimes. The book you’re talking about, it was the investigation of a crime. My book is an investigation of the system.”

“But you said yourself, John is the centerpiece.”

“I said I’d like him to be.”

“All right, you’d like him to be. But it comes down to the same question.”

“What’s in it for him?”

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t mean to sound so cold-blooded. This doesn’t have—doesn’t have to have—anything to do with you and me. But I have to view all deals the same way. The interests of the parties.”

“If it doesn’t have anything to do with you and me, maybe we should just split it up,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she said, spots of color in her cheeks.

“You’re not your brother’s . . . agent, I guess is the word I’m looking for. Let’s put them all face-up, okay?

“One, I would rather have simply approached your brother, made my pitch, and either started working with him, incorporating him into my project, or moved on. Quick and easy, yes or no.

“But, in his current situation, he’s not only less accessible—I don’t have a clue where he even is, never mind how to reach him—he’s more attractive. Because of the whole prosecutor-on-trial angle.

“Two, I . . . like you. I guess that’s obvious. I don’t want one thing to screw up the other. I don’t want to put you in a position of making choices you shouldn’t have to make.”

“You mean . . . ? I don’t know what you mean.”

“I want to meet your brother,” I said. “Talk to him. And leave you out of it. And, regardless of how that works out, I want to keep seeing you.”

“Oh.”

I didn’t say anything, just went back to my food. At least the Dr. Brown’s cream soda was the same as you could buy on Second Avenue.

“You wouldn’t still want my . . . recollections?” she asked. “The family history, things like that?”

“Sure I would,” I said. “The truth is, your brother’s story—the factual part of his story—pretty much tells itself. There’s court documents—indictments, trial transcripts, appeals—all over the place. I was looking for more. Deep background. What I told you was one hundred percent true. The impact on the family is a microcosm of the impact on all society.

“It wasn’t until we . . . it wasn’t until I realized I had feelings for you that I decided I didn’t want to risk one thing for the other.”

“We went to bed,” she said, scanning my face. “I don’t know a lot about men, but I know enough to know that doesn’t take a lot of ‘feelings’ on their part.”

“I didn’t expect it to happen,” I said. “Any of it. Sure, you’re a gorgeous girl, and I’m not pretending I wouldn’t want to get next to you even if I had never spent ten minutes talking to you. You don’t know a lot about men; I don’t know a lot about women. But I know some things. I know you’re not the kind of girl who makes love to a man unless you’ve got feelings of your own.”

“You know that . . . how?”

“I couldn’t tell you if you gave me a shot of truth serum,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not right. It’s just something I . . . sense, maybe. I don’t know.”

She toyed with her salad, not looking up.

“Tell me I’m wrong, and that’ll do it,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me you don’t have feelings for me, and we’ll drop the whole thing.”

“You’re confusing me.”

“Look at me, Laura. You don’t have to be a map reader to know I’ve been around for a while. I’m not too old to play, but I’m too old not to play for keeps. If you just like sex, and figured I might be fun, I hope I didn’t disappoint you. But it would sure disappoint me.”

“And if I said that . . . that I was just horny?”

“No hard feelings,” I said. “You’re a big girl, you get to make your own decisions.”

“You’d still want to do the book? With my brother, I mean?”

“Sure.”

“Just . . . what, then?”

“Just nothing. I thought, if I told you I could just meet your brother, leave you out of it, maybe you and I, we could try being together, see how it worked.”

She pushed her plate away from her, said, “You can’t meet my brother. I don’t even know where he is. I hear from him, once in a while. But they’re keeping him safe. Until the trial, anyway.”

“I understand.”

“I wish you could smoke here,” she said.

“I can fix that,” I said, catching the attention of our waitress with a check-signing gesture.

She made a sound of pleasure, exhaling a stream of smoke into the warm, soft night, leaning against the side of her Audi in the parking lot.

“I like to know where everything is before I do anything,” she said. “Going to bed with you—taking you to bed—that’s not me, you’re right. But I did it before I thought about it. And now you’re making me think about it.”

“I don’t know money talk,” I said. “But isn’t there some terminology you guys use for long-term investments?”

“Lots of them. Why?”

“That’s what I’m looking for.”

“With your book?”

“Stop dancing around, Laura. You don’t need to do that. I’m not pressuring you. That’s why I said what I did, to take the pressure off.”

“I . . . checked you out,” she said, quietly, looking down.

“And?”

“And . . . are you married?”

“Divorced,” I said.

“Do you have children?”

How deep did she look? I knew Hauser kept his private life rigidly segregated from his work, but, still . . .

I gambled. “No,” I told her. “I had a vasectomy, in fact.”

“You don’t like kids?”

“I don’t dislike them. Just never wanted any.”

“Me neither,” she said. “I wouldn’t have invited you to my house if I didn’t know you were a legitimate person. Some of those books, the ones I read after we first talked, they were just . . . terrifying. Like . . . I don’t know, pornography.”

I shifted my body slightly, so my chest was against her shoulder.

“I don’t mean that I think there’s anything wrong with . . . sex,” she said, hastily. “That isn’t what I meant by pornography. Those books—are they all about sex murderers or rapists?”

“I guess they could seem like that, especially if you were looking at the paperback originals. The real pros, though, they’re journalists, and crime happens to be the topic of a particular book. Look at Jack Olsen. He was the dean of so-called true-crime writing, and he wrote about sex killers, sure. But he also wrote about Gypsy con games. And about an innocent man spending most of his life in prison.”

“Oh. Is that where you—?”

“I think so,” I said, as if I was considering the idea for the first time. “I met Jack Olsen once,” I told her. “He was a great truth-seeker. Any reporter would want to follow in his footsteps.”

She turned to face me. “So what happens now?”

“You make some decisions,” I said. “In order of importance: Do you want to give me a chance with you? Do you want to talk to me about the impact the wrongful imprisonment of a loved one has on a family? Do you want to ask your brother if he’d be interested in doing an interview?”

“But I—”

“You don’t have to decide any of it tonight, Laura,” I said, holding her eyes in the reflected glow of the diner’s windows.

It was almost one in the morning when we pulled into her garage. She killed the engine. Turned to look at me. “I want you to come back up with me,” she said.

“Because you decided . . . ?”

“On all of it, yes.”

She leaned over, kissed me under my bad eye.

“Okay?” she said.

^“You have a lot of scars,” she whispered, later.

“I’ve had a lot of surgery,” I said. “Different things.”

“Where did the doctor who did this one get his license, in a school for the blind?” she said, licking the chopped-off top of my right ear.

“Sometimes, it’s not neatness that counts.”

“What, then?”

“Speed.”

“Oh. Were you wounded?”

“Yeah.”

“In Vietnam?”

“No. Africa.”

“Africa? You were a . . . like a mercenary?”

“No,” I said. “I was there covering a story.”

“What story?” she asked.

So I told her a story. About the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda, the rape of the Congo, the “blood diamonds” of Sierra Leone, and how they got that name.

Everything I told her was true, except for the part about me being there. I filled in the blanks—right down to how it feels to get malaria—from my Biafra days. But I didn’t say a word about those experiences. J. P. Hauser wouldn’t have been old enough to have them.

“You’ve really led a life,” she said.

“Not me, personally,” I told her. “Reporters aren’t supposed to lead lives, they’re supposed to lead people to lives . . . other people’s lives. I didn’t have to be in Africa. The story wasn’t me, it was those people who did have to be there, see?”

“Yes. But, still, it must be exciting. There’s a woman I watch on CNN all the time. It seems, every time something major happens, anywhere in the world, she’s there. You can’t tell me that’s not . . . I don’t know, glamorous.”

“I don’t have the face for TV,” I said.

“No, you don’t,” she agreed. “But at least you could be in the profession you wanted.”

“Are you saying you couldn’t?”

“You know why there’s such a shortage of nurses and teachers now?” she said.

“No,” I admitted. “I guess I haven’t thought about it.”

“It’s because, years ago, those were about the only real opportunities for an educated woman. Maybe there were others, like being a social worker, but all in the ‘helping’ professions. When things started to change, started to open up, a lot of women took other roads.”

“And you’re one of the them, right?”

“Yes. I didn’t get an M.B.A. to teach home economics. It wasn’t just the money—although that was a factor—it’s the . . . freedom, I guess.”

“I thought money was tightly regulated. I mean, with the SEC and all. . . .”

“You’re talking about interest rates, and things like that,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if the government regulates money, so long as it doesn’t regulate making money. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m saying is, if you get good enough at putting together deals, you get to call the shots. Be your own boss. I don’t mean self-employed; I mean a real boss. With people under you.

“There’s women who manage major mutual funds now, head up corporations, all kinds of opportunities. But what I want isn’t anything like that.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to put things together,” she said. “Not working for anyone, working for me. I want to sit back and analyze situations. Then I’d approach all the different parties with a proposal to solve their problems—by using what they already have but don’t understand.”

“Like what? What could they have and not understand, for example?”

“Capabilities in concert,” she said, licking the words like they were rich cream. “Sometimes, assets and liabilities of one company fit those of another one—like a jigsaw puzzle. And if you look at them from an objective distance, you can see how, if they did things together, they could both benefit.”

“You mean, like a merger?”

“Like that, but not exactly that,” she said. “Mergers are usually about controlling markets. Or a company looking to expand. I want to specialize in rescue operations. Like leveraged buyouts and third-party ventures from unrealized asset pools and—”

“You know you’ve already lost me, don’t you?” I said.

“I guess,” she giggled. “Don’t mind me. I get so . . . enthusiastic sometimes. I don’t show that side of me at work. They expect women to be more emotional than men. Women in my profession, they have to come across as . . . well, not cold, exactly. Objective, I guess. That’s the right word.”

“That’s why you dress the way you do? For work, I mean.”

“What’s wrong with the way I dress?”

“Wrong? Nothing. It’s very, uh, tasteful. I just meant, you couldn’t walk in there in a micro-skirt and fishnet stockings and spike heels, right?”

“I don’t guess,” she said, chuckling. “Why? Do you like those kind of outfits?”

“On some girls.”

“What kind of girls?”

“Girls who can bring it off.”

“And you think I could?”

“Guaranteed.”

“You’re an angel,” she said. “But I know my flaws. It’s part of . . . objectivity. Looking at things as they really are. My legs aren’t thin enough to show off.”

“You’re nuts,” I told her. “They’re . . . flashy.”

“Stop it!”

“I especially like these,” I said, running the back of my fingernails down her thighs.

“I’m fat there,” she said, reaching over to light another cigarette.

“That’s a class thing.”

“What?”

“It’s not . . . objective,” I said, using her language. “Middle-class men have a different image of what a good-looking woman is than working-class men have. And girls pick up on that, real early. Maybe even from their parents.”

“You really think that social class determines what’s physically attractive?” she asked, sounding truly interested.

“Not a doubt in my mind,” I told her. “I’ve been all over, and it never seems to fail. Marketing plays a role, too. Women who were all the rage decades ago would be dismissed as overweight today.”

“Like who?”

“Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page, Barbara Eden . . .”

“You’re quite the connoisseur, are you?”

“Just an observant reporter.”

“Uh-huh. And what social class do you come from?”

“My family didn’t have much money when I was small,” I told her, weaving the lie. “My dad had to work like an animal. But later he became pretty successful. Good enough to get us a nice home, send me to college. So I guess I ended up middle-class,” I said, then switched to the truth, “but my roots, my earliest experiences and conditioning, that’s what set my standards.”

“And you like what you see?”

“I’d like it even better if . . .” I said, turning her over onto her stomach.

^“I told you I was no cook,” she said the next morning, offering me a choice of half a dozen different cold cereals, none of which I’d ever heard of. “There’s plenty of juice, though.”

“We could go out,” I offered.

“If you’re not starving, could we do that later?”

“Sure.”

“What do you want to know?” she said suddenly.

“About . . . ?”

“For your book.”

“Oh. All right, just sit there, I’ll get my notebook.”

My cell phone made its sound.

“Excuse me,” I said. “This could be important.”

I pulled the phone loose, opened it up, said, “Hauser.”

“We’ve got her.” Pepper’s voice.

“Really? Can you be more specific?”

“Not alone, huh, chief?”

“Not even close.”

“The missing woman.”

“The friend of the—?”

“No. The one who went to Iowa.”

“Okay. When you say ‘got’ . . . ?”

“Address, current employment, license number . . . Nobody’s approached her. Yet. But we figured we’d go along with you on this one.”

“Why is that?”

“Mick’s from around there,” she said. “He might be able to help you with the directions.”

“Okay,” I said, not believing a word.

“When can we book it for?”

“I can’t do anything until Monday,” I told her.

“Call me tomorrow,” Pepper told me. And hung up.

“Lucky that didn’t ring last night,” Laura said, as I returned to the table in the kitchen with my notebook.

“Oh, I turned it off,” I lied. “I didn’t want anything to . . . disturb us. I turned it back on while you were in the shower, earlier.”

“That was sweet of you.”

I ducked my head, busied myself with lining up a trio of felt-tipped pens.

“Was John a typical big brother?” I asked when I looked up.

“What do you mean, typical?”

“Well, did he resent you tagging along when he went places, stuff like that?”

“I never went anyplace with him.”

“Yes, I guess that makes sense. Too much difference in your ages. Well, what about—?”

“How far apart do you think we were?” she said, tilting up her chin.

“Well, I know your brother’s age, from the court records. He was born in 1964, so he’d be almost forty now. You’re, what, thirty? Ten years, between kids, that’s a million miles.”

“I’m only four years younger than him,” she said. “I’m going to be thirty-six.”

I made a noise in my throat.

“What?” she said, quickly.

“I . . . just thought you were a lot younger. I only made it thirty, when I guessed, because I thought you might be insulted if I thought you were too young to have the kind of job you do. Oh, hell, I don’t know. I’m not exactly an expert at dealing with women.”

“You seemed to know your way around last night,” she said, smiling.

“You’re confusing skill with motivation,” I said.

She blushed prettily. Opened her mouth, then snapped it shut, as if biting off whatever she was going to say.

“All right,” I said, “let’s try it another way. Was John very protective of you?”

“Like how?”

“I don’t know. Like giving your boyfriends the third degree when they came to the house.”

“No,” she said. “He was never protective.”

“You weren’t close?”

“Not at all.”

“Each had your own lives, huh?”

“Yes. We even went to different schools.”

“Parochial school?” I guessed.

“I did. He didn’t,” she said.

Her answers were getting shorter, more clipped. I shifted gears, asked, “How did your family react when he was first arrested?”

“My mother had been dead for years,” she said. “So she never knew about any of it. And my father had already retired, moved to the Sun Belt. I don’t know if my brother told him what was going on at the time. Maybe he didn’t—my father’s got a bad heart.”

“So that left you.”

“Not really,” she said. “I was just starting to make headway in my job, trying to put enough money together to risk a few little moves of my own. Working eighteen-hour days, sometimes. I was frazzled, a real wreck. And, to be truthful, I never took it seriously.”

“Him being charged with rape?” I asked, allowing just a trace of disbelief into my voice.

“I thought it was some kind of mistake,” she said. “I was so sure I’d get a call from him saying they realized they had the wrong man.”

“Did you go to the trial?”

“I was supposed to,” she said. “I even arranged for some time off. But I got the dates wrong. By the time I showed up, the jury was already out.”

“You were in the courtroom when they came in with the verdict?”

“Yes. It was . . . it was about what you’d expect. A shock.”

“Did they let you speak to him before they took him away?”

“I was too stunned to even move,” she said. “It was like, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, he was gone.”

“Did you visit him in prison?”

“No. John wrote and asked me not to. He said the visiting conditions were disgusting. The guards were very abusive to women. He didn’t want me there. Besides, he expected to be released any day.”

“He never lost faith?”

“Never once. But, with John, it isn’t ‘faith,’ exactly. It’s more like . . . certainty.”

“You really don’t know much about the case itself, then?” I asked, walking the tightrope.

“Well, I know John didn’t do what he was accused of. What more is there?” she asked, blue eyes on mine.

“The . . . impact thing, remember? Are you saying that your brother’s faith—his certainty—that he’d be vindicated made the whole thing less hard on you? And maybe on your father?”

“I’m sure that’s true,” she said. “Although I never thought about it until right now. Is that common?”

“In a way, it is,” I lied. “For other families I’ve interviewed, it was always the belief that someday the truth would come out that kept them going. I guess the difference is, sometimes the families had an awful lot more faith than the person who had been convicted.”

“But they would be the only ones who really knew, isn’t that true?”

“I guess that is true,” I acknowledged. “In some of the cases, the evidence was so shaky, or there was such outright corruption, or there was a journalist already on the job, beating the drums so hard, that the public got to share the sense of innocence before the courts ratified it. But in your brother’s case, that wasn’t so. Until he was actually set free, I couldn’t find one line of coverage of the case after the trial was over.”

“And when he got shot . . .”

“Exactly. Truth is, Laura, if that hadn’t happened, I never would have heard of your brother’s case at all.”

“I’m not surprised,” she said. “It wasn’t that big a deal.”

“I’m sure it was to you.”

“I know how this must sound, but when I told you my brother and I were never close, that’s an understatement. When I heard about it, my first thought was how . . . humiliated I was at the idea of anyone connecting me to him. We don’t have the same name. . . . You think that’s disgusting, don’t you?”

“I think it’s human,” I told her. “After all, for all you knew . . .”

“Who knows what anyone’s capable of?” she said.

“Exactly.”

“This doesn’t do a lot for your book, does it, J.?” Her expression shifted, too quick to read. “Can I call you that? J.? ‘J.P.’ sounds like you should be a banker or something.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Does anyone do it? Call you that?”

“Never in my life,” I said.

“I never liked my name,” she said, wistfully. “When I was a little girl, I always wanted to change it.”

“To what?”

“Oh, all kinds of different things. ‘Laura’ always sounded so old-fashioned to me. I wanted a fabulous name.”

“Like Hildegarde?”

“Stop it!” she laughed. “You know what I mean. I went to school with girls named Kerri, and Pandora, and Astrid, and . . . names like those.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I did some research into this, for a story I was working on. All you have to do, to change your name, is file a petition in court.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. You have to file a notice in the papers—in case you’re trying to duck a bunch of debts and get some new credit—but it’s no big deal.”

“I could never do that now,” she said. “In my business, a name is very important. Not what the name is, what it represents. Like a brand. ‘Laura Reinhardt’ isn’t what to call me, it’s what I do. Understand?”

“Sure.”

“So I guess I’m stuck with Laura the Librarian.”

“That’s not how I see you. Although I bet you’d look real cute in glasses.”

“I have glasses,” she said. “I never really use them—I wear contacts—but I have them. I always thought I looked dorky in them.”

“Let me see.”

“I . . . All right, wait here.”

I thought I heard the bottle tree tinkle as she swept out of the kitchen, but I couldn’t swear to it.

She was back in a minute, wearing a pair of plain round glasses with rust-colored frames.

“All you need is your hair in a bun,” I said.

“I knew it.”

“It’s your own fault,” I said. “You picked out the glasses, right?”

“Sure.”

“But you didn’t pick them out the same way you picked out your dresses. Or your jewelry. Or your apartment, even.”

“I see what you mean. . . .”

“They’ve got thousands of different frames. You could get some that would show off your eyes. Like putting something especially beautiful under glass.”

“Oh God, that’s so . . .” She started sniffling.

Thanks, Little Sis, I said to myself, holding Laura Reinhardt against me.

^“I should go home,” I said, later.

“Am I making you—?”

“I just feel grungy in these same clothes,” I told her. “I need to change.”

“Want me to come with you?”

Fucking moron, you didn’t see that one coming? I thought. “I’d like to have you stay with me,” I said. “But not until I . . . do some stuff to my place.”

“You mean, like, rehab?”

“No. I mean, like, clean.”

She giggled. Then said, “You probably think I’m the world’s best housekeeper, looking around this place.”

“It does look immaculate.”

“It should. I’m hardly ever here. I have a girl come in twice a week, and I’ll bet all she does is watch TV.”

“You don’t let her touch your bottle tree, do you?”

“Never! I blow the dust off it with my own breath.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“When I put something together myself—even a deal, which is not really a thing you can touch—I get very protective of it. I don’t want anyone handling it but me.”

“I understand.”

“You’re the same way about your car, I bet.”

“I guess I am, now that you make me think about it,” I confessed, lying. The truth was, the Plymouth had been built as a multi-user appliance—power steering and an automatic transmission made it possible for anyone to drive the beast, if they didn’t get too crazy with the gas pedal. “How about this? I go and get some fresh clothes, and come back in time for dinner?”

“Do you want to go to—?”

“Let me surprise you,” I said.

A block away from Laura’s, I thumbed my cellular into life.

“Gardens.”

“It’s me, Mama. Can you get everyone over there?”

“Now, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Basement?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

Max was the only one there when I walked in. He was in my booth, trying to play a game of solitaire. Mama was seated across from him, tapping the table sharply every time she detected what she considered a major error in progress.

“Have soup at big table,” Mama said, confirming everyone was on their way. I never would have asked her. In my family, some things you know inside yourself. Other things—like “basement” meaning “weapons”—you learn.

The Prof strolled in the door just as the soup came up from the back. He snatched a cup from the tray and put it on the table in front of him as he sat down.

“I’m in,” he said, as if the cup were a poker chip.

“Where’s Clarence?” I asked.

“He’s with Terry, over at your place, cooking on those computers.”

“But that’s just around the—”

“You want the Mole on the set, letting him drive ain’t the bet, bro. They have to go and haul him over.”

“Fair enough,” I said, just as Michelle swept into the joint.

“This had better be important,” she said.

She didn’t bother to wait for anyone to pull out a chair for her—Clarence is the only one who ever does. And I didn’t bother to assure her the meet was important—she was just being herself.

“So? What’s up, pup?” the Prof asked.

“Let’s wait until everyone’s here,” I said. “I don’t want to tell it twice.”

“Righteous,” he said, lighting a smoke.

“You did get to be with that girl?” Michelle demanded.

“Yeah,” I said.

“And you are going to talk about that?”

“Yes, Michelle.”

“Not in front of my son, you’re not,” she said, in a tone of utter finality.

“Honey, he’s old enough to—”

“Don’t you say a word!” she warned me.

“Terry’s been teaching Clarence some boss stuff,” the Prof slipped in. “Boy’s talking about going to school, for real.”

“I’m sure,” Michelle said, not mollified. “And I’m glad, Prof,” she added, quickly. “But if you think I’m going to have Terry sit here and listen to the gory details of—”

“There won’t be any details, honey,” I promised.

“How can I know if my . . . expertise is needed without specifics?” she said, exasperated.

“I can tell you that part right now,” I said. “Before they get here. Fair enough?”

“Sold,” she said.

^“It was a Seimens,” I told the Mole, almost an hour later. “One of those jobs that work as a regular phone and as a cordless, too. The main one is in the kitchen. She’s got three of those pod-things in different rooms. You just lift the cordless unit out of them and talk. It’s a two-line job. Probably uses the second one for the fax. Or maybe the Internet.”

The Mole shook his head. “That is a difficult one to plant a device in,” he said. “You don’t have the . . . knowledge. It would be better at the junction. In the basement.”

“You see security cams?” the Prof asked.

“Not in the garage. I don’t know where they’d go to; I didn’t see a monitor in her apartment.”

“Just a voice system, like they got in regular apartment buildings?”

“I guess so,” I said. “I haven’t gone in the front door.”

“But you’re going back this evening, yes?” Michelle said. “So then we’ll know if—”

“No,” I told her, holding up the plastic card Laura had given to me. “She gave me hers, for the garage. Said she wouldn’t be using her car all day, so . . .”

The Mole took the card from my hand, studied it for a few seconds. He nodded, asked: “It doesn’t have to look the same?”

“As long as it works,” I told him.

“You can test it later,” the Mole said, pocketing the card.

“I don’t see a play except the phone,” I said. “We don’t have the personnel to shadow her—”

“Not in that neighborhood, for sure,” the Prof said, sourly.

“—but the house phone’s not enough,” I told them. “What if he contacts her on her cell? Or even at work? Hell, what if he drops her a goddamned postcard?”

“What makes you so sure they’re going to meet at all?” Michelle asked.

“They met once,” I said. “Or planned to meet, anyway. If the story we got is true, the sister shows up, he’s already down from the shots. Whatever he wanted to tell her, he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do it on the phone. And he didn’t just want to meet her in a public place. He went to a lot of trouble to set the whole thing up.”

“You think he wanted to give her something, mahn?” Clarence asked.

“If he had it with him, whoever shot him got it,” I said. “But Wychek’s still running scared. Big scared. He’s got—still got—something good enough to convince the cops to keep him on ice. But, whatever it is, it has to be something . . . physical. Not just info he could carry around in his head. Otherwise, he would have already cut the deal he wanted. And there’d be no need to keep the charges running against Wolfe.”

“Maybe he’s still trying to work that one out,” the Prof said. “How he can turn loose of what he’s got, and still keep himself protected?”

“Even if that was so, why keep the charges alive?”

“They don’t want to tip off whoever shot him? That he’s ratting them out?”

“No,” I said. “Doesn’t work for me. Wychek’s dirt. If all he could do for the cops is dime out the guy who shot him, what’s that worth? Not the DA’s Office cooperating in a bogus charge against Wolfe. Too much potential downside for them, especially with all the press attention.

“He’s got something,” I went on, filling in the blanks with guesses. “And either he needs the sister to get it for him, or he needs her signature on a safe-deposit box, or . . . something like that. Whatever he has, he’s had it for a long time. Since before he went into the joint.”

“Because . . . ?” Michelle said.

“Because he was protected in there. Off a contract. Somebody paid real money for that. And for the fancy appellate lawyer, too.”

“So why’d he wait?” the Prof demanded.

“He . . . Damn, Prof! It isn’t just that he waited so long to hire Greuchel. He never even made bail on the charge Wolfe dropped him on. And he wouldn’t have needed PC at Rikers if the Brotherhood was protecting him there. So, whatever he found out, it must have happened while he was at Rikers.”

“Yeah?” the Prof snorted. “You think someone in there sent him a kite, made him see the light?”

Nobody said anything. Whatever they were thinking, I don’t know. Me, I was wondering if Wychek had ever asked his sister for bail money.

Suddenly, Max tapped a knuckle against the tabletop, drawing all our eyes. The Mongol looked up at the ceiling, dropped his gaze to eye level, let his eyes wander around aimlessly. He glanced at the floor. Picked some imaginary object up, gave it a quick, examining look, shrugged, and put it in his pocket.

Max got to his feet. Walked over to one of those promotional calendars, mostly a large poster, with a little pad of months you can tear off one at a time on the bottom. The one on Mama’s wall featured a Chinese woman, elegantly dressed, having a cocktail. The writing on the poster was all in Chinese, and the calendar pad was for 1961.

Max turned the pages of the calendar, indicating the passage of time. Then he snapped his fingers, made an “I’ve got it!” face, and reached into his pocket. He brought out the imaginary object in one hand, and used the fingers of the other to turn it, as if examining it from all sides.

He nodded a “Yes!,” then went over to Mama’s cash register and patted it, like it was a good dog.

I stood up, bowed deeply. “You nailed it, brother,” I said, making a gesture to match the words. “He got it before he went down, but he didn’t figure out it was worth anything until later.”

“Adds up,” the Prof said.

“Very logical,” the Mole agreed.

“And I think I know where he got it now,” I said. “So I’m going to Iowa.”

I walked out to the back alley with Clarence and Terry, the Mole stumbling in our wake. I pulled Clarence aside, asked him a quick question, got the answer I expected.

Back inside, I sat down in my booth. I felt . . . depleted. Like I’d fought ten rounds, to a decision that wasn’t going to go my way.

Mama came over and sat across from me. “All for police girl?” Mama said, accusingly.

“There’s money in this,” I said, stubbornly.

I closed my eyes, felt Michelle slide in next to me, ready to defend her big brother. Mama had known about Wolfe for years. “Police girl” said it all. Our family is outlaws; we don’t believe in mixed marriages.

“If Burke says there’s money, there’s money,” Michelle said, loyally.

“Maybe. But not for money,” Mama replied.

“So?” Michelle challenged her.

“So no . . . focus,” Mama said, pointing at Max to emphasize what she meant. For all his skills, the ki radiating from Max the Silent was all about focus. Without it, he’d just be another tough guy.

“I’m feeling my way,” I admitted. “But Wychek’s got something. Even Max says so.”

“Something for police, maybe.”

“Wolfe’s not on their side anymore,” Michelle said. “She went into her own business a long time ago.”

“Still police girl here,” Mama said, patting her chest. Case fucking closed.

It was just past seven that same night when I test-slipped the Mole’s clone card into the slot for Laura’s garage, my other hand on the genuine one Laura had given me, just in case.

The gate went up.

I walked up the back stairs, carrying the stainless-steel cylinder by its handle.

I rapped lightly on the door to her apartment. The door opened immediately. I hadn’t heard the sound of a deadbolt retracting, and the chain wasn’t in place.

“Hi!” she said, giving me a quick kiss as I crossed the threshold.

She was wearing another kimono—white, with gold and black dragon embroidery.

“I didn’t know where we were going, so I didn’t want to get dressed until . . .” she said, blushing a little.

“You’re perfect,” I said, holding up the gleaming cylinder.

^“Oh my God, this is the best Chinese food I ever had in my life,” she said, about forty-five minutes later.

I had opened the complex series of interlocking pots, each with its own dish inside. A few quick blasts with the microwave, and we had a five-course dinner that money, literally, couldn’t buy.

“I told you it would be a surprise,” I said.

“Where did you get it? I’m going to order from them for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, it’s not from a restaurant,” I said. “I know this old Chinese woman who makes special meals to order. She used to serve them in her house—”

“Oh, I heard about those kind of setups. You don’t get a menu or anything, and you have to book, like, months in advance, right?”

“Exactly. Only she’s not up to having people in her home anymore. She’s like a hundred years old,” I said, involuntarily tensing my neck muscles against a psychic slap from Mama. “I called her, gave her a few hours’ notice—that was what took so long—and she said she’d do it.”

“Wow. She really put herself out. It must have cost a—”

“Money wouldn’t make her do anything, not at her age. I told her it was very special, very important to me.”

“I . . . I wish I knew how to do things like that.”

“I guess I don’t, either. I never did it before. I was just thinking . . . about you, about going out to eat, how things . . . happened. Then I remembered this old lady, and . . .”

“Did you use to eat there a lot?”

“A lot? I ate there once. About, let me see, six, seven years ago? I was doing a profile on a big Chinese businessman. A puff piece, really, but I can’t support myself doing nothing but investigative stuff. He was the one who took me there.”

“Did you mention it in your article?”

“I wasn’t going to. It isn’t that kind of place, you could see that. But it wouldn’t have mattered. The piece got spiked, and I had to settle for the kill fee.”

“What’s a kill fee?”

“Say a magazine commissions a piece for five thousand. Then, after they see it, they decide not to go with it. If there’s a decent contract, they have to pay the writer some percentage of the fee, agreed on in front.”

“Why would they do that? Commission an article and then not use it?”

“There’s a hundred reasons.” I shrugged. “They decide they need the space for something else that month. Or the subject isn’t hot anymore. Or maybe they just don’t like the job you did on it.”

“But if they did that, you could just turn around and sell it to someone else?”

“If you can, sure. It doesn’t happen often. Every magazine is a different market, even when they’re competing with each other. What’s good for one isn’t always good for another.”

^“You don’t have to do that,” I said, later.

“You weren’t planning to return all the cookware without washing it?” she said, incredulous.

“No. I just meant, I could take it home, throw it in the dishwasher myself.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said, dubiously. “I mean, not everything can go in the dishwasher. It’s easy enough to wash them by hand; I’ll be done in a few minutes.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Do you want to go out somewhere. Or just . . . ?”

“How about we go for a drive?”

“To . . . where? Oh. I guess that’s the point, right?”

“Sure is.”

^“Is this still Queens?”

“Yep. That’s Flushing Bay we’re looking at. You can’t see it from here, but La Guardia’s over to the left. The Bronx is on the other side of the water.”

“I was born, what, maybe forty-five minutes from here? And I never even knew it existed.”

“It’s a nice little community,” I said. “You got everything from working stiffs to big-time gangsters, with house prices to match.”

“With those other cars around, it’s like a drive-in movie, almost.”

“People come here for the same reason they go to drive-ins, true enough.”

“Did you know that in Singapore young couples go to drive-ins because the culture frowns on public displays of affection?”

“I didn’t have a clue. You know a lot about Singapore?”

“I’m hardly an expert. But everyone in the money game knows something about Singapore.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“No. You?”

“Yeah, I was there, once.”

“What’s it like?”

“Very clean, very efficient. And very scary.”

“Scary?”

“I can’t explain it, exactly. Felt like everybody was so . . . anxious. Like something could descend on them any minute.”

“Were you there for a story?”

“No. I was on my way to Australia. But something happened with the connecting flight, and I ended up having to lay over.”

“I wonder why people would be so anxious there. It’s supposed to have a very low crime rate.”

“Maybe it was a misimpression,” I said. “I was only there for a short while. I wouldn’t ever write what I told you.”

“Why not?”

“I’m old-school,” I told her, trying to be Hauser in my mind. “I don’t like this ‘personal journalism’ stuff. Never did. What I told you, that was my own feelings, not facts. Private, not public.”

“That’s what this place feels like,” she said, snapping her cigarette out the open window and sliding in close to me.

Twenty minutes later, she moved back toward her side of the front seat. Rolled down her window, lit a cigarette.

“I never did that before,” she said.

“In a car?”

“Not just . . . in a car. Never.”

“Oh. I . . .”

“You don’t know what to say, do you, J.?” she said, a slight edge around the softness of her voice. “If you say you never would have known, it sounds like you’re calling me a liar. And if you say it was obvious I’d never done it before, you’re saying I’m not very . . . good at it, right?”

“None of that’s right, Laura. Not one word of any of it. Some people, they do things perfect the first time they try. Others, they could do it a thousand times and still . . . not do it very well.”

“I only meant—”

“But what’s really not right about what you said was the other part. It would never cross my mind that you were lying.”

“I thought reporters were supposed to be cynics,” she said, expelling smoke in a harsh jet.

“Cynicism is for adolescent poseurs. A person who’s been around the block a few times learns better.”

“What’s better?”

“Better is knowing some people are liars. I don’t mean they just told a lie, I mean they’re liars; that’s what they do. Better is knowing that even essentially truthful people lie sometimes, for different reasons. Better is knowing how to tell the difference.”

“You know when people are lying?”

“Not always,” I said, reaching over and taking her hand. “But I know when they’re not.”

We were both quiet for a while. Then she said, “I never asked you. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“I have a sister.”

“Older or younger?”

“She’s my baby sister.”

“Is that why you asked me, before, if John was protective? Because you were?”

“No. I was just trying to get a picture of the whole family dynamic.”

“But you were, weren’t you?”

“Protective? Sure.”

“You think that’s normal, don’t you?”

“I’m a reporter, not a judge.”

“J., I’m just asking you an honest question. Can’t I get an honest answer?”

“Ask me your question,” I said, watching her eyes.

“If someone tried to hurt your sister, what would you do?”

I saw pieces of Michelle’s childhood, playing on the inside of my eyelids like a movie on a screen. The kind of movie freaks sell for a lot of money. Felt the familiar suffusion of hate for all of them—from her bio-parents, who used her like a toy, to the agencies that treated a transgendered child like a circus freak, to the predatory johns who took little pieces of her in exchange for survival money, to . . . Oh, honeygirl, I wish I had been there, I said to myself. Again.

I waited a beat, still on her eyes.

“Kill them,” I said.

^“Do you have something to pick up?” Laura asked me, as I wheeled the Plymouth into the gigantic parking lot for the Pathmark supermarket in Whitestone. At just after two in the morning, the lot was almost empty.

“Nope,” I said, pulling over to the side. I put the lever into park, opened the door, and got out. I walked around to her side of the car, opened her door.

“You’re leaving the engine run—”

“Just come on,” I said, taking her hand and pulling her around the back of the car. “Get in,” I told her.

“You want me to—?”

I was already on my way back around to the passenger side. We both closed our doors at the same time.

“This isn’t like your Audi,” I said, as she wiggled around, trying to find the best driving position. “The gas pedal isn’t hyper-sensitive, but if you step on it hard we’ll launch like a rocket. The brakes are a little stiff when you first touch them; they take a little pressure. But if you floor them, we’re going to stop. I mean, right now, like someone dropped an anchor into the road behind us.”

“You’re making me nervous.”

“Oh, great,” I said. “The first time I ever let anyone drive my baby and you tell me you’re nervous.”

“J.,” she giggled. “Stop it.”

“Your Audi’s a front-driver. This one’s not. If you get on the gas too hard in a corner, the rear end’s going to want to come around.”

“You make it sound like a ticking bomb.”

“It’s nothing of the kind,” I said. “Only reason I’m saying all this is that it’s a great contrast to what you’re used to driving. Take it slow, get used to it, and it’ll practically drive itself. You’ll see.”

“I . . .”

“Come on, Laura. I’ll bet you’ll be perfect at it, the first time.”

She gave me a look I couldn’t read. Then she put her left foot on the brake and pulled the lever down into drive.

I nodded approval. Laura took her foot off the brake, and the Plymouth started to creep forward. She delicately feathered the gas and we picked up speed.

“There’s nobody around,” I told her. “Give it a little gas.”

“This isn’t so bad,” she said. “I could just . . . Oh!” she gasped, as the Plymouth shifted stance and shot forward.

I had expected her to deck the brakes, but she just backed off the gas, got it under control instantly.

“It is fast,” she said.

I made her try the brakes a few times, to get used to the pedal.

“I can feel the power,” she said. “Like a huge dog, on a leash.”

“Let’s give it some running room,” I said, pointing toward the highway.

^“What a wonderful car this is, J. It was so nice of you to let me drive it.”

“My pleasure.”

“I was . . . wondering.”

“What?”

“Well, how come you . . . The outside of the car is so . . .”

“Grungy?”

“At least. But it runs so beautifully. Is it the money?”

“If you mean, did I put my money into the engine and the transmission and the suspension and then kind of run out of cash, the answer is ‘yes.’ But it’s been this way for a long while now, and I think I may actually like it better.”

“Better? Why?”

“It’s kind of . . . special-sweet to have something very fine, something that most people wouldn’t even recognize. They’d have to drive my car to know what it was.”

“And you’re not going to let them?” she said, smiling in the night.

“Why should I?” I answered. “I’m building her for me. Not for my ego.”

“What does that mean, for you, not your ego?”

“It means she’s perfect for me. Just for me. I don’t care if anyone else thinks I’m driving a rust-bucket; I know I’ve got a jewel.”

“Is that the way you are—?”

“About everything,” I assured her. “Everything in my life. Right down the line.”

O’Hare was in its usual state of high cholesterol, but the three of us had plenty of time to catch our connector to Cedar Rapids. On the way out, Pepper had ended up seated next to an elderly lady; Mick and I were side by side. By the end of the trip, the old woman wanted to take Pepper home with her. Mick and I hadn’t exchanged a single word.

All they had left at the car-rental agency was an Infiniti SUV. Mick kept calling it a stupid cow every time he had to take a curve.

He found the address easily: a smallish wood-frame house on a side street. Pepper turned around in the front seat so she could face me.

“You want us to go in with you, chief?”

“I think it might help if you did,” I said. “But if Mick’s going to pull his—”

“I’m in the fucking room,” he said.

“Mick!” Pepper said, punching him on the arm hard enough to floor most middleweights. “Come on!”

“The paper says she’s from around here,” Mick said. “She came home. If anyone here scares her, it’s not going to be me.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

^“Miss Eberstadt? My name is Michael Range. This is my assistant, Margaret Madison. And her husband, Bill. We apologize for coming by without notice, but I thought it would be better if you got to look us over before we asked you anything. People can give a real false impression over the phone.”

“I . . . What do you—?”

That’s when Mick took over. “We all work for a lawyer, ma’am,” he said. “Mr. H. G. Davidson, from New York City. I don’t mean I’m from there; I guess you can tell,” he went on, a warm, friendly smile on his transformed face. “I’m a paralegal, Mr. Range is an investigator, and Margaret here is an administrative assistant. Anyway, there’s a case back there that concerns you, a little bit, and we were sent out here. Well, I guess the truth is, the boss sent Mr. Range out, and we came along for the ride. I wanted to take Margaret home to see my folks, anyway.”

“What does this have to do with—?”

“Could we come inside for a little bit, ma’am?” Mick asked, in a voice I never would have recognized. “Unless this town has changed a lot since I was last home, I wouldn’t want to be talking about stuff like this out on the front step.”

“I . . . All right,” the target said.

Pepper and I watched in respectful silence as Mick danced with Eileen Eberstadt for almost an hour. We listened to her explain that her initial report had “all been a big mistake, like going to New York in the first place,” and how she “had nothing against anyone.”

Mick countered gently, explaining that Wolfe, the only one who had ever prosecuted Wychek, was now being charged with shooting him, and any help she might be able to provide would be greatly . . .

But the woman held firm, until I stood up and walked over to where she was sitting.

“Everything costs,” I said, softly. “And everybody pays. The only question is when, and how much. There’s a lot of people behind Ms. Wolfe. Serious people. Very committed. You’ve got your reasons for lying—don’t waste my time,” I said, when she opened her mouth to speak—“and nobody cares about them. We’re not cops, and we’re not the bad guys, either. We’re not on anyone’s side except Ms. Wolfe’s. But we have a job to do, and now you’re it.”

“I’m not going to—”

“Just tell me what he took,” I said, even more softly. “Just tell me that one thing, and we’re gone.”

I tossed “forever” into her long silence.

“A skirt,” she said, looking down. “A little red pleated skirt. It was the bottom half of my cheerleader’s outfit. From high school.”

^“I got a call,” Davidson said.

I didn’t say anything, just watched the smoke from his cigar turn blue in the band of sun that came in the top of his office window.

“Toby Ringer, you remember him?”

“That’s a long way back,” I said.

“Sure. From when he was an ADA in the same office that’s prosecuting Wolfe now. Toby’s gone up in the world since then. Moved over to the feds. He was the boss of Narco there for a while, then he kind of dropped out of the public eye. But he’s the same man.”

“Meaning . . . ?”

“Meaning, you know how it works in our business. A man’s no better than his word. And Toby’s has always been gold.”

“Okay,” I said, neutral.

“So, anyway, Toby gives me a call, says we haven’t had lunch in a long time. How about Peter Luger’s, his treat?”

“Did he pat you down when you showed up?”

“Asked me to give my word that I wasn’t wired.”

“This was about Wolfe, right?”

“I’m getting to it,” Davidson said.

I went quiet again.

“Toby said it would be in my client’s interest not to push for discovery right now. He said, if we could be a little patient, he was absolutely confident—that’s the exact phrase he used—that the case would just go away.

“I told him we weren’t interested in a case going away. That happens, the case can always come back. He said he meant go away for good. Disa-fucking-peer.

“I told him he knows the game as well as I do. I can’t just sit on motions, or I end up waiving my right to them. He went over the time lines with me, said another few weeks and it would all be over.”

“So he’s just trying to save you time and aggravation?”

“I asked him the same thing. He fenced for a while. Finally, after he could see he wasn’t getting over, he told me Wychek’s going in the Grand Jury soon.”

“How is that supposed to—?”

“He’s not going in as a victim, he’s going in as a witness,” Davidson said. “His appearance has nothing to do with Wolfe, or her case.”

“So?”

“So, by way of preamble, first they’re going to immunize him. Full boat—use and transactional. Then he’s going to tell the Grand Jury that he made it all up about it being Wolfe who shot him. When the DA’s Office gets ‘notified’ of that, they then introduce a transcript of his statement during a presentation of her case. And No True Bill it.”

“Sure.”

“It sounds fishy to me, too,” Davidson said, tilting his chair back. “If we’re a target, we’re entitled to Grand Jury notice, and we haven’t gotten any. But it could work the way Toby says. A federal grand jury—investigating who knows?—brings Wychek in. He makes a statement under oath. Suppose he does say that he lied about Wolfe? The feds have to turn that statement over to the DA in Manhattan. And then they’d have to drop the case. If the statement ever came to light, they’d be cooked. Not just legally, politically.”

“What’s in it for us, to wait?”

“That’s where Toby stopped being blunt. But I got the distinct impression that Wychek is telling the DA’s Office one story and the feds another. And that they’re not sharing.”

“He’s in federal custody?”

“He’s not in anyone’s custody,” Davidson said.

“You mean he’s still in the hospital?”

“Nope. That’s why I’m inclined to go along with Toby. He said the DA’s Office is giving Wychek an allowance, maintaining him as a protected witness. But Wychek knows, long-term, it’s got to be the feds, if he wants the total package—new ID, maybe even a new face, some serious maintenance money, you know.”

“So Wychek goes in the Grand Jury—the federal one—and then he gets gone?”

“What Toby says.”

“Toby say where Wychek’s staying?”

“I never asked him,” Davidson said.

^“You had a successful trip?” Laura asked.

“In my business—actually, I’ll bet it’s a lot like your business—you don’t always know right away. You make an investment, then you wait to see if it pans out.”

“That sounds a lot more like gambling than investment.”

“Isn’t that what investment is, gambling?”

“At some end of the continuum, it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“A person who buys shares of stock—or of a mutual fund, or any similar instrument—is gambling. Their idea of ‘research’ is maybe fifteen minutes on the Internet . . . and that’s for those who even go that far. For most investors, it’s more like religion than it is science. They trust; they have faith; they believe. They believe in a broker, or a mutual-fund manager, or in something they heard on a TV program. Everybody in the business knows this is true, but nobody knows why.”

“If people didn’t want to believe, they wouldn’t,” I said. “I don’t care if it’s a televangelist or a stockbroker; it’s easier for people to say ‘I trust you’ than to find out the truth for themselves.”

“You make it sound like they’re all suckers.”

“And volunteers for the job,” I agreed.

“I’m not in any of that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t sell stocks or bonds. I don’t even analyze them. What I do is, I put deals together. There’s big sharks and little sharks, sure. But all the players are sharks, do you see what I mean? There aren’t any fish.”

“Then where do the little sharks get their food?”

^“You haven’t asked about him at all,” she half whispered, her mouth against my ear. “Have you changed your mind?”

We were lying on her bed in the dark. Me on my back, she on her stomach. It was the first time we’d had sex that she hadn’t lit a cigarette afterwards.

“Changed my mind?”

“About your book.”

“No,” I said, my tone suggesting that would be absurd. “I’ve made the commitment. I took the advance. And spent most of it, too. Your brother’s case didn’t give me the idea for the book—it was something I came across during my research.”

“But you said he’d be perfect.”

“He might very well be. But I can’t believe he’s the only one. There were two things that drew me to him—”

“What?”

“—and neither was the underlying fact pattern,” I went on, ignoring her interruption. “One, I have to be honest, was nothing but convenience. He was—at least, I thought he was—right here, and available for in-depth interviews. Everything about his case is right here, too: the court records, the local newspapers, the judge who sat on his case, maybe even some of the jurors. The second thing, of course, was him getting shot.”

“Couldn’t you—?”

“But, the more I think about it, I’m not so sure.”

“Not so sure about what?”

“Whether the hook is really such a good one after all. At first, I thought it was perfect. If you’re writing a book about overzealous prosecutors, what’s better than one who tries to kill a man they convicted, after the courts set him free?

“But, in looking at these cases, you don’t see that . . . personal element at all. You see the criminal-justice system jumping the rails. You see cops concerned with their crime-clearance rate, just like you see prosecutors obsessed with their conviction rates. Working together. But that kind of mind-set is just as likely to tip the scales the other way.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, moving away from me and sitting up.

“A prosecutor who wants a perfect conviction rate can give some plea bargains that are real bargains. I’ve seen cases where a defendant confesses to a couple dozen different crimes, and only gets sentenced for one of them.”

“But that person would still be guilty, wouldn’t he?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Why would they ever—?”

“Did you ever read about the Boston Strangler case?”

“I heard of it. But it was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

“The Sixties. A serial killer was at large. The public was panicked. The media—and this is the key to the whole dynamic—was demanding action. Everyone was on the spot. They already had this guy—Albert DeSalvo was his name—on a whole ton of sex crimes. Different MO—not a homicide in the bunch—but more than enough to give him a life sentence.

“So now they’ve got DeSalvo in a prison where they evaluate defendants to see if they’re competent to stand trial. Out of the blue, he makes a deal to confess to all the strangling cases.”

“Plead guilty?”

“It was a little trickier than that. He ‘clears up’ the cases, gives the police information about the crimes, stuff like that. But the deal is, since there’s no other evidence he was the Strangler—no fingerprints, no blood, no body fluids, no witnesses, nothing—the confession can’t be used. So DeSalvo gets the same life sentence he would have gotten anyway, and everyone’s happy.”

“I still don’t see what’s so horrible. I mean, what he did, of course. But he still went to prison for life.”

“What if he wasn’t the Strangler?”

“What? Then why would he—?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t there. But a lot of people, today, think he was lying about those crimes. Especially relatives of the victims. There’s a whole new investigation going on now.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she said, her tone just below angry.

“He was going down for the count anyway. And he wasn’t going to do an extra day for the Strangler’s crimes. Maybe he got some money . . . from a book deal or whatever. Maybe he just wanted to be famous—the cops get confessions like that all the time.”

“Did the crimes stop after he was arrested?” she asked. I caught the faintest whiff of triumph in her voice—the cold-blooded researcher, confronting the “believer” with the hard facts.

“They did,” I said. “But if he got the information—about the crimes—from someone else, that person could have been locked up, too. With DeSalvo. Maybe in the nuthouse.”

“What does he say?”

“DeSalvo?”

“Yes. Well, what does he say about it, now that all that time has passed?”

“He’s not saying anything,” I told her. “A few years after he went to prison, he was stabbed to death.”

“Oh my God. Who did it?”

“Nobody knows,” I said. “Or, at least, nobody was ever charged with it.”

Laura bent over to light a pair of candles on an end table. “Can you see me?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Perfectly. But I’d rather have a closer look.”

“You will. But, first, could you close your eyes? Just for a minute?”

“Sure,” I said, dropping my eyelids, but leaving a slit open at the bottom. I learned how to do that when I was a kid—the trick is to keep your eyelids from fluttering.

Laura dropped to her knees, pulled out the lowest drawer in a dark wood bureau. She rooted around for a few seconds. When she stood up, she held something clasped in her hands.

She came over to the bed, climbed on next to me, and knelt, keeping her back very straight.

“What do you do when you’re afraid of something?” she said, very softly.

“What do people do, or what do I do, personally?”

“You.”

“It depends on what it is that I’m afraid of.”

“Tell me.”

“If it’s something I can avoid, I do that. If it’s something I can’t, I try to overcome it.”

“How?”

“How? I don’t know. It depends on what it is.”

“Give me an example?”

Oh, I could do that, I thought. I could give you enough “examples” to haunt your dreams for the rest of your life.

But I’m a Child of the Secret. We don’t talk to outsiders. Except when we lie. Because They taught us well. We know we’re never safe.

And just because you’re one of Us doesn’t mean you can’t also be one of Them.

“Public speaking,” I said. “I was scared to death to get up in front of—”

“That’s not fear,” she cut me off, sharply. “That’s a . . . phobia. Didn’t you ever—?”

“A bully,” I said. “How’s that?”

“That’s very good,” she said. Kneeling, with her hands clasped.

“When I was a kid,” I said, feeling the dot of truth inside my story expand the margins of the lie, “I was scared all the time. Of this one guy. He took stuff from me. Just because he was bigger. Just because he could do it. And he hurt me, too.”

“Did you tell your parents?”

“It wasn’t the kind of thing I could tell my parents about,” I said. More truth, wrapped in a mourner’s cloak.

“What did you do?”

“I tried to stay away from this other guy,” I said. “But he made it impossible.” Yeah, I thought, “impossible,” when you’re a little kid, and the other guy is the teenage son of the degenerate freaks who have custody of your orphaned body.

“What happened, finally?”

“I hit him with a baseball bat,” I lied.

“Oh! Did you hurt him badly?”

“Bad enough so he never bothered me again,” I said. The baseball bat was true enough. I didn’t tell Laura how I had followed it with a can of gasoline, and a match. By the time I was done, every human living in that house of demons was, too.

“Good! I hate bullies, don’t you?”

“Ever since I was old enough to know what they are,” I said, switching to pure, undiluted truth.

“See what I’ve got?”

I opened my eyes. She was holding up a pair of handcuffs.

“Being . . . restrained has always terrified me. I . . . I keep these as kind of a test. Usually, I’m afraid to even look at them.”

“You were handcuffed once?”

“Oh, no,” she said, way too much certainty in her voice. “Nothing like that. I’ve always been this way. When I was a little girl, and they played cowboys and Indians, I would never let anyone tie me up.”

“Some things, it’s good to be afraid of. Just common sense.”

“Maybe that’s why I went into my line of work. There’s a lot of risk—one day, you’re getting a huge bonus; the next, you’re out of a job—but there aren’t any . . . restraints.”

“Maybe you just like the risks. I’ve known people like that.”

“Maybe I do,” she said. “Do you know how these work?”

^“See how much faith I have in you?” she purred. “With my hands behind my back like this, you could do . . . anything.”

“If you trust me, you know I won’t.”

“I know you would never do anything to hurt me,” she said. I wondered if she realized how much she sounded like one of the no-research investors she had been sneering at.

“I wouldn’t, Laura,” I said, guiding her shoulders down.

^“I could still ask him,” she said. It was much later; the candles were burned out.

“Okay.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic, J.”

“I guess I’m . . . not, actually. I thought he was the one who would have been enthusiastic. Most people want to tell their stories, especially if they believe it’s going to make them look good.”

“But you haven’t lost interest completely?”

“No, of course not. But I can’t put the whole project on hold waiting for—”

“Oh, I understand,” she said, squirming in close to me.

^“It’s not that big a risk,” Wolfe said. “If Toby’s . . . prediction doesn’t come true, it’s not like the DA has a better case against me. Besides, I trust him.”

“Toby?”

“Yes. Who else?”

“Not me, I understand.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you think my arteries are hardening—the ones to my brain. Your pal, Molly? No way he made copies of all the files he had in his storage unit. And no way you didn’t. You never trusted anyone in administration when you worked there. Probably got copies of every single piece of paper that ever went through your hands, somewhere.”

“It’s Molly who doesn’t trust you,” she said, not denying anything. “He said he was willing to take the chance of you shopping him, but he wasn’t going to give you the chance to do it to me.”

“Very protective of you, is he?”

“You have a problem with that?”

“No,” I said. “None of my business.”

“This whole thing is none of your business now,” Wolfe said, quietly. “It’s done. Maybe not wrapped up with a red ribbon and tied with a bow, but it’s done. I appreciate what you did, but . . . but I want you to stop now. Just stop.”

I got to my feet. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought I was helping.”

“Come on, Burke. Be yourself.”

“You got it,” I promised.

The next day, I kept my promise. I sat down with my family, and we made our plans.

If you think a “perfect crime” is some kind of rare event, you probably think all sociopaths are handsome, intelligent, and charming, too. Truth is, thousands of perfect crimes take place every day. Nobody ever gets arrested for them, much less convicted.

And if you think it takes a criminal genius to commit the perfect crime in America, you don’t know anything about incest.

“There’s other players, remember,” I warned my family. “Whoever shot him has to know by now that they didn’t get the job done.”

“He’s a piece of dry wood, Schoolboy,” the Prof said. “Lying on the ground, waiting for the forest fire to catch up to him. Why don’t we let the flame take the blame?”

“Nobody needs him dead now,” I said. “Nobody on our side, anyway. Wolfe doesn’t think she’ll even go to trial. Neither does Davidson. If whoever wanted him finds him before we do, there’s no loss, sure. But we can’t make that happen. Even if we could stake him out, how would we get the shooter to show up? Besides, it’s not about him anymore. It’s about the money.”

“You think there’s cash in his stash?”

“I don’t know, Prof. But there’s cash somewhere. Heavy cash. This whole thing reeks of it.”

“You mean, because he had protection when he was Inside?” Michelle said. “His little sister’s got money . . . and she was the one coming to see him the time he got shot.”

“The sister has some money,” I conceded. “And it doesn’t take a fortune to buy protection Inside. But Silver said the order came from the top, and there’s no way she’d even know how to make a contact like that.”

“He has not called,” the Mole said.

“What? You mean you—?”

“The card opened the garage,” he said, shrugging. “The basement has all the lines. We already had her numbers. It’s a simple relay unit—we record the calls at our end.”

“I didn’t know you were even going to . . .”

“I was in a Con Ed van,” the Mole said. “In and out in under fifteen minutes.”

“You leave any paint behind?” the Prof asked.

The Mole ignored him.

“He could use a lot of other ways to get in touch,” I said. “Or maybe he hasn’t reached out for her at all. I’ve spent a lot of time with her. Consecutive hours. She didn’t get any calls. So either her phones were turned off—and that doesn’t seem likely—or he’s not coming through that way.”

“Maybe he only has her work number, or her e-mail address,” Michelle said. “If I was his sister, Satan forbid, I wouldn’t want him to know where I lived.”

“Could be. I don’t know. And she never said.”

“So how would we be able to have a strategy, mahn?” Clarence asked. “Either he calls her at home—and he has not done that—or she convinces him to give you that ‘interview.’”

“We’re holding garbage,” I agreed. “But we already anted heavy, so it’s worth staying to see the last card.”

The tenants in the Lower East Side building were so old, I got called “boychick” more than once. Four of them stopped their canasta game long enough to tell me that the two girls who had lived in the second-floor apartment had been very nice, but kind of standoffish.

“You would think, coming from such a big family, that Hannah would have been a little more friendly,” an elderly lady with heavily rouged cheeks and an elaborate hairdo told me.

“She had a big family?”

“Well, either her or Jane—that was the roommate—must have. I never saw so many boys. Brothers or cousins. I could tell by the way they were acting, all together.”

“And they came after the . . . after it happened, too?”

“Oh yes,” another lady said. “But not right away, a few days later. Maybe they were from out of town.”

“Who can tell anymore?” a third lady said.

“Did Hannah and Jane leave with them?” I asked.

“Who pays attention, a time like that?” the rouged-cheeked lady said.

“And who should be surprised, her moving out, after such a thing?” a different lady said.

“You saw Hannah move out?” I asked.

“Hannah? Hannah never moved out, young man. She was murdered. Didn’t you know that? It was in the papers. Horrible! That’s when Jane moved out.”

“Like the Devil was chasing her,” the rouged-cheeked lady said. “In the middle of the night. Manny, the super, he said she hardly took any of her clothes, she was in such a hurry. Who could blame her? To have such a thing happen to your own roommate. It would be . . . I don’t have the words for it.”

As I exited the apartment building, I had to step back to avoid a pair of skinheads strutting down the sidewalk. As they passed, I saw they had bar-code tattoos on the back of their necks. Couldn’t tell if they were identical.

I drove over to the building in Williamsburg where Hannah had been found hanging. The rehab was long since completed, and I calculated my chances of getting inside about as good as a counterman at Taco Bell buying a condo off his tip money.

Walking away, I felt a tremor in my wake. Just a slight pattern-shift in my visuals, maybe. Afterimages that didn’t match up with my expectations.

That was enough to send me Queens-bound on the subway instead of driving back to Manhattan. I changed trains three times, careful not to box myself, working my way back to Canal Street. When I got to the network of back alleys that leads to Mama’s, I found a place to wait.

And that’s what I did, for over an hour.

Nothing.

Spiders have it easy. When they need a web, they make their own threads. I had to work with the ones they gave me.

Something about those bar-code tattoos . . .

I knew a stripper who had a tiny bar code tattooed on one cheek of her bottom. “It’s a trick,” she said, smiling at the double meaning. “Supposed to mean my ass is merchandise, see? But if anyone gets close enough to read it, they’re mine.”

I opened one of my notebooks, found what I had drawn from my memory after I’d left Silver.

V71.01

What had he told Silver? “A message, written in the code of Nietzsche.”

I’d seen the “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” tattoos in prison. Sometimes with swastikas where the quote marks would go. Not exactly a secret code.

So?

In the room I use for sleeping, I took a polished piece of steel with a hole drilled at the top out of one of the standing lockers. In the middle of the steel, I used a Sharpie to draw a red dot. Then I hung it on a nail on the wall. When I settled into position, the red dot was exactly at eye level.

I focused on the red dot until I went into it.

When I came back, the room was dark. A sliver of moonlight glinted on the steel. I couldn’t see the dot.

^“He’s guilty,” I said.

“That view ain’t new, son.”

“I’m not talking about the evidence, Prof.”

“Then how you know, bro?”

“He said it.”

“Confessed?”

“No, sis,” I said to Michelle. “I’ve never spoken to him. But in prison, Silver saw this on his forearm. . . .” I drew it on a paper napkin, showed it to everyone.

Max shook his head.

Mama shrugged the same message.

“What is it, then, mahn?” Clarence asked, for all of them.

I took out the two pages I had Xeroxed. “This is from the DSM-IV. The manual the shrinks use to put labels on people. Listen.”

They all turned toward me.

“V71.01 is a code number. All the disorders have one. Like schizophrenics or pyromaniacs or whatever. That ‘V’ prefix is kind of a catchall. They say it’s for ‘other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention.’ I remembered it, finally, because it goes in front of malingering.”

“What is that, mahn?”

“Bottom line, it’s when you fake being sick to get out of something, Clarence.”

“Like when you plead insanity?”

“Like when you fake insanity.”

“How do you know all this stuff, mahn?”

“Schoolboy was the shrink’s clerk, Inside,” the Prof said, proudly. “One of the cushiest jobs in the entire joint. Once Burke got that deal working, we made bank in the tank, son. Bank in the tank.”

“From meds?” Michelle asked.

“No, honey,” the Prof told her. “From reports. That’s where you tap the vein. You know what it’s worth to a man going before the Parole Board to have a few little changes made to his jacket? Or a guy trying to get into a work-release program? Or—?”

“I get it,” Michelle said, grinning.

“Let me read it to you,” I said, clearing my throat. “‘V71.01. Adult Antisocial Behavior. This category can be used when the focus of clinical attention is adult antisocial behavior that is not due to a mental disorder, for example, Conduct Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, or an Impulse-Control Disorder. Examples include the behavior of some professional thieves, racketeers, or dealers in illegal substances.’”

“What does that—?”

“Means us,” the Prof cut Michelle’s question off. “Our kind of people.”

“That filthy little maggot isn’t—”

“No,” I said. “He’s not us. He’s not even like us. That code isn’t some diagnosis a psychiatrist put on him—that’s what he’s saying about himself. What he’s telling the world. He didn’t do the . . . things he did because he was nuts; he did them because he wanted to.

“That Nietzsche thing he told Silver? He did those rapes, hurt those women, took those trophies because he could. In his mind, he’s not some sicko; he’s a superman. And the tattoo is his little private joke.”

I handed the photocopied sheets of paper to Max.

“Where he find that book?” Mama asked, pointing at the pages I was holding.

“What I think is, he had a lot of therapy, probably when he was very young,” I said. “I’m guessing here; the sister didn’t say anything about it. But a freak like him doesn’t spring into full bloom overnight.

“First, he experiments. I’ll bet he hurt a lot of small animals, set some fires. . . . And when he finds out what certain things do for him, how they make his blood get hot with power . . . he escalates. Until he gets caught.

“His family had money. Not enough money to quash a major felony, but enough to get him sent for ‘treatment’ instead of the juvie joints when he was a kid.”

“So tattoo is big insult?” Mama said.

“Yeah, exactly,” I agreed. “A joke nobody’s supposed to get but him. I don’t know when he got the idea for it, but it’s his way of sneering at the whole idea of him being a sick man. He’s the opposite. In his mind, he’s a god.”

Max picked up a pair of chopsticks, held them together in his two fists. He twisted his hands, and the chopsticks splintered like matchsticks.

^“You do have a backup plan?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you wanted to interview him. But if you can’t . . .”

“I already told you. I was working on the book way before this whole business with him came to light. His case wasn’t even part of the proposal.”

“Yes, but . . .”

“But what, Laura? What difference does it make now?”

“I guess I’m just . . . insecure.”

“About what?”

“About . . . us. In my world, people are always plotting. You have no idea of all the crimes people in business commit every day. Like it was nothing. Or there’s a set of special rules for them. Remember when Bush made that whole speech about ‘corporate ethics’ last year? What a fraud. You think stuff like Enron or WorldCom is an aberration? It’s only the tip. Business is a religion. Probably the only one practiced all over the world.”

“What does that have to do with—?”

“If you want to succeed, you have to plan very long-term,” she went on, talking over me. “Tools and research. Research and tools,” she said softly, stroking the rock of her faith for comfort. “You have to be very patient. There’s no forgiveness in my world. You only get one chance.”

“Laura . . .”

“You and I met because you wanted something. That part is real, I know. What happened, with us, I mean, I don’t know how real that is. And now that you’re not going to get to meet my—”

“I’m still here,” I said.

“Yes.”

“There’s never any more than that.”

“Yes there is,” she said, fiercely. “There’s . . . promises.”

“I never made any—”

“That’s exactly it,” she said, taking the handcuffs out from under her pillow.

^“Oh no,” she said softly, as she climaxed. “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no!”

In the silence after she let go, I thought I heard the bottle tree whisper. But I couldn’t be sure.

^“Sorry, chief. She doesn’t want you.” Pepper caught herself, quickly added, “Working the case, I mean. There is no case, far as we’re concerned. You understand, right?”

“Sure, but—”

“It’s done,” she said, gently. “Let it go.”

^“I don’t know who the hell you are, or what you’re talking about, pal. But I can tell you this: don’t ever fucking call me again. Understand?”

Molly, at the other end of a phone call. The dead end.

^“Well, sure, it’s still theoretically open,” Davidson said. “But I’ve got my deal in place with Toby, and my client and I are both certain the result will be as agreed.”

“What about the other rapes he did?”

“You know the statute of limitations on a felony as well as I do,” he said. “Better, I’m sure, given your . . . profession. He could call a press conference, confess to everything, and walk away giggling.”

“He’s already done that,” I said.

“What do you want from me, Burke? Some bullshit about bad karma? We both know how it is. Real life isn’t on Oprah. What goes around sometimes doesn’t come around. Chalk it up.”