Eleven on top

I gave the phone back to Morelli, and I went to look in the cupboard. "Do we have cereal that's not coated with sugar?"

"We have bagels and English muffins."

I popped a bagel into the toaster and drank coffee while I waited. "Ranger thinks some of the bombings feel off."

"I agree," Morelli said. "Laski's double-checking the crime-lab reports to make sure we don't have an opportunist at work. And I left a message for him to talk to Chester Rhinehart. So far Chester's the only other person besides you to see Spiro."

"So, what's up for today? How's your leg?"

"The leg is a lot better. No pain. My foot isn't swollen."

There was a lot of loud knocking on the front door. I grabbed my bagel and went to investigate.

It was Lula, dressed in a poison green tank and spandex jeans with rhinestones running down the side seam. "I heard about the wedding," Lula said. "I bet your mama had a cow. Imagine having to call all those people and tell them they're on their own for burgers tonight. But there's some good news in all this, right? You didn't have to go parading around like a freakin' eggplant."

"It all worked out for the best," I said.

"Damn skippy. Glad you feel that way. Wouldn't want you to be in a bad mood since I need a little help."

"Oh boy."

"It's just a little help. Moral support. But you can jump in on the physical stuff if you want. Not that I expect anyone's gonna shoot at us or anything."

"No. Whatever it is ... I'm not doing it."

"You don't mean that. I can see you don't mean that. Where's Officer Hottie? He in the kitchen?" Lula swept past me and went in search of Morelli. "Hey," she said to him. "How's it shakin'? You don't mind if I borrow Stephanie today, do you?"

"He does," I said. "We were going to do something . . ."

"Actually, it's Guy Day," Morelli said to me. "I promised the guys we could hang out today."

"You hung out with the guys yesterday. And the day before."

"Those were cop guys. These are just guy guys. My brother Tony and my cousin

Mooch. They're coming over to watch the game."

"Lucky for you I came along," Lula said to me. "You would have had to hide upstairs in your room so you didn't ruin Guy Day."

"You can stay and watch the game with us," Morelli said to me. "It's not like it's a stag party. It's just Tony and Mooch."

"Yeah," Lula said. "They probably be happy to have someone do the pizza run and open their beer bottles for them."

"Think I'll pass on Guy Day," I said to Morelli. "But thanks for inviting me." I grabbed my jacket and followed Lula out to the Firebird. "Who are we looking for?"

"I'm gonna take another shot at Willie Martin. I'm gonna keep my clothes on this time. I'm gonna nail his ass."

"He didn't leave town?"

"He's such an arrogant so-and-so. He thinks he's safe. He thinks no one can touch him. He's still in his cheap-ass apartment over the garage. My friend Lauralene made a business call on him last night. Do you believe it?"

In a former life, Lula was a 'ho, and she still has a lot of friends in the industry. "Is Lauralene still there?"

"No. Willie's too cheap to pay for a night. Willie's strictly pay by the job."

We crossed town, turned onto Stark, and Lula parked in front of the garage.

We both looked up at Willie's apartment windows on the third floor.

"You got a gun?" Lula asked.

"No."

"Stun gun?"

"No."

"Cuffs?"

"Negative."

"I swear, I don't know why I brought you."

"To make sure you keep your clothes on," I said.

"Yeah, that would be it."

We got out of the Firebird and took the stairs. The air was foul, reeking of urine and stale fast-food burgers and fries. We got to the third-floor landing, and Lula started arranging her equipment. Gun shoved into the waistband of her jeans. Cuffs half out of her pocket. Stun gun rammed into her jeans at the small of her back. Pepper spray in hand.

"Where's the taser?" I asked.

"It's in my purse." She rooted around in her big shoulder bag and found the taser. "I haven't had a chance to test-drive this baby yet, but I think I could figure it out. How hard can it be, right?" She powered up and held on to the taser. She motioned me to the door. "Go ahead and knock."

"Me?"

"He won't open the door if it's me. I'm gonna hide to the side, here. He see a skinny white girl like you standing at his door, he's gonna get all excited and open up."

"He'd better not get too excited."

"Hell, the more excited the better. Slow him down running. Make him do some pole vaulting."

I rapped on the door, and I stood where Martin could see me. The door opened, and he looked me over.

"I don't know what you're selling, but I might be willing to buy it," Willie said.

"Boy, that's real original," I said, walking into his apartment. "I bet you had a hard time coming up with that one."

"Wadda ya mean?"

I turned to face him. Was he really that dumb? I looked into his eyes and decided the answer was yes. And the frightening part is that he outsmarted Lula last time she tried to snag him. Best not to dwell on that realization. The door was still open, and I could see Lula creeping forward behind Willie Martin.

She had pepper spray in one hand and the taser in the other.

"I was actually looking for Andy Bartok," I said to Martin. "This is his apartment, right?"

"This is my apartment. There's no Andy here. Do you know who I am? You follow football?"

"No," I said, putting the couch between me and Martin. "I don't like violent sports."

"I like violent sports," Lula said. "I like the sport called kick Willie Martin in his big ugly blubber butt."

Martin turned to Lula. "You! Guess you didn't get enough of Will Martin, hunh? Guess you came back for more. And look at this here present you brought me ... a candy-ass white woman."

"The only thing I brought you is a ticket to the lockup," Lula said. "I'm hauling your nasty blubber butt off to jail."

"I haven't got no blubber butt," Martin said. He turned again so he could moon Lula, and he dropped his drawers to prove his point.

I was standing in front of him so I got the pole-vaulting demonstration.

Lula got the rear view, and whether it was intentional or just a jerk-action reflex was hard to say, but Lula shot Martin in the ass with the taser.

Martin went down with his pants at half-mast and flopped around on the floor, twitching on the taser line like a fresh-caught fish.

"Get your finger off the button," I yelled to Lula. "You're going to kill him!"

"Oops," Lula said. "Guess I should have read the instruction book."

Martin was facedown, doing shallow breathing. He was about six foot five and close to three hundred pounds. I had no idea how we were going to get him to the Firebird.

"I'll cuff him, and you pull his pants up," Lula said.

"Good try, but this is your party. I'm not doing pants wrangling."

"The bounty hunter assistant is supposed to take orders," Lula said.

I cut my eyes to her.

"Of course, that don't count for you," she said. "On account of you're not an official assistant. You're the..."

"The friend of the bounty hunter," I said.

"Yeah, that's it. The friend of the bounty hunter. How about you cuff him, and I'll get his pants up."

I took the cuffs from Lula. "Works for me."

I cuffed Martins hands behind his back and stepped away, and Lula straddled him and yanked the taser leads off. By the time she got his pants up, she was sweating.

"Usually I'm taking pants off a man," Lula said. "It's a lot more work getting them up than down."

Especially when you're wrestling them up the equivalent of a 280-pound sandbag.

Willie had one eye open, and he was making some low-level gurgling sounds.

"He's gonna be pissed off when he comes around," Lula said. "I'm thinking we want to get him into the car before that happens."

"I'd feel a lot better about this if you had ankle shackles," I said.

"I forgot ankle shackles."

I grabbed a foot and Lula grabbed a foot, and we threw our weight into dragging Martin to the door. We got him through the door and onto the cement landing and realized we were going to have to use the rickety freight elevator.

"It's probably okay," Lula said, pushing the button.

I closed and locked Martin's door. I repeated Lula's words. It's probably okay. It's probably okay. The elevator made a lot of grinding, clanking noises, and we could see it shudder as it rose from the bottom floor.

"It's just three floors," Lula said, more to herself than to me. "Three floors isn't a whole lot, right? Probably you could jump from three floors if you had to. Remember when you fell off that fire escape? That was three floors, right?"

"Two floors by the time I actually started free falling." And it knocked me out and hurt like hell.

The open-air car came to a lurching stop three inches below floor level.

Lula struggled with the grate and finally got it half open.

"You got the least weight," Lula said. "You go in first and see if it holds you."

I gingerly got into the cage. It swayed slightly but held. "Feels okay," I said.

Lula crept in. "See, this is gonna be fine," Lula said, standing very still.

"This is one sturdy-ass elevator. You give this elevator a coat of paint and it'll be like new."

The elevator groaned and dropped two inches.

"Just settling in," Lula said. "I'm sure it's fine. I could see this is a real safe elevator. Still, maybe we should get off and reconsider our options."

Lula took a step forward and the elevator went into a downslide, banging against the side of the building, groaning and screeching. It reached the second floor and the bottom dropped out from under us. Lula and I hit the ground level and lay there stunned, knocked breathless, with rust sifting down on us like fairy dust.

"Fuck," Lula said. "Take a look at me and tell me if anything's broken."

I got to my hands and knees and crawled out of the elevator. It was Sunday and the garage was closed, thank God. At least we didn't have an audience.

And probably the guys who worked in the garage wouldn't be real helpful when it came to capturing Martin. Lula crawled out after me, and we slowly got to our feet.

"I feel like a truck rolled over me," Lula said. "That was a dumb idea to take the elevator. You're supposed to stop me from acting on those dumb ideas."

I tried to dust some of the rust and elevator grit off my jeans, but it was sticking like it was glued on. "I don't know how to break this to you," I said.

"But your FTA is still on the third floor."

"We're just gonna have to carry Willie down the stairs," Lula said. "I got him cuffed. I'm not giving up now."

"We can't carry him. He's too heavy."

"Then we'll drag him. Okay, so he might get a little bruised, but we'll say we were walking him down and he slipped. That happens, right? People fall down the stairs all the time. Look at us, we just fell down an elevator, and are we complaining?"

We were standing next to a stack of tires that were loaded onto a hand truck. "Maybe we could use this hand truck," I said. "We could strap Martin on like a refrigerator. It'll be hard to get him down the two flights of stairs, but at least we won't crack his head open."

"That's a good idea," Lula said. "I was just going to think of that idea."

We off-loaded the tires and carted the truck up the stairs. Martin was still out. He was drooling and his expression was dazed, but his breathing had normalized, and he now had both eyes open. We laid the hand truck flat and rolled Martin onto it. I'd brought about thirty feet of strapping up with the hand truck, and we wrapped Martin onto the truck until he looked like a mummy. Then we pushed and pulled until we had Martin and the truck upright.

"Now we're going to ease him down, one step at a time," I said to Lula.

"We're both going to get a grip on the truck, and between the two of us we should be able to do this."

By the time we got Martin to the second-floor landing we were soaked through. The air in the stairwell was hot and stagnant, and lowering Martin down the stairs one at a time was hard work. My hands were raw from gripping the strapping and my back ached. We stopped to catch our breath, and I saw Martins fingers twitch. Not a good sign. I didn't want him struggling to get free on the next set of stairs.

"We have to get moving," I said to Lula. "He's coming around."

"I'm coming around, too," Lula said. "I'm having a heart attack. I think I gave myself a hernia. And look... I broke a nail. It was my best nail, too. It was the one with the stars and stripes decal."

We shifted the hand truck into position to take the first step, and Martin turned his head and looked me in the eye.

"What the..." he said. And then he went nuts, yelling and struggling against the strapping. He was crazy-eyed and a vein was popped out in his forehead.

I was having a hard time hanging on to the hand truck, and I was watching the strapping around his chest go loose and show signs of unraveling.

"The stun gun," I yelled to Lula. "Give him a jolt with the stun gun. I can't hang on with him struggling like this."

Lula reached around back for the stun gun and came up empty. "Must have fallen out when the elevator crashed," she said.

"Do something! The strap is unraveling. Shoot him. Zap him. Kick him in the nuts. Do something! Anything!"

"I got my spray!" Lula said. "Stand back, and I'll spray the snot out of him."

"No!" I shrieked. "Don't spray in the stairwell!"

"It's okay, I got plenty," Lula said.

She hit the button, and I got a faceful of pepper spray. Martin gave an enraged bellow and wrenched the hand truck away from Lula and me. I was blinded and gagging, and I could hear the hand truck banging down the stairs like a toboggan. There was some scuffling at ground level, the door opened, and then it was quiet at the bottom of the stairs. At the top of the stairs, Lula and I were gasping for breath, feeling our way down, trying to get away from the droplets that were still hanging in the torpid air on the second-floor landing.

We stumbled over the hand truck when we got to the bottom. We pushed through the door and stood bent at the waist, waiting for the mucus production to slow, eyes closed and tearing, nose running.

"Guess pepper spray wasn't a good idea," Lula finally said.

I blew my nose in my T-shirt and tried to blink my eyes clear. I didn't want to touch them with my hand in case I still had some spray left on my skin.

Martin was nowhere to be seen. The wrapping was in a heap on the sidewalk.

"You don't look too good," Lula said. "You're all red and blotchy. I'm probably red and blotchy, too, but I got superior skin tone. You got that pasty white stuff that only looks good after you get a facial and put on makeup."

We were squinting, not able to fully open our eyes, my throat burned like fire, and I was a mucus factory.

"I need to wash my hands and my face," I said. "I have to get this stuff off me."

We got into Lula's Firebird, and Lula crept down Stark to Olden. She turned on Olden and somehow the Firebird found its way to a McDonald's. We parked and dragged ourselves into the ladies' room.

I stuck my entire head under the faucet. I washed my face and hair and hands as best I could, and I dried my hair under the hot-air hand dryer.

"You're a little scary," Lula said. "You got a white woman Afro thing going."

I didn't care. I shuffled out of the ladies' room and got a cheeseburger, fries, and a bottle of water.

Lula sat across from me. She had a mountain of food and a gallon of soda.

"What's with you?" she wanted to know. "Where's your soda? Where's your pie?

You gotta have a pie when you come here."

"No soda and no pie. I'm off sweets."

"What about cake? What about doughnuts?"

"No cake. No doughnuts."

"You can't do that. You need cake and doughnuts. That's your comfort food. That's your stress buster. You don't eat cake and doughnuts, and you'll get all clogged up."

"I made a deal with my mother. She's off the booze as long as I'm off the sugar."

"That's a bad deal. You're not good at that deprivation stuff. You're like a big jelly doughnut. You give it a squeeze and the jelly squishes out. You don't let it squish out where it wants and it's gotta find a new place to squish out. Remember when your love life was in the toilet and you weren't getting any? You were eating bags of candy bars. You're a compensator. Some people can hold their jelly in, but not you. Your jelly gotta squish out somewhere."

"You've got to stop talking about doughnuts. You're making me hungry."

"See, that's what I'm telling you. You're one of them hungry people. You deprive yourself of cake and you're gonna want to eat something else."

I shoved some fries into my mouth and crooked an eyebrow at Lula.

"You know what I'm saying," Lula said. "You better be careful, or you'll send Officer Hottie to the emergency room. And you're working for Ranger now. How're you gonna keep from taking a bite outta that? He's just one big hot sexy doughnut far as I'm concerned."

"What are you going to do about Willie Martin?"

"I don't know. I'm gonna have to think about it. Taking him down in his apartment doesn't seem to be working."

"Does he have a job?"

"Yeah, he works nights, stealing cars and hijacking trucks."

I drained my bottle of water and bundled my trash. "I need to go back to Morelli's house and get out of these clothes. Call me when you get a new plan for Martin."

"You mean you'd go out with me again?"

"Yeah." Go figure that. Truth is, it was getting pretty obvious that being a bounty hunter wasn't the problem. In fact, maybe being a bounty hunter was the solution. At least I'd acquired a few survival skills. When trouble followed me home I was able to cope. I was never going to be Ranger, but I wasn't Ms. Wimp either. There were a bunch of cars parked in front of Morelli's house when Lula dropped me off.

"You sure you want to go in there?" Lula asked. "Looks like its still Guy Day."

"I don't care what day it is. I'm beat. I want to take a shower, get into clean clothes, and turn into a couch potato."

I straggled into the house and found five guys slouched in front of the television. I knew them all. Mooch, Tony, Joe, Stanley Skulnik, and Ray Daily. There were pizza boxes, boxes of doughnuts, discarded candy bar wrappers, beer bottles, and chip bags on the coffee table. Bob was sound asleep on the floor by Morelli. He had orange Cheez Doodle dust on his nose, and a red jelly bean stuck in the fur on his ear. Everyone but Bob was eyes glued to the television. They all turned and stared at me when I walked into the room.

"Hows it going?" Mooch said.

"Looking good," Stanley said.

"Yo," from Tony.

"Long time no see," Ray said.

And they turned back to the game.

I had hair from hell, I'd blown my nose in my shirt, I was covered with rust and crud, my jeans were torn, and I was holding a roll of toilet paper from McDonald's, and no one noticed. Not that I was surprised by this. After all, these guys were from the Burg, and a game was on television. Morelli continued to stare after the others had turned away.

"Fell down an elevator shaft and got sprayed with pepper spray," I said to him. "Picked up the toilet paper at McDonalds."

"And you're okay?"

I nodded.

"Could you get me a cold one?"

I got into the shower and stood there until there was no more hot water. I got dressed in Morelli's sweats, blasted my hair with the dryer, and crawled into bed. It was close to seven when I woke up. The house was quiet. I shuffled into the bathroom, glanced in the mirror, and realized there was a note pinned to my sweatshirt.

WENT OUT TO EAT WITH MOOCH AND TONY. DIDN'T WANT TO WAKE YOU. CALL MY CELL IF YOU WANT ME TO BRING SOMETHING HOME. THERE'S LEFTOVER PIZZA IN THE FRIDGE.

Apparently Guy Day continued into Guy Night. I shuffled downstairs and ate the leftover pizza. I washed it down with a Bud. I checked out the doughnut box.

Three doughnuts left in the box. I blew out a sigh. I wanted a doughnut. I paced in the kitchen. I finished off a bag of chips. I drank another Bud. I couldn't stop thinking about the doughnuts. It's only been one friggin' day, I thought. Surely I can make it through one lousy day without a doughnut. I went to the living room and remoted the television. I flipped through the channels. I couldn't concentrate. I was haunted by the doughnuts. I stormed into the kitchen space, got the doughnuts, and threw them in the garbage. I paced around, and I got the doughnuts out of the garbage. I rammed them down the garbage disposal and ran the disposal. I stared into the sink at the empty drain. No doughnuts. I couldn't believe I had to disposal the doughnuts. I was pathetic. I went back to the living room and tried television again. Nothing held my attention. I was restless. Big Blue was at the curb, but I had nowhere to go. It was Sunday night. The mall was closed. I wasn't up to a visit with my parents. Probably I shouldn't be driving Big Blue anyway. It was sitting out there unprotected.

A couple minutes after nine, Morelli swung in on his crutches. "You're looking better," he said. "You were out like a light when I left. I guess falling down an elevator shaft is exhausting. Did you get your man?"

"No. He ran away."

Morelli grinned. "You're not supposed to let them do that."

"Did I miss anything important?"

"Yeah. I just got a call from Laski. Four bodies were found in a shallow grave in a patch of woods off upper Stark this afternoon. Some kids stumbled across it. They said they were looking for their dog, but they were probably looking for a place to smoke weed." Morelli eased him self onto the couch.

"Laski said the bodies were pretty decomposed, but there were rings and belt buckles. None of the bodies has been officially identified yet, but Laski's certain one of them is Barroni. He was wearing an initialed belt buckle when he disappeared, and the wedding ring matches the description his wife, Carla, gave when she filed missing persons."

I sat next to Morelli. "That's so sad. I always hoped they'd suddenly reappear. Did Laski know how they were killed?"

"Shot. Multiple times. All in the chest, as if they'd been standing together and someone sprayed them with bullets like in an old Al Capone movie."

"What about the cars?"

"Laski said there was a dirt road going in. Most likely used by kids looking for privacy for one reason or another. So cars could have driven in there. But no cars were found with the bodies."

"I have profiles on the four missing men. I've been trying to tie them together. And I had a feeling Anthony Barroni and Spiro Stiva were involved somehow.

Now I'm not so sure. Maybe Spiro came back for the sole purpose of terrorizing me and eventually killing me. Maybe he's a lone gun out there and not hanging with anyone. That would partially explain why no one's seen him."

"There's a description out on him now. There's a corroborating witness that Spiro, or at least someone with a badly scarred face, was seen in the area when my garage went up. I don't know what to say about the men who were just found. It's pretty clear that someone called a meeting and executed them."

"They had to have known the gunman," I said. "I can't see any of these men getting in his car and driving off to a meeting on upper Stark at the request of a stranger."

"I agree, but we don't know the relationship. It could have been something impersonal, like blackmail. And the blackmailer decided to terminate."

"Do you think that's it?"

"No," Morelli said. "I think they all knew each other, and there was a fifth member of the group who had his own agenda."

"They were all in the same unit at Fort Dix."

Morelli turned and looked at me. "You found that out?"

"Yeah."

"So, not only are you hot but you're smart, too?"

"You think I'm hot?"

Morelli had his hand up my shirt, tinkering with my bra. "Cupcake, I'm not sharing my house with you because you can cook."

I cut my eyes to him. "Are you telling me I'm here just for the sex?"

Morelli was concentrating on getting me undressed and not paying attention to the tone of my voice. "Yeah, the sex has been great."

"What about the companionship, the friendship, the relationship part of this?"

Morelli paused in his effort to release the clasp on my bra. "Uh oh, did I just say something stupid?"

"Yes. You said I was just here for the sex."

"I didn't mean that."

"Yes, you did! It's all you think about with me."

"Cut me some slack," Morelli said. "I have a broken leg. I sit here all day, eating jelly beans and thinking about you naked. It's what guys do when they have a broken leg."

"You did that before you broke your leg."

"Oh man," Morelli said. "This isn't going to turn into one of those issue discussions, is it? I hate those discussions."

"Suppose for some reason we couldn't have sex. Would you still love me?"

"Yeah, but not as much."

"What kind of an answer is that? That's not the right answer."

Okay, so I knew his answer wasn't serious, and I didn't really think my relationship with Morelli was entirely sexual, but I couldn't seem to stop myself from getting crazy. I was on my feet, flapping my arms and yelling. This was usually Morelli's role, and here I was, working myself into a frenzy, going down a one-way street to nowhere. And I suspected it was Lula's jelly doughnut. The doughnut was bursting with jelly, and the jelly was squishing out in all the wrong places. And if that wasn't frightening enough, I was turning myself on. All the while I was yelling about Morelli wanting nothing but sex, the truth is, I could think of nothing else.

"Can we finish this upstairs?" Morelli asked. "My leg wants to go to bed."

"Sure," I said. "There are parts of me that want to go to bed, too."

I was showered and dressed and ready to go to work. I'd had two mugs of coffee and an English muffin. It was 8:00 A.M., and Morelli was still in bed.

"Hey," I said. "What's up with you? You're always the early riser."

"Mmmmph," Morelli said, pillow over his face. "Tired."

"How could you be tired? It's eight o'clock. It's time to get up! I'm leaving. Don't you want to kiss me goodbye?"

Nothing. No answer. I whipped the sheet off him and left him lying there in all his glorious nakedness. Morelli still didn't move.

I sat on the bed next to him. "Joe?"

"I thought you were going to work."

"You're looking very sexy . . . except for Mr. Happy, who seems to be sleepy."

"He's not sleepy, Steph. He's in a coma. You woke him up every two hours and now he's dead."

"He's dead?"

"Okay, not dead, but he's not going to be up and dancing anytime soon. You might as well go to work. Did you walk Bob?"

"I walked Bob. I fed Bob. I cleaned the living room and the kitchen."

"Love you," Morelli said from under the pillow.

"I 1-1-1-like you, too." Shit.

I went downstairs and stood at the front door, looking out at Big Blue. Probably perfectly safe, but I didn't feel comfortable taking the chance.

Bob came to stand next to me. "I have no way to get to work," I said to Bob.

"I could call Ranger, but lately it feels like I'm on a date when I'm in a car with Ranger, and it would be tacky to have a date pick me up here. Lula probably isn't up yet." I went to the kitchen and dialed my parents' number.

"I need a ride to work," I told my mom. "Can you or Dad take me?"

"Your father can pick you up," my mom said. "He's driving the cab today, anyway. Are you still off dessert?"

"Yes. How about you?"

"It's amazing. I don't even have the slightest need to tipple now that the wedding is behind us and Valerie's in Disney World."

Great. My mother doesn't need to tipple, and I'm so strung out with doughnut cravings I put Mr. Happy into a coma.

My dad showed up ten minutes later. "What's wrong with the Buick?" he said.

"Broken."

"I figured you were worried it was booby-trapped."

"Yep. That, too."

Ranger was waiting for me when I arrived. He was in my cubby, slouched in the extra chair, reading through the files on Gorman, Lazar, Barroni, and Runion.

There was a new cell phone on my desk, plus a new key fob, and my Sig. The Sig was in a holster that clipped to a belt.

"They found them," I said.

"I heard. How'd you get in to work?"

"My dad."

"I have a bike set aside for you downstairs. If you park it exposed, be sure to look it over before getting on. It's hard to hide a bomb on a bike, but you still need to be careful. The key is on your keychain."

"As far as Rangeman is concerned, Gorman is found, and the file is closed,"

Ranger said. "If you still think there's a connection between the murdered men and your stalker and you want to use this office to continue searching, you have permission to do that."

I looked at my in-box and stifled a groan. It was packed with search requests.

Ranger followed my eyes. "You're going to have to divide your time and get through some of those files. They're not just from Rodriguez. You do the searches for everyone here, including me."

He stood and brushed against me, and I had a wave of desire rush into my chest and shoot south.

"What?" Ranger said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You moaned."

"I was thinking of Butterscotch Krimpets."

Our eyes locked for a long moment. "I'll be in my office the rest of the morning," Ranger said. "Let me know if you need anything."

Oh boy.

I sorted through the requests that had come in over the weekend. Three were from Ranger. I'd do them first. He was the boss. And he was hot. One was from someone named Alvirez. The rest were Rodriguez. Ranger's files were all standard searches. Nothing unusual. I had them done by noon. My plan was to get a quick lunch, run the Alvirez and two for Rodriguez, and then see what I could turn up at Fort Dix. I prowled through the kitchen, not finding anything inspiring to eat.

I settled on the turkey again and took it back to my cubicle with a bottle of water. I finished lunch, finished Alvirez and Rodriguez, and started surfing Fort Dix.

I called my mother, Morelli, Lula, and Valerie and told them I had a new cell phone. Valerie was in the Magic Kingdom and said she'd be home at the end of the week. They liked Florida, but the girls missed their friends, and Albert had broken out in hives when he was approached by a six-foot-tall, four-foot-wide Pooh Bear. Lula wasn't answering. I left a message. Morelli wasn't answering. I left a message. My mother invited me for dinner, and I declined.

It was midafternoon when Ranger returned to my cubby. I was pacing, unable to focus on anything beyond my need for a cupcake.

"Babe," Ranger said. "You're looking a little strung out. Is there anything I should know?"

"I'm in sugar withdrawal. I've given up dessert, and it's all I can think about." That had been true five minutes ago. Now that Ranger was standing in front of me I was thinking a cupcake wasn't what I actually wanted.

"Maybe I can help get your mind off doughnuts," Ranger said.

My mouth dropped open, and I think some drool might have dribbled out.

"Did Silvio show you how to search the newspapers?" Ranger asked. No.

"Sit down and I'll show you how to get into the programs. It's tedious work, but it accesses a lot of information. You want to go to the local paper and look for something bad that happened when the four men were at Dix. An unsolved murder, a high-stakes robbery, unsolved serial crimes like multiple burglaries."

"Morelli thinks there were five men involved. Originally, I thought Anthony

Barroni was the fifth guy, but now I'm not sure. Is there a way to get a list of men who were in that unit at Dix?"

"I don't have access to those records. I could get someone to hack in but I'd rather not. It would be safer to have Morelli do it."

I was hearing the words, but they weren't sticking. My brain was clogged with naked and sweaty Ranger thoughts.

"Babe," Ranger said, smiling. "You just looked me up and down like I was lunch."

"I need a doughnut," I told him. "I really need a doughnut."

"That would have been my second guess."

"I'll feel better tomorrow. The sugar will be out of my system. The cravings will be gone." I sat down and faced the keyboard. "How do I do this?"

Ranger pulled a chair next to me. His leg pressed against mine and when he leaned forward to get to my keyboard we were shoulder to shoulder, his arm brushing the side of my breast when he typed. He was warm and he smelled delicious. I felt my eyes glaze over, and I worried I might start panting.

"You should take notes," Ranger said. "You're going to need to remember some passwords."

Get a grip, I said to myself. It wouldn't be good to jump on him here. You'd be on television. And you haven't got a door on your cubby. And then there was Morelli. I was living with Morelli. It wouldn't be right to live with Morelli and boink Ranger. And what was wrong with me, anyway, that I needed two men? Especially when the second man was Ranger. Ever since we'd had the discussion about marriage my imagination had been running wild dredging up possibilities for his deep dark secret. I knew it had nothing to do with killing people because that was no secret. I knew he wasn't gay. I'd seen that one firsthand. The memory brought a new rush of heat, and I resisted squirming in my seat. Was he scarred by a terrible childhood? Had his heart been so badly broken he was unable to recover?

"Earth to Babe," Ranger said.

I looked at him and unconsciously licked my lips.

"I'm going to have to disconnect your cubby's security camera," Ranger said.

"I just heard everyone in the control room gasp when you licked your lips. I could have a hatchet murder taking place in full monitor view on one of my accounts, and I don't think anyone would notice as long as you're sitting in here." Ranger signed off the search he'd just pulled up. He took my pad and wrote out instructions for retrieving information from newspapers. He returned the pad to my desk and stood. "Let's go on a field trip," he said.

"I want to see the area where the bodies were recovered."

I thought that sounded sufficiently grim to be a good doughnut diversion. I stood and clipped my new cell phone onto the waistband of my jeans. I pocketed the key fob. And I stared at the gun. The gun was in a holster that attached to a belt, and I wasn't wearing a belt.

"No belt," I said to Ranger.

"Ella has some clothes for you upstairs in my apartment. Try them on. I'm sure she's included a belt. I'll meet you in the garage. I need to talk to Tank."

I took the elevator to the top floor and stepped out into the small marble-floored foyer. I'd lived here for a brief time not long ago, so I was familiar with the apartment. I opened the locked door with the key he'd given me and stepped inside. His apartment always felt cool and serene. His furniture was comfortable, with clean lines and earth tones, and felt masculine without being overbearing. There were fresh flowers on the sideboard by the door. I doubted Ranger ever noticed the flowers, but Ella liked them. They were part of Ella's campaign to civilize Ranger and make his life nicer.

I dropped my keys in the silver dish beside the flowers. I walked through the apartment and found my clothes stacked on a black leather upholstered bench in Ranger's dressing room. Two black shirts, two black cargo pants, a black belt, a black windbreaker, a black sweatshirt, a black ball cap. I was going to look like a mini-Ranger. I stepped into the cargo pants. Perfect fit. Ella had remembered my size from the last time I'd stayed here. I belted the cargo pants, and I tugged the shirt over my head. It was a short-sleeved shirt, female cut with some spandex. It had a V-neck that was relatively high. Rangeman was embroidered on the left breast with black thread. The shirt was a good fit with the exception of being too short to tuck into the cargo pants. The shirt barely touched the top of the cargo pants waistband.

I called Ranger on his cell. "This shirt is short. I'm not sure you're going to like it on the control room floor."

"Put a jacket over it and come down to the garage."

I shrugged into the windbreaker. Black on black again, with Rangeman embroidered on the left breast of the jacket. I took my phone off my jeans and clipped it onto the cargo pants. I grabbed the black-on-black ball cap, and I left Rangers apartment and rode the elevator to the garage.

Ranger was waiting by his truck. He was wearing a windbreaker exactly like mine, and the almost smile expression was fixed on his face.

"I feel like a miniature Ranger," I said to him.

Ranger unzipped the windbreaker and looked me over. "Nice, but you're no miniature Ranger." He took my Sig out of his jacket pocket and snapped it onto my belt just in front of my hip, his knuckles grazing bare skin. "There are some advantages to this short shirt," he said, sliding his hands under, fingertips stopping short of my bra.

"Okay, here's the deal," I said to him. "You know how when you squeeze a jelly doughnut and the jelly squirts out in the weakest spot of the doughnut? Well, if I'm a jelly doughnut then my weak spot is dessert. Every time I get stressed I head for the bakery. I'm trying to stop the dessert thing now, and so the jelly is squirting out someplace else."

"And?"

"And this place that it's squirting out. . . maybe squirting out isn't a good way to put this. Forget squirting out."

"You're trying to tell me something," Ranger said.

"Yes! And it would be a lot easier if you didn't have your hands under my shirt. It's hard for me to think when you've got your hands on me like this."

"Babe, has it occurred to you that you might be giving information to the enemy?"

"The thing is, I have all these excess hormones. They used to be jelly-doughnut hormones, but somehow they got switched over to sex-drive hormones. Not that sex-drive hormones are bad, it's just that my life is so complicated right now. So I'm trying to control all these stupid hormones, to keep them locked up in the doughnut. And you're going to have to help."

"Why?"

"Because you're a good guy."

"I'm not that good," Ranger said.

"So I'm in trouble?"

"Big time."

"You told Ella to get me this short shirt, didn't you?"

Ranger's fingers were slowly creeping up my breast. "No. I told her to get you something that didn't look like it was made for Tank. She probably didn't realize it was cut off at the waist."

"The hand," I said. "You have to remove the hand. You're poaching."

Ranger smiled and kissed me. Light. No tongue. The appetizer on Ranger's dinner menu. "Don't count on my help with the overactive sex drive," he said. "You're on your own with this one."

I looked up at the security camera focused on us. "Do you think Hal will sell this tape to the evening news?"

"Not if he wants to live." Ranger took a step back and opened the passenger-side door to the truck for me.

Ranger took the wheel, drove out of the garage, and headed for the patch of scrub woods east of center city where the four men had been found. Neither of us spoke. Understandable since there wasn't a lot to say after I explained my jelly doughnut dilemma, and Ranger'd declared open season on Stephanie. Still, it was good to have cleared the air, and now if I accidentally ripped his clothes off he'd understand it was one of those odd chemical things.

The crime-scene tape blocked the dirt road leading back to the crime site and covered a couple acres along the road and into the woods. Ranger parked the truck, and we got out and scooted under the yellow tape. I could see a van through the trees, and snatches of conversation carried to me. Men's voices.

Two or three.

We walked the dirt road through the scrubby field and into the woods. The graves weren't far in. There was an area about the size of a two-car garage where the vegetation had been trampled over the years, leaving hard-packed dirt and some hardscrabble grass. This was the end of the road, the turnaround point.

This was the place where drug deals were made, sex was sold, and kids got drunk, stoned, pregnant.

The van belonged to the state lab. The side door was open. One guy stood by the open door, writing on a pad. Two guys in shirtsleeves were working at the grave site. They were wearing disposable gloves and carrying evidence bags. They looked our way and nodded, recognizing Ranger.

"Your FTA's long gone," the guy at the van said.

"Just curious," Ranger told him. "Wanted to see what the scene looked like."

"Looks like you got a new partner. What happened to Tank?"

"It's Tank's day off," Ranger said.

"Hey, wait a minute," the guy said, smiling at me. "Aren't you Stephanie Plum?"

"Yes," I said. "And whatever you've heard ... it isn't true."

"You two are kind of cute together," the guy said to Ranger. "I like the matching clothes. Does Celia know about this?"

"This is business," Ranger said. "Stephanie's working for Rangeman. Are you finding anything interesting?"

"Hard to say. There was a lot of trash here. Everything from left-behind panties to crack cookers. A lot of used condoms and needles. You want to watch where you walk. Be best if you stay on the road. The road's clean."

"How deep was the grave?"

"A couple feet. I'm surprised they weren't found sooner. It's on the far perimeter of the cleared area so maybe it wasn't noticed. Or maybe no one cared. From the way the ground's settled I'd say they were here for a while. Couple weeks at least. Looks to me like they were shot here. Won't know for sure until the lab tests come back."

"Did he leave the shells?"

"Took the shells."

Ranger nodded. "Later."

"Later. Give Celia a hug for me."

We got back to the truck and Ranger shielded his eyes from the low-angled sun and studied the road we'd just walked.

"There was just barely enough room back there for five cars," Ranger said.

"We know two of them were SUVs. Probably they could at least partially be seen from the main road. And that probably ensured their privacy. We know when three of the men left work and got into their cars. If they came directly here they'd arrive around six-thirty, which meant there was still daylight."

"You'd think someone would have heard gunshots. This guy didn't just pop off a couple rounds."

"It's an isolated area. And if you were a passing motorist it might be hard to tell where the shots originated. Most likely you'd just get the hell out of here."

We climbed into the truck and buckled ourselves in.

"Who's Celia?" I asked Ranger.

"My sister. Marty Sanchez, the guy by the van, went to school with Celia. They dated for a while."

"Is she your only sister?"

"I have four sisters."

"Any brothers?"

"One."

"And you have a daughter," I said.

Ranger swung the truck onto the paved road. "Not many people know about my

daughter."

"Understood. Do I get to ask more questions?"

"One."

"How old are you?"

"I'm two months older than you," Ranger said.

"You know my birthday?"

"I know lots of things about you. And that was two questions."

It was five o'clock when we pulled into the garage.

"How's Morelli doing?" Ranger asked.

"Good. He's going back to work tomorrow. The cast won't come off for a while, so he's limited. He's on crutches, and he can't drive, and he can't walk Bob. I'm going to stay until he's more self-sufficient. Then I'll go back to my apartment."

Ranger walked me to the bike. "I don't want you going back to your apartment until we get this guy."

"You don't have to worry about me," I said. "I've got a gun."

"Would you feel comfortable using it?"

"No, but I could hit someone over the head with it."

The bike was a black Ducati Monster. I'd driven Morelli's Due, so I was on familiar ground. I took the black full-face helmet off the grip and handed it to Ranger. I took the key out of my pocket, and I swung my leg over the bike.

Ranger was watching me, smiling. "I like the way you straddle that," he said. "Someday . . ."

I revved the engine and cut off the rest of the sentence. I didn't have to read his lips to know where he was going. I put the helmet on, Ranger remoted the gate open for me, and I wheeled out of the garage.

It felt great to be on the bike. The air was cool, and traffic was light. It was just a few minutes short of rush hour. I took it slow, getting the feel of the machine. I cut to the alley and brought the bike in through Morellis backyard. Morelli had an empty tool shed next to his house. The shed was locked with a combination lock, and I knew the combination. I spun the dial, opened the shed, and locked the bike away.

Morelli was waiting for me in the kitchen. "Let me guess," Morelli said. "He

gave you a bike. A Due."

"Yeah. It was terrific riding over here." I went to the fridge and studied the inside. Not a lot there. "I'll take Bob out, and you can dial supper," I said.

"What do you want?"

"Anything without sugar."

"You're still on the no-sugar thing?"

"Yeah. I hope you took a nap this afternoon."

Morelli poked me with his crutch. "Where are your clothes? You weren't wearing this when you left this morning."

"I left them at work. I didn't have a way to carry them on the bike. I could use a backpack." I still had the wind breaker zipped over the shirt. I thought it was best to delay the short-shirt confrontation until after we'd eaten. I clipped Bob to his leash and took off. I got back just as the Pino's delivery kid was leaving.

"I ordered roast beef subs," Morelli said. "Hope that's okay."

I took a sub and unwrapped it and gave it to Bob. I handed a sub to Morelli, and I unwrapped the third for myself. We were in the living room, on the couch, as always. We ate, and we watched the news.

"The news is always the same," I said. "Death, destruction, blah, blah, blah. There should be a news station that only does happy news."

I collected the wrappers when we were done eating and carted them off to the kitchen. Morelli followed after me on his crutches.

"Take your jacket off," Morelli said. "I want to see the rest of the uniform."

"Later."

"Now."

"I was thinking I might go back to work just for a couple hours. I started a search and didn't get to finish it."

Morelli had me backed into a corner. "I don't think so. I have plans for tonight. Let's see the shirt."

"I don't want to hear any yelling."

"It's that bad?"

It wasn't just the shirt. It was also the gun. Morelli was going to be unhappy that I was carrying. He knew I was a moron when it came to guns. I took the jacket off and twirled for him. "What do you think?"

"I'm going to kill him. Don't worry. I'll make it look like an accident."

"He didn't pick out the shirt. His housekeeper picked out the shirt. She's short. It probably came to her knees."

"Who picked out the gun?"

"Ranger picked out the gun."

"Is it loaded?"

"I don't know. I didn't look."

"You aren't really going to keep working for him, are you? He's a nut. Plus half his workforce has graduated from Jersey Penal," Morelli said. "And what about not wanting a dangerous job?"

"The job isn't dangerous. It's boring. I sit at a computer all day."

I had Morelli up and dressed. I got him down the stairs and into the kitchen. I sat him at the table, put the coffee on, and left for a short walk with Bob. When I came back, Morelli was asleep with his head on the table. I put a mug of coffee in front of him, and he opened an eye.

"You have to open both eyes," I said. "You're going to work today. Laski's picking you up in five minutes."

"That gives me five minutes to sleep," Morelli said.

"No! Drink some coffee. Get some legal stimulants into your system." I danced in front of him. "Look at me. I'm wearing a gun! And look at the short shirt. Are you going to let me go to work like this?"

"Cupcake, I haven't got the energy to stop you. Anyway, maybe if you look slutty enough, Ranger will take up some of the slack in the bedroom before you make a permanent cripple out of me. Maybe you should wear that shirt with the neckline that lets your boobs hang out." Morelli squinted at me.

"Why aren't you tired?"

"I don't know. I feel all energized. I always thought I couldn't keep up with you, but maybe you've just been slowing me down all these years."

"Stephanie, I'm begging you. Eat some doughnuts. I can't keep going like this."

I poured his coffee into a travel mug and got him to his feet. I shoved the crutches under his arms and pushed him to the front door. Laski was already at the curb. I helped Morelli hobble down the stairs and maneuver himself into the car. I threw his crutches onto the backseat and handed Morelli his mug of coffee.

"Have a nice day," I said. I gave him a kiss, closed the car door, and watched as Laski motored them away, down the street.

There was a chill to the air, so I went back to the house, ran upstairs, and borrowed Morelli's leather biker jacket. I tied the Rangeman windbreaker around my waist, I gave Bob a hug, and I let myself out through the back door. I unlocked the shed and rolled the bike out, and a half hour later, I was at my desk.

I went straight into the newspaper search. I limited the search to the last three months the men were at Dix. It seemed to me that was the most likely time frame for them to do something catastrophic. I began with a name search and came up empty. None of the men were mentioned in any of the local papers. My next search was front page. I was only reading headlines, but it was still a slow process.

I stopped the Fort Dix search at nine-thirty and switched to Rangeman business, working my way through the security check requests. By noon I was questioning my ability to do the job long-term. The words were swimming on the screen, and I felt creaky from sitting. I went to the kitchen and poked at the sandwiches.

Turkey, tuna, grilled vegetables, roast beef, chicken salad. I dialed Ranger on my cell phone.

"Yo," Ranger said. "Is there a problem?"

"I don't like any of these sandwiches."

There was a moment of dead phone time before Ranger answered. "Go upstairs to my apartment. I think there's some peanut butter left from last time you stayed there."

"Where are you?"

"I'm with an account. I'm inspecting a new system."

"Are you coming home for lunch?"

"No," Ranger said. "I won't be back until three. Are you still off sugar?"

"Yes."

"Maybe I can get back sooner."

"No rush," I said. "I'm happy with peanut butter."

"I'm counting on that being a lie," Ranger said.

I let myself into Ranger's apartment and went straight to the kitchen. He still had the peanut butter in his fridge, and there was a loaf of bread on the granite countertop. I made myself a sandwich and washed it down with a beer. I was tempted to take a nap in Ranger's bed, but that felt too much like Goldilocks.

I was on my way out when I got a call from Lula. "I got him trapped," she yelled into the phone. "I got Willie Martin trapped in the deli at the corner of Twenty-fifth Street and Lowrnan Avenue. Only I'm gonna need help to bag him. If you're at Rangeman it's just around the corner."

"Are you sure you need my help?"

"Hurry!"

I took the elevator to the first floor and went out the front door. No point taking the bike. The deli was only a block away. I jogged to Lowman, and saw Lula standing in front of Fennick's Deli.

"He's in there eating," she said to me. "I just happened on him. I was going in for sandwiches for Connie and me and there he was. He's in the back where they have some tables."

"Did he see you?"

"I don't think so. I got out right away."

"So what do you need me for?"

"I thought you could be a diversion. You could go in there and get his attention, and then I'll sneak up and zap him with the stun gun."

"Didn't we already try that?"

"Yeah, but we'd be better this time on account of we got some practice at it."

"Okay, but you'd better not screw up. If you screw up he's going to beat the crap out of me."

"Don't worry," Lula said. "The third time's a charm. This is going to work. You'll see. You go on up to him, and I'll sneak around from the side and get him from the back."

"Have you tested the stun gun? Does it work?"

We were standing next to a bus stop with a bench. Three elderly men were sitting on the bench. One was reading a paper, and the other two were zoned out, staring blankly into space. Lula reached out and pressed the stun gun to one of the men. He gave a twitch and slumped onto the man next to him.

"Yep," Lula said. "It works."

I was speechless. My mouth was open and my eyes were wide.

"What?" Lula said.

"You just zapped that poor old man."

"Its okay. I know him. That's Gimp Whiteside. He don't do nothing all day. Might as well help us hardworking bounty hunters. Anyway, he didn't feel any pain. He's just taking a snooze now." Lula looked me over and grinned. "Look at you! You look like Rangeman Barbie. You got a gun and everything."

"Yeah, and I have to get back to work, so let's do this. I'm going to talk to Willie and see if I can get him to surrender. Give me your cuffs, and don't use the stun gun until I tell you to use it."

Lula handed her cuffs over to me. "You're taking some of the fun out of it, but I guess I could do it that way."

I walked straight back to Willie Martin. He was sitting alone at a small bistro table. He'd finished his sandwich, and he was picking at a few remaining fries. There was a second chair at his table. I slid the chair over next to him and sat down. "Remember me?" I asked him.

Willie looked at me and laughed. It was a big openmouthed, mashed-up-french-fries-and-ketchup laugh that sounded like haw, haw, haw.

"Yeah, I remember you," he said. "You're the dumb white bitch who came with fat-ass Lula."

He dipped a french fry into a glob of ketchup with his right hand, and I clamped a cuff onto his left.

He looked down at the cuff and grinned. "I already got a pair of these. You giving me another?"

"I'm asking you nicely to return to the courthouse with me, so we can get you rescheduled."

"I don't think so."

"It's just a formality. We'll rebond you."

"Nope."

"I have a gun."

"You gonna use it?"

"I might."

"I don't think so," Willie said. "I'm unarmed. You shoot me, and you'll do more time than I will. That's assault with a deadly weapon."

"Okay, how about this. If you don't let me cuff your other hand, and you don't quietly walk out with me and get in Lula's car, we're going to send enough electricity through you to make you mess your pants. And that's going to be an embarrassing experience. It'll probably make the papers-pro ball all-star Willie Martin messed his pants in Fennick's Deli yesterday..."

"I didn't mess my pants last time."

"Do you want to risk it? We'd be happy to give you a few volts."

"You swear you'll rebond me?"

"I'll call Vinnie as soon as we get you into the car."

"Okay," Willie said. "I'm gonna stand and put my hands behind my back. And we'll do this real quiet so nobody notices."

Lula was a short distance away with the stun gun in hand, her eyes glued to Willie. I stood, and Willie stood, and next thing I knew I was flying through the air. He'd moved so fast and scooped me up so effortlessly, I never saw it cming. He threw me about fifteen feet, and I crash-landed on a table of four. The table gave way and I was on the floor with the burgers and shakes and soup of the day. I was flat on my back, the wind knocked out of me, dazed for a moment, the world swirling around me. I rolled to my hands and knees and crawled over smashed food and dishes to get to my feet.

Willie Martin was facedown on the floor just beyond the table debris. Lula was sitting on him, struggling with the second cuff. "Boy, you really know how to make a diversion," Lula said. "I zapped him good. He's out like a light. Only I can't get his second hand to cooperate."

I limped over and held Martin's hand behind his back while she cuffed him.

"Do you have shackles in the car?"

"Yeah. Maybe you should go get them while I babysit here."

I took the key to the Firebird, got the shackles, and brought them back to Lla. We got the shackles on Martin, and a squad car pulled up outside the deli.

It was my pal Carl Costanza and his partner, Big Dog. Costanza grinned when he saw me. "We got a call that two crazy fans were on Willie like white on rice."

"That would be Lula and me," I said. "Except we're not fans. He's FTA."

"Looks like you're wearing lunch."

"Willie threw me into the table. And then he decided to take a nap."

"We'd appreciate it if you could help us drag his sorry ass out of here," Lula said. "He weighs a ton."

Big Dog got Willie under the armpits, Carl took the feet, and we hauled Willie out of the deli and dumped him into the back of Lula's Firebird.

"We need to do a property damage report," Costanza said to me. "You're wearing Rangeman clothes. Are you hunting desperadoes for Vinnie or for Ranger?"

"Vinnie."

"Works for me," Costanza said. And they disappeared inside the deli.

Lula and I looked over at the bench by the bus stop. Two of the three men were gone from the bench. The guy Lula stun-gunned was still there.

"Looks like Gimp missed his bus," Lula said. "Guess he didn't come around fast enough. Hey, Gimp," she yelled. "You want a ride? Get your bony behind over here."

"You're a big softy," I said.

"Yeah, don't tell nobody."

I walked back to Rangeman and entered through the front door. "Don't say anything," I told the guy at the desk. "I've just walked two blocks through town, and I've heard it all. And just in case you're wondering, those are noodles stuck in my hair, not worms."

I rode the elevator to the control room and had the full attention of everyone there as I crossed to my desk.

"I got tired of turkey so I went out for lunch," I told them.

I retrieved the key fob I'd left on my desk, got back into the elevator, and rode to Ranger's floor. I knocked on his door and didn't get an answer, so I let myself in. I took my shoes off in the hall and left them on the marble floor. I didn't want to trash Ranger's apartment, and the shoes were coated with chocolate milkshake and some smushed cheeseburger. I padded into Rangers bathroom, locked the door, and dropped the rest of my clothes.

I washed with his delicious shower gel and stood under the hot water until I was relaxed and no longer cared that just minutes before I'd had chicken noodle soup in my hair.

I wrapped myself in Rangers luxuriously thick terrycloth robe, unlocked the door, and stepped into his bedroom. Ranger was stretched out on the bed, ankles crossed, arms behind his head. His was fully clothed, and he was obviously waiting for me.

"I had a small mishap," I said.

"That's what they tell me. What happened?"

"I was helping Lula snag Willie Martin at Fennick's and next thing I knew I was airborne. He threw me about fifteen feet, into a table full of food and people."

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, but my sneakers are history. They're covered with chocolate milkshake."

Ranger crooked a finger at me. "Come here."

"No way."

"What about the jelly-doughnut hormones and the sex-drive hormones?"

"Getting thrown across a room seems to have a calming effect on them."

"I could fix that," Ranger said.

I smiled at him. "There's no doubt in my mind, but I'd rather you didn't. I have a lot of things going on in my head right now, and you could make it a lot more confusing."

"That's promising," Ranger said. He got off the bed and crossed the room. He grabbed me by the big shawl collar on the robe and pulled me to him. "I like when you wear my robe."

"Because I'm cute in it?"

"No, because it's all you're wearing."

"You don't know that for sure," I said. "I could have clothes under this."

"Is this another one of those things I should find out for myself?"

I was skating on thin ice here. I had the jelly-doughnut hormone problem going on, and I didn't want it to get out of control. I'd spent a night with Ranger a while ago, and I knew what happened when he was encouraged. Ranger knew how to make a woman want him. Ranger was magic.

"Let's take a look at my life," I said to Ranger. "I keep rolling in garbage."

"Mind-boggling," Ranger said.

"And let's take a look at your life. You have a deep dark secret."

"Let it go," Ranger said.

"Are you sick?"

"No, I'm not sick. Not physically, anyway. I'm not so sure sometimes about the mental, emotional, and sexual."

I locked myself in Ranger's dressing room and got dressed in the second Rangeman outfit. Short black T-shirt, black cargo pants, black socks. Ella hadn't provided underwear or shoes, so I sent my soda-and-ketchup-soaked underwear and my chocolate-shake-covered shoes off to the laundry with the first Rangeman outfit. I was feeling a little strange without underwear, but a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do, right?

I returned to my desk, and I ignored the search requests piling up in my in-box. I picked up where I left off with the Dix search, reading the front pages. By five o'clock I had a list of crimes that I thought had potential.

Nothing sensational. Just good solid crimes like a rash of unsolved burglaries, an unsolved murder, an unsolved hijacking. None of the crimes really grabbed me, and I still had lots of front pages to read, so I decided to keep searching.

I called Morelli and told him I was working late.

"How late?" he said.

"I don't know. Does it matter?"

"Only if you come home with your underwear on backwards."

I could go him one better than that. How about no underwear at all?

"Dial yourself some food," I said. "And tie Bob out back. I need to finish this project. How was your day? Is your leg okay?"

"The leg is okay. The day was long. I don't like being stuck in the building."

"Anything on Barroni and the three other guys?"

"They've all been positively identified. You were right about all of them. They were killed on-site. That's it so far."

"No one's seen Spiro?"

"No, but the pizza kid gave a good description, and it matches yours."

I struggled up from a deep sleep and opened my eyes to Ranger.

"Babe," he said softly. "You need to wake up. You need to go home."

I had my arms crossed on my desk and my head on my arms. The screen saver was up on my computer. "What time is it?"

"It's a little after eleven. I just came back from a breakin on one of the Rangeman accounts and saw you were still here."

"I was looking for a crime."

"Did you call Morelli?"

"Earlier. He knows I'm working late."

Ranger looked down at my feet. "Have you heard anything about your shoes?

Ella was going to wash them."

"Haven't heard anything."

Ranger punched Ella's extension on my phone. "Sorry to call so late," he said. "What's happening with Stephanie's shoes?"

Ranger smiled at Ella's answer. He disconnected and slung an arm around my

shoulder. "Bad news on the shoes. They melted in the dryer. Looks like you're going home in your socks." He pulled me to my feet. "I'll drive you. You can't ride the bike like this."

We took the elevator to the garage, and Ranger went to the Porsche. Of all his cars, this was my favorite. I loved the sound of the engine, and I loved the way the seat cradled me. At night, the dash looked like controls on a jet, and the car felt intimate.

I was groggy from sleep and exhausted from the events of the day. And I suspected the last two nights were catching up with me. I closed my eyes and melted into the cushy leather seat. I felt Ranger reach across and buckle my seat belt. I heard the Porsche growl to life and move up the ramp to exit the garage.

I dozed on the way home and came awake when the car stopped. I looked out at the darkened neighborhood. Not a lot of lights shining in windows at this time of the night. These were hardworking people who rose early and went to bed early. We were stopped half a block from Morelli's house.

"Why are we stopped here?" I asked Ranger.

"I have a working relationship with Morelli. I think he's a good cop, and he thinks I'm a loose cannon. Since we both carry guns, I try not to do things that would upset the balance in an insulting way. I wanted to give you a chance to wake up, so we didn't sit at the curb in front of his house like a couple teenagers adjusting their clothes." Ranger looked over at me. "You got the rest of your clothes from Ella, didn't you?"

Damn. "I forgot! I was working, and then I fell asleep. She's got my underwear."

Ranger laughed out loud, and when he looked back at me he was smiling the

full-on Ranger smile. "I'm worrying about parking too long in front of Morelli's house, and I'm bringing his girlfriend home without her underwear. I'll have to put double security on the building tonight." He put the Porsche in gear, drove half a block, and parked. Lights were on in the downstairs rooms. "Are you going to be okay?" he asked.

"Morelli's a reasonable person. He'll understand." Plus he had a cast on his leg. He couldn't move fast. I'd head straight for the stairs, and I'd be changed before he could get to me.

Ranger locked eyes with me. "Just so you know, for future reference, I wouldn't understand. If you were living with me, and you came home without underwear, I'd go looking for the guy who had it. And it wouldn't be pretty when I found him."

"Something to remember," I said. And the truth is, Morelli wasn't so different from Ranger. And Morelli wasn't usually a reasonable person. Morelli was being uncharacteristically mellow. I wasn't sure why I was seeing the mellow, and I wasn't sure how long it would last. The main difference between Morelli and Ranger was that when Morelli got mad he got loud. And when Ranger got mad he got quiet. They were both equally scary. I jumped out of the Porsche and ran to the house. I let myself in, called to Morelli, and ran up the stairs and into the bedroom to get clothes. I smacked into Morelli en route to the bathroom. He dropped a crutch and put an arm out to steady me.

"What are you doing up here?" I asked.

"Going to bed? I live here, remember?"

"I thought you were downstairs."

"You were wrong." He looked over at me. "Where's your bra?"

"What?"

"I know your body better than I know my own. And I know when you're not wearing a bra."

I slumped against the doorjamb. "It's in Ranger's dryer. You're not going to make a big deal about this, are you?"

"I don't know. I'm waiting to hear the whole story."

"I helped Lula capture Willie Martin this morning, and I sort of got thrown into a table filled with food and people."

"Costanza told me."

"Yeah, he responded to the call from Fennick's. Anyway, my clothes and my shoes were a mess, and I had chicken soup in my hair, so I used Ranger's shower to get cleaned up. And I put clean clothes on, except Ella hadn't gotten me any underwear or shoes." We both looked down at my feet. Black socks. No shoes.

"So here I am, and I don't have any underwear."

"Was Ranger in the shower with you?"

"Nope. Just me."

"And you were actually working tonight?" Yep.

"If I had anyone else for a girlfriend I'd be out the door with a gun in my hand, looking for Ranger - but your life is so insane I'm willing to believe anything.

Living with you is like being in one of the reality shows on television where people keep getting covered with bees and dropped off forty-story buildings into a vat of Vaseline."

"I admit it's been a little... hectic."

"Hectic is getting three kids to soccer practice on time. Your life is... there are no words for your life."

"That's what my mother says. Is this leading to something?"

"I don't know. I'm really tired right now. Let's talk about it tomorrow."

I picked Morelli's crutch up for him, and he moved toward the little guest room.

"Where are you going?" I asked him.

"I'm sleeping in the guest room, and I'm locking the door. I need a night of uninterrupted sleep. I'm running on empty. I was a mess at work. I couldn't keep my eyes open. And my guys feel like they've been run over by a truck. They need a day off."

"What about my guys?"

"Cupcake, you don't have guys."

"I have something."

"You do. And I love it. But you're on your own tonight. You're going to have to fly solo."

I rolled out of bed and crossed the hall to the little guest room. The door was open, and the room was empty. No Morelli in the bathroom or study, but Bob was sleeping in the bathtub. I crept down the stairs and walked through the house to the kitchen. There was hot coffee, and a note had been left by the coffeemaker.

SORRY ABOUT LAST NIGHT. THE GUYS MISSED YOU THIS MORNING. DON'T WORK LATE.

That sounded hopeful. I poured a mug of coffee, added milk, and took it upstairs. An hour later, I was dressed in black jeans and black T-shirt, and I was ready for work. I'd called my dad and mooched a ride. He was at the curb when I came down the stairs.

"You're doing pretty good on the new job," he said. "Almost a week. And nothing's caught fire or blown up."

It'd be a real challenge for Spiro to penetrate Range-man. And that's probably the reason Morelli's garage got destroyed. Spiro went for what was available.

Truth is I was beginning to be bothered by the lack of activity. The garage went five days ago and there hadn't been any threatening notes, snipings, or bombings since the Buick.

"They're holding a memorial service for Michael Barroni today," my father said. "Your mother said to tell you she's taking your grandmother. It's being held at Stiva's. Ordinarily they'd hold it at the church, but Stiva and Barroni were old friends, and I guess Stiva gave the Barronis a discount if they held the service in his chapel."

"I didn't realize Stiva and Barroni were that close."

"Yeah, me neither. I didn't see them spending a lot of time together. But then that happens when you got a big family and a business to run. You lose touch with your buddies."

I had a chill run up my spine to the roots of my hair, and my scalp was tingling like I was electric. "How'd Stiva and Barroni get to be friends?" I asked, holding my breath, my heart skipping beats.

"They were in the army together. They were both at Dix."

I might have the fifth man. I was so excited I was hyperventilating. Now there's the thing, why was I so excited? Ranger had his FTA, so the excitement didn't come from case closure. I barely knew Barroni and I didn't know the other three men at all, so there was nothing personal. My original long jump tying Anthony Barroni to Spiro and the missing men proved to be groundless. So why did I care? The four missing men seemed to be completely unrelated to anything I'd care about. And even if Spiro did turn out to have a tie to the four men, even if there was a crime involved, it really didn't matter to me, did it? Finding Spiro and stopping the harassment was really the only thing that mattered, right? Right. But stopping the harassment could be a problem. There were really only two ways the harassment would stop. Ranger could kill Spiro. Or Spiro could get convicted of a crime, like murdering Mama Macaroni, and get locked away. The latter was definitely the preferred. Okay, maybe I was excited about the fifth man because it might be Constantine Stiva. And if Con was involved, then Spiro might be involved. And if there wasn't evidence that convicted Spiro of the bombings, there might be evidence to convict him of the shallow grave homicides. So, was this why I couldn't wait to plug Con's name into the search program? I didn't think so. I suspected the hard reality was that it all just came down to tasteless curiosity.

I was a product of the Burg. I had to know all the dirt.

My dad pulled up to the front of the building and I jumped out. "Thanks," I yelled, hitting the ground running.

I was supposed to sign in and sign out when I entered and left the building.

And I was supposed to show my picture ID when I came through the first-floor lobby. I never remembered to sign in or out, and my picture ID was lost in the garage fire. Good thing everyone knew me. Being the only woman in an organization had its upside.

I waved to the guy at the desk and danced in place, waiting for the elevator. I barreled out of the elevator on the fifth floor and crossed to my cubby.

I got my computer up and running and punched "Constantine Stiva" into the

newspaper search program. A single article appeared. It was small and on page thirteen. I would have missed it on my front-page search.

Private first class Constantine Stiva had been injured in his attempt to thwart a robbery. A government armored truck carrying payroll had been hijacked when it had stopped for a routine gate check at Fort Dix. Stiva had been on guard duty, along with two other men. Stiva was the only guard to survive.

He'd been shot in the leg. There'd been no mention of the amount of money involved. And there weren't a lot of details on the hijacking, other than a few brief sentences that the truck had been recovered. I searched papers for two weeks following the incident but came up empty. There'd only been the one article.

I called Ranger on his cell and got a message. I left my cubby and went to the console that monitored Rangeman cars. "Where's Ranger?" I asked Hal.

"He's not answering his cell, and I don't see him on the board."

"He's on a plane," Hal said. "He had to bring an FTA up from Miami. He'll be back tonight. Manny was supposed to bring the guy up on a red-eye yesterday, but he had problems with security, so Ranger had to go down this morning."

Hal tapped Ranger's number into his computer and a screen changed and brought Ranger's car up. Philadelphia airport. "He should be on the ground in three hours," Hal said. "His cell will come back on then."

I went back to my cubby and I called Morelli.

"I might know the fifth guy," I told him. "It might be Constantine Stiva. He was at Dix when Barroni was there. They were army buddies."

"I can't imagine Con in the army," Morelli said. "I can't imagine him ever being anything other than a funeral director."

"It gets even stranger. He was on guard duty, and he was shot during an armored car hijacking."

"How do you know all this?"

"I've been searching newspapers. I'm going to email you the article on Con. I know it's stupid, but I just have this feeling everything fits somehow. Like maybe the four missing men were involved in the armored car hijacking and Con recognized them."

"Then it would seem to me Con should be the one in the shallow grave."

"Yes, but suppose Con told Spiro and Spiro came back and was extorting money from the four men? And then when he didn't think he could get any more he shot them."

"It’s a lot of supposing," Morelli said.

"And here's something else that's interesting. There's been no activity since your garage got blown up. Five days without a note, a sniping, or a bombing. Don't you think that's odd?"

"I think it's all odd."

I sent the news article to Morelli, and then I went to the kitchen, got coffee with milk, no sugar, and went back to my desk and called my mother.

"Are you tippling yet?" I asked her.

"No," she said.

Damn. "Dad said you and Grandma were going to the memorial service."

"Yes. It's at one o'clock. I feel so sorry for Carla and the three boys. What a terrible thing. I might have to tipple after the service. Do you think that would be bad?"

"Everybody tipples after a memorial service," I told her. I knew it was the wrong thing to say. God help me, I was a rotten daughter, but I really needed dessert!

I disconnected and started working my way through the search requests. I called Morelli at noon.

"How's it going?"

"I talked to Con."

"Just for the heck of it."

"Yeah. Just for the heck of it. He said the army tried to keep the armoured truck robbery as quiet as possible. The two guards that Con was working with were shot and killed. Con said he was alive because he fainted when he got shot in the leg, and he supposed the hijackers thought he was dead. He couldn't identify any of the hijackers. They were all dressed in fatigues, wearing masks. For security purposes the army never released the entire death toll, but Con said it was rumored that there were three men in the truck who were killed."

"Did he say how much money was involved?"

"He didn't know."

"Did you ask him if he thought Barroni might have been involved in that hijacking?"

"Yeah. He looked at me like I was on drugs."

"Did Spiro know about the hijacking?"

"Spiro knew his dad was shot. Con said there was a time when Spiro was a kid, and he was sort of obsessed with it. Kept the newspaper article in a scrapbook."

"What does he have to say about the Spiro sightings?"

"Not much. He seemed confused more than anything else. He said he thought Spiro had perished in the fire. If he's telling the truth he's in a strange spot, not sure if he should be happy Spiro's alive or sad that Spiro blew up Mama Macaroni."

"Do you think he's telling the truth?"

"Don't know. He sounds convincing enough. The big problem for me isn't that

Spiro came back to harass you. That I could easily believe, and you've actually seen him. My problem is I don't feel comfortable involving him in the Barroni murder."

"You don't think Spiro's a multitasker."

"Spiro's a rodent. You put a rodent in a maze, and he focuses on one thing, he goes for the piece of cheese."

"Then who killed Michael Barroni?"

"Don't know. If I was going on gut instinct, I'd have to say it feels like Spiro's got his finger in that pie, but there's absolutely no evidence. We don't know why Barroni was killed, and we have no reason to believe he was involved in the hijacking."

"Jeez, you're such a party pooper."

"Yeah, insisting on evidence is always a downer."

I hung up and went back to my searches, but I couldn't keep my mind on them.

I was getting double vision from looking at the computer, and I was tired of sitting in the cubby. And even worse, I was feeling friendly. I was thinking Morelli's voice had sounded nice on the phone. I was wondering what he was wearing. And I was remembering what he looked like when he wasn't wearing anything. And I was thinking I might have to leave work early, so I could be naked by the time Morelli walked through the door at four o'clock.

I pushed away from my desk, stuffed myself into the windbreaker, and grabbed the key fob.

"I need to get some air," I told Hal. "I won't be gone long."

I rode the elevator to the garage and got on the bike. When I pushed away from my desk I didn't have a direction in mind. By the time I'd reached the garage I knew where I was going. I was going to the memorial service. I got to Stiva's exactly at one o'clock. Latecomers were hunting parking places and hustling up to the big front porch. I zipped into the lot with the Due and parked on a patch of grass separating the lot from the drive-thru lane for the hearse and the flower car. My mothers gray Buick was in the lot. From the location of her parking place I was guessing she'd gotten there early. Grandma always liked a seat up front.

Stiva had a chapel on the first floor to the rear of the building. When there was a large crowd he opened the doors and seated the overflow on folding chairs in the wide hallway. Today was standing room only. Since I was one of the last to arrive, I was far down the hall, catching the service over the speaker system.

I wandered away after fifteen minutes and peeked in some of the other rooms.

Mr. Earls was in Slumber Salon number three. I thought he was sort of a sad sack in there all by himself while everyone else was at the service. It felt like poor Mr. Earls didn't get an invitation to the party. I snooped in the kitchen and spent a moment considering the cookie tray. I told myself they weren't that good. They were store-bought cookies, and there weren't any of my favorites on the tray. There were better things to nibble on, I told myself. Fresh doughnuts, homemade chocolate chip cookies... Ranger. I left the kitchen and tiptoed into Con's office. He'd left the door open. It was an announcement that he had nothing to hide. If you can't trust your undertaker, who can you trust, eh?

I don't ordinarily do recreational mortuary tours, and I'd absolutely believed Con when he said he hadn't seen Spiro, so I wasn't sure why I felt compelled to search the building. I guess it just wasn't adding up for me. I kept coming back to the mole. It had been made from mortician's putty. Stiva doesn't run the only funeral home in the greater Trenton area. And for that matter, you can probably order morticians putty on the Net. Still, this was the easiest and most logical place for Spiro to get a chunk of the stuff. I had a feeling that if I opened enough doors here, I'd find Spiro or at least some evidence that Spiro had passed through.

I went upstairs and checked out the storage room and the two additional viewing rooms Con reserved for peak periods, like the week after Christmas. I returned to the ground level, exited the side door, and looked in the garage. Two slumber coaches, waiting for the call. Two flower cars that were somber, even when filled with flowers. Two Lincoln Town Cars. And Con's black Navigator, the vehicle of choice when someone inconveniently dies during a blizzard.

I returned to the main building through the back door. The chapel was straight ahead, at the end of a short corridor. The embalming rooms were in the new wing, to my left. These rooms were added after the fire. The new structure was cinder block and the equipment supposedly was state of the art, whatever that meant.

I took a deep breath and turned left. I'd gone this far, I should finish the search. I tested the door that led to the new wing. Locked. Gee, too bad. Guess God doesn't want me to see the embalming rooms.

The basement also remained unexplored. And that's the way it was going to stay. The furnaces and meat lockers are in the basement. This is where the fire started. I've been told the basement's all rebuilt and shiny and bright, but I'd rather not see for myself. I'm afraid the ghosts are still there... and the memories.

Con lived in a house that sat next to the mortuary. It was a good-size Victorian, not as big as the original mortuary house, but twice the size of my parents' house. Spiro had grown up in that house. I'd never been inside. Spiro hadn't been one of my friends. Spiro had been a kid who lived in shadows, scheming and spying on the rest of the world, occasionally sucking another kid into the darkness.

I went out through the back door and followed the walkway past the garages to Con's house. It was a pretty house, well maintained, the property professionally landscaped. It was painted white with black shutters, like the mortuary. I circled the house and stepped up onto the small back porch that sheltered the kitchen door. I looked in the windows. The kitchen was dark. I could see through to the dining room. It was also dark. Nothing out of place. No dirty dishes on the counter. No cereal boxes. No sweatshirt draped over a chair. I stood very still and listened. Nothing. Just the beating of my heart, which seemed frighteningly loud.

I tried the door. Locked. I worked my way around the side of the house. No open windows. I returned to the back of the house and looked up at the second floor. An open window. People felt safe leaving windows open on the second floor. And most of the time they were safe. But not this time. This window was over the little back porch, and I was good at climbing up back porches. When I was in high school my parents' back porch had been my main escape route when I was grounded. And I was grounded a lot.

Stephanie, Stephanie, Stephanie, I said to myself. This is insane. You're obsessed with this Spiro thing. There's no good reason to believe you'll find anything helpful in Con's house. What if you get caught? How embarrassing will that be? Then the stupid Stephanie spoke up. Yes, but I won't get caught, the stupid Stephanie said. Everyone's at the memorial service and it'll go on for another half hour at least. And no one can see this side of the house. It's blocked by the garage. The smart Stephanie didn't have an answer to that, so the stupid Stephanie shimmied up the porch railing and climbed through the second-story window and dropped into the bathroom.

The bathroom was white tile, white walls, white towels, white fixtures, white shower curtain, white toilet paper. It was blindingly antiseptic. The towels were perfectly folded and lined up on the towel bar. There was no scum in the soap dish. I took a quick peek in the medicine cabinet. Just the usual over-the-counter stuff you'd expect to find.

I walked through the three upstairs bedrooms, looking in closets and drawers and under beds. I went downstairs and walked through the living room, dining room, and den. The house was eerily unlived-in. No wrinkles on the pillowcases, and all the clothes hanging in the closet and folded in the chest were perfectly pressed. Just like Con, I thought. Lifeless and perfectly pressed.

I went to the kitchen. No food in the fridge. A bottle of water and a bottle of cranberry juice. The poor man was probably anemic from starvation. No wonder he was always so pale. His complexion frequently mirrored the deceased. Not flawed by death or disease but not quite human either. I thought it was by association, but Grandma said she thought Con dabbled in the makeup tray in the prep room.

Constantine Stiva was surrounded by grieving people every night, left alone with the dead by day, and went home to this sterile house after the evening viewings. And if we're to believe him, he has a son who came back to the Burg but never stopped by to say hello. Morelli thought Spiro was a single-minded rodent. I thought Spiro was a fungus. I thought Spiro fed off a host, and his host had always been Con.

I opened the door to the cellar, switched the light on, and cautiously crept down the stairs. Eureka. This was the room I'd been looking for. It was a windowless basement room that had been made into a do-it-yourself apartment. There was a couch covered by a rumpled sleeping bag and pillow. A television. A comfy chair that had seen better days. A scarred coffee table. A bookshelf that had been stocked with cans of soup and boxes of crackers.

At the far end someone had installed a sink and a makeshift counter. There was a hotplate on the counter. And there was a small under-the-counter refrigerator. This was the perfect hiding hole for Spiro. There was a door next to the refrigerator. Bathroom, I thought.

I opened the door and looked around the room. I'd expected to find a small bathroom. What I had in front of me was a mortician's workroom. Two long tables covered with tubes of paint, artists' brushes, a couple large plastic containers of mortician's modeling clay, wigs and hairpieces, trays of cosmetics, jars of replacement teeth. And on a chair in the corner was a jacket and hat. Spiro's.

I had my cell phone clipped to my belt alongside my gun. I undipped the phone and went to dial. No service in the basement. I was on my way through the door when a flash of color caught my eye. It was a rubbery blob that looked a lot like uncooked bacon. I moved closer and realized it was several pieces of the material morticians used for facial reconstruction. I didn't know a lot about the mechanics of preparing the dead for their last appearance, but I'd seen shows on movie makeup, and this looked similar. I knew it was possible to transform people into animals and aliens with this stuff. It was possible to make young actors look old, and it was possible to give the appearance of health and well-being to the newly departed. Stiva was a genius when it came to reconstructing the dead. He added fullness to the cheeks, smoothed over wrinkles, tucked away excess skin. He filled in bullet holes, added teeth, covered bruises, straightened noses when necessary.

Stiva was Burg comfort food. Burg residents knew their secrets and flaws were safe in Stiva's hands. At the end of the day, Stiva would make the fat look thin and the jaundiced look healthy. He wiped away time and alcoholism and self-indulgence. He chose the most flattering lipstick shade for the ladies.

He hand-selected men's ties. Even fifty-two-year-old Mickey Branchek, who had a heart attack while laboring over Mrs. Branchek and died with an enormous erection that gave new meaning to the term stiffy, looked rested and respectable for his last hoohah. Best not to consider the process used to achieve that result.

Spiro had watched his father at work and would know the same techniques. So it wasn't shocking that the mole had been made from mortician's putty. The pieces of plastic that were lying on the table were more disturbing. They reminded me of Spiro's scars, and I realized Spiro would have the ability to change his appearance. A perfectly healthy Spiro could make himself horribly disfigured. He wouldn't fool anyone up close, but I'd only seen him at a distance, in a car. And Chester Rhinehart had seen him at night. If I was, in fact, looking at a disguise, it was pretty darn creepy. I heard movement behind me, and I turned to find Con standing in the doorway.

"What are you doing? How'd you get in here?" he asked. "The doors to the house were closed and locked."

"The back door was open." When in a jam always go with a fib. "Is the service done?"

"No. I came back here because you tripped my alarm."

"I didn't hear it."

"It rings in my office. It monitors the cellar door, among others."

"You're hiding Spiro," I said. "I recognize the coat and hat on the chair. I'm sorry. This must be awful for you."

Con looked at me, his face composed, as always, his eyes completely devoid of emotion. "You're perfect," he said. "Stupid to the end. You haven't figured it out, have you? There's no Spiro. Spiro is dead. He died in the fire. There was nothing left of him but ashes and his school ring."

"I thought he was never found. There was never a service."

"He wasn't found. There wasn't anything left of him. Just the ring. I stumbled across it and never said anything. I didn't want a service. I wanted to move on, to rebuild my business. If he'd lived he would have ruined me, anyway. He was a moron."

This was the first I'd ever heard Con speak badly of the dead. And it was of his son. I didn't know what to say. It was true. Spiro was a moron, but it was chilling to hear it from Con. And if Spiro was dead then who was tormenting me? Who blew up Mama Macaroni? I suspected the answer was standing two feet away, but I couldn't put it together. I couldn't imagine solicitous Constantine Stiva, Mr. No Personality, offing Mama Mac.

"So it wasn't Spiro who was leaving me notes and blowing up cars?" "No."

"It was you."

"Hard to believe, isn't it?"

"Why? Why were you stalking me?"

"Why doesn't matter," Con said. "Let's just say you're serving a purpose. I guess it's just as well that you're here. I don't have to hunt you down."

I put my hand to the gun at my hip, but it was an unfamiliar act, and I was slow. Con was much faster with his weapon. He lunged forward, and I saw the glint of metal in his hand, and I barely registered stun gun before I went out.

I was in absolute blackness when I came around. My mind was working, but my body was slow to respond, and I couldn't see. I was cuffed and shackled, and I was blindfolded. No, I thought. Back up. I wasn't blindfolded. I could open and close my eyes. It was just very, very dark. And silent. And stuffy.

I was disoriented in the dark, and I was having a hard time focusing. I rocked side to side. Not much room. I tried to sit but couldn't raise my head more than a couple inches. The space around me was minimal. The realization of confinement sent a shock of panic into my chest and burned in my throat. I was in a silk-lined container. God help me. Constantine Stiva had put me in one of his caskets. My heart was pounding and my mind was in free fall. This couldn't be real. Con was the heart and soul of the Burg. No one would ever suspect Con of bad things.

My hands ached from the cuffs, and I couldn't breathe. I was suffocating. I was buried alive. Hysteria came in waves and receded. Tears slid down my cheeks and soaked into the satin lining. I had no idea of time, but I didn't think much time had passed. Maybe a half hour. An hour at most. I had a moment of calm and realized I was breathing easier. Maybe I wasn't suffocating. Maybe I was just suffering a panic attack. I didn't smell dirt. I wasn't cold. Maybe I wasn't buried. Okay, hold that thought. Did I hear a siren far off in the distance? A dog barking?

My confinement stretched on with nothing to break the monotony. My muscles were cramping and my hands were numb. I no longer knew if it was day or night.

What I knew with certainty was that Ranger would be looking for me. He'd return from Florida, and he'd do what he does best... he'd go into tracking mode. Ranger would find me. I just hoped he'd get to me in time. I heard a door slam and an engine catch. The casket shifted. I was pretty sure I was being driven somewhere. I hoped it wasn't the cemetery. I strained to hear voices. If I heard voices I'd make noise. I seemed to have air, but I didn't want to chance depleting the oxygen if I didn't hear voices. We were stopping and starting and turning corners.

We stopped, and a door opened and slammed shut, and then I was sliding and

bumping along. I'd been to a lot of funerals with Grandma Mazur. I knew what

this was. I was moving on the casket gurney. I was out of the hearse or the truck or whatever, and I was being taken somewhere. I was wheeled around corners, and then the motion stopped. Nothing happened for what seemed like years, and finally the lid was raised, and I blinked up at Con.

"Good," he said, "you're still alive. Didn't die of fright, eh?" He looked in at me. "Undertaker humor."

My first thought was that I wouldn't cry. I'd try to stay smart. I'd keep him talking. I'd look for an opportunity to escape. I'd stall for time. Time was my friend. If I had enough time, Ranger would find me.

"I need to get out of this casket," I said.

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"I need to use the bathroom... bad."

Con was fastidious to a fault, and he looked genuinely horrified at the possibility of a woman peeing in one of his silk-lined caskets. He cranked the gurney down to floor level and helped me wriggle myself out of the box.

"This is the way it will work," he said. "I don't want you making a mess all over everything, so I'm going to let you use the bathroom. I'm going to release one cuff, but I'll stun-gun you if you do anything dumb."

It took a moment to get my balance, and then I very carefully shuffled into the bathroom. When I shuffled out I felt a lot better. My hands were no longer numb and the cramps in my legs had subsided. We were in a house that looked like a small '70s ranch. It was sparsely furnished with mix-and-match hand-me-downs.

The kitchen linoleum was old and the paint was faded. The counters were red Formica dotted with cigarette burns. The white ceramic sink was rust stained. Some of the over-the-counter kitchen cabinets were open and I could see they were empty. The casket was in the kitchen, and I was guessing it had been wheeled in from an attached garage.

"Is this in retaliation for Spiro's death or the fire in the funeral home?" I asked Con.

"Only tangentially. It's a bonus. Although it's a very nice bonus. There've been a couple nice bonuses to this charade. I got to kill Mama Macaroni. Who wouldn't love to do that? And then I got to bury her! Life doesn't get much better. The Macaronis bought the top-of-the-line slumber bed."

I cut my eyes to my slumber bed.

"Sorry," Con said. "Molded plastic. Not one of my better caskets. Lined with acetate. Still, it's good quality for people who haven't set aside funeral expenses. I'd like to put your grandmother in one of these. Her death should be declared a national holiday. What is this morbid obsession she has with the dead? I have to nail the lid down when there's a closed casket. And she's never happy with the cookies. Always wanting the kind with the icing in the middle. What does she think, cookies grow on trees?" Con smiled.

"Maybe I'll nail your lid down just to annoy her. That would be fun."

"So, I guess that means you're not going to bury me alive?"

"No. If I buried you alive I'd have to put you back in the casket. And I have plans for the casket. Mary Aleski is on a table back at the mortuary, and she'll be on view in that casket tomorrow. And besides, do you have any idea how much digging is involved in burying someone in a casket? I have a better plan. I'm going to hack you up and leave you here on the kitchen floor. It's important to my plan that you're found in this house."

"Why?"

"This house belongs to Spiro. It's tied up in probate because he hasn't been pronounced dead. If Spiro killed you it would be in this house, don't you think?"

"You still haven't told me why you want to kill me."

"It's a long story."

"Are we in a rush?"

Con looked at his watch. "No. As a matter of fact, I'm ahead of schedule. I'm coordinating this with the last of the Spiro sightings. Spiro will be seen in his car around midnight, and then I'll come back here and kill you, and Spiro will disappear forever."

"I don't get the Spiro tie-in. I don't get anything."

"This is about a crime that happened a long time ago. Thirty-six years to be exact. I was stationed at Fort Dix, and I masterminded a hijacking. I had four friends who helped me. Michael Barroni, Louis Lazar, Ben Gorman, and Jim Runion."

"The four men who were found shot to death behind the farmer's market."

"Yes. An unfortunate necessity."

"I wouldn't have pegged you for a criminal mastermind."

"I have many unappreciated talents. For instance, I'm quite good as an actor. I play the role of the perfect undertaker each night. And as you know I'm a genius with makeup. All I needed was a hat and a jacket, some colored contacts and handmade scars, and I was able to fool you and that pizza delivery boy."

"You always seemed like you enjoyed being a funeral director."

"It has its moments. And I hold a certain prominence in the community. I like that."

Constantine Stiva has an ego, go figure. "So you masterminded a hijacking."

"I saw the trucks come through once a week, and I knew how easy it would be to take one of them down on that isolated back station. Lazar was a munitions expert. I learned everything I know about bombs from Lazar. Gorman had been stealing cars since he was nine. Gorman stole the tow truck we used to drag the armored truck away. Barroni had all kinds of connections to launder the money. Runion was the dumb muscle."

"Do you want to know how we did it? It was so simple. I was on guard duty with two other men. The armored truck pulled up. Runion and Lazar were directly behind it in a car. Lazar had already planted the bomb when the truck stopped for lunch. Kaboom, the bomb went off and disabled the truck. Runion killed the other two guards on duty and shot me in the leg. Then Gorman hooked the truck up to the tow truck and hauled it off about a quarter mile down the road into an abandoned barn. I wasn't there, of course, but they told me Lazar set a charge that opened the truck like he'd used a can opener. They killed the truck guards and in a matter of minutes were miles away and seven million dollars richer."

"And no one ever solved the crime."

"No. The army expended so much energy hushing it all up that there wasn't a lot of energy left to investigate. They didn't want anyone to know the extent of the loss. That was very big money back then."

"What happened to the money?"

"There were five of us. We each took two hundred thousand as seed money for start-up businesses when we got out. And we agreed that every ten years we'd take another two hundred thousand apiece until we hit the forty-year mark and then we'd divide up what was left." "So?"

"We had a vault in the mortuary basement. We had a system that each of us had a number, and it took all of us to open the vault. No one knew, but over the years I'd figured out the numbers. So I borrowed from the vault from time to time. Then you and your grandmother burned my business down. The vault survived, but I didn't. I was underinsured. So I took what was left in the vault and used it to rebuild. Two months ago, Barroni found out he had colon cancer and asked for his share of the money. He wanted to make sure it went to his family. We set the meeting up in the field behind the farmers market so we could take a vote. I knew they were going to give Barroni the money. And they were going to want their share early, too. We were all at that age. Colon cancer.

Heart disease. Irritable bowel. Everyone wants to take a cruise. Live the good life. Buy a new car. They were going to go down to my basement, open the vault, find out I'd stolen the money, and then they would have killed me."

"So you killed them."

"Yes. Death isn't such a big deal when it's happening to someone else."

"How do I fit in?"

"You're my insurance policy."

"Just in case one of my comrades shared the secret with a wife and she came looking for me, maybe with the police, I would confess to telling Spiro about the crime. Of course, it would be my version of the crime and I'd be non-culpable. Easy to believe Spiro would return to extort money and then resort to mass murder. And easy to believe Spiro would be a little goofy and take to stalking you. And I'd be the poor grieving father of the little bastard."

"That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."

"You fell for it," Con said. "Actually my original plan was just to leave you a few notes. Then I realized you'd made so many enemies you might not consider Spiro as the stalker, so I had to get more elaborate. Probably I could have stopped after you identified me at Cluck-in-a-Bucket, but by that time I was addicted to the rush of the game. It's too bad I have to kill you. It would have been fun to blow up more cars. I really like blowing up cars. And it turns out I'm good at it."

He was crazy. He'd inhaled too much embalming fluid. "You won't get away with it," I told him.

"I think I will. Everyone loves me. Look at me. I'm above suspicion. I'm the social director of the Burg."

"You're insane. You blew up Mama Macaroni."

"I couldn't resist. Did you like my present to you? The mole? I thought that was a good touch."

"What about Joe? Why did you run him over?"

"It was an accident. I was trying to get home, and I couldn't get rid of you and your idiot grandmother. I hit the curb and lost control of the car. Too bad I didn't kill him. That was a slow week."

Shades were drawn in the house. I looked around for a clock.

"It's almost ten," Con said. "I need to have Spiro seen one last time, driving the car that will be found in this garage. Sadly, it will be my final Spiro performance. And your body will be found in the kitchen. Horribly mutilated, of course. It seems like Spiro's style. He had a flare for the dramatic. I suppose in some ways the apple didn't fall far from the tree." He held the stun gun up for me to see. "Do you want me to stun you before I put you away or will you cooperate?"

"What do you mean, put me away?"

"I want you to be freshly killed after Spiro is seen driving the car. So I'm going to have to put you on ice for a couple hours."

I cut my eyes to the casket. I really didn't want to go back in the casket. "No," Con said. "Not the casket. I need to get that back to the mortuary. It was just an easy way to transport you." He was looking around. "I need to find something that will keep you out of sight. Something I can lock."

"Ranger will find me," I told him.

"Is that the Rambo bounty hunter? Not a chance. No one's going to find you until I point him in the right direction."

He turned and looked at me with his pale, pale eyes, I saw his hand move, I heard something sizzle in my head, and everything was black.

My mouth was dry and my fingertips were tingling. The jerk had zapped me again and stuffed me into something. I was on my back, and I was curled up fetus style. No light. No room to stretch my legs. My arms were pinned under me and the cuffs were cutting into my wrists. No satin lining this time. I was pretty sure I was crammed into some sort of wooden box. I tried rocking side to side. No room to get any momentum and nothing gave. This wasn't as terrifying as being locked in the casket, but it was much more uncomfortable. I was taking shallow breaths against the pain in my back and arms, playing games to occupy my mind, imagining that I was a bird and could fly, that I was a fire-breathing dragon, that I could play the cello in spite of the fact that I wasn't sure what a cello sounded like.

And suddenly there was a very slim, faint sliver of light in my box. I went still and listened with every molecule in my body. Someone had turned a light on. Or maybe it was daylight. Or maybe I was going to heaven. There were muffled sounds and men's voices, and there was a lot of door banging. I opened my mouth to yell for help, but the box opened before I had the chance. I tumbled out, and fell into Rangers arms.

He was as stunned as I was. He had a vise-like grip on my arms, holding me up. His eyes were dilated black, and the line of his mouth was tight. "I saw you folded up in there, and I thought you were dead," he said.

"I'm okay. Just cramped."

I'd been stuffed into one of the empty over-the-counter cabinets. How Con had gotten me up there was a mystery. I guess when you're motivated you find strength.

Ranger had come in with Tank and Hal. Tank was at my back with a handcuff key, and Hal was working on the shackles.

"It's not Spiro," I said. "It's Con, and he's coming back to kill me. If we hang round we can catch him."

Ranger raised my bruised and bloody wrist to his mouth and kissed it. "I'm sorry to have to do this to you, but there's no we. I've just had six really bad hours looking for you. I need to know you're safe. Sitting in this house waiting for a homicidal undertaker doesn't feel safe." And he clamped the handcuff back on my wrist. "You've had enough fun for one day," he said. And the other bracelet went on Tank's wrist.

"What the ..." Tank said, caught by surprise.

"Take her back to the office and have Ella tend to her wrists and then take her to Morelli," Ranger told Tank.

I dug my heels in. "No way!"

Ranger looked at Tank. "I don't care how you do it. Pick her up. Drag her. Whatever. Just get her out of here and keep her safe. And I don't want those bracelets to come off either of you until you hand her over to Morelli."

I glared at Tank. "I'm staying."

Tank looked back at Ranger. Obviously trying to decide which of us was more, to be feared.

Ranger locked eyes with me. "Please," he said.

Tank and Hal were goggle-eyed. They weren't used to "please." I wasn't used to it either. But I liked it.

"Okay," I said. "Be careful. He's insane."

Hal drove, and Tank and I sat in back in the Explorer. Tank was looking uncomfortable with me as an attachment, looking like he was searching for something to say but couldn't for the life of him come up with anything. I finally decided to come to his rescue.

"How did you find me?" I asked him.

"It was Ranger."

That was it. Three words. I knew he could talk. I saw him talking to Ranger all the time.

Hal jumped in from the front seat. "It was great. Ranger dragged some old lady out of bed to open the records office and hunt down real estate. He brought her in at gunpoint."

"Omigod."

"Boy, he was intense," Hal said. "He had every Range-man employee and twenty contract workers out looking for you. We knew you disappeared at Stiva's because I was monitoring your bike. Tank and me started looking for you

before Ranger even landed. You told me you were coming back and I got worried."

"You were worried about me?"

"No," Hal said. "I was worried Ranger would kill me if I lost you." He shot me a look in the rearview mirror. "Well yeah. Maybe I was a little worried about you, too."

"I was worried," Tank said. "I like you."

Hot damn! I leaned into him and smiled, and he smiled back at me.

"We went through the funeral home, and we went through the undertakers home," Hal said. "And then Ranger figured they might own property someplace else, so he got the old lady in the tax records to open the office. She found that little ranch house under Spiro's name. It was all tied up because Spiro was never declared dead."

Forty minutes later, I got dropped off at Morelli's. I had my wrists bandaged, and I had some powdered-sugar siftings on my black T-shirt. Tank walked me to the door and unlocked the cuffs while Morelli waited, a crutch under one arm, his other hand hooked into Bob's collar.

"She's in your care," Tank said to Morelli. "If Ranger asks, you can tell him I unlocked the cuffs in front of you."

"Do you want me to sign for her?" Morelli asked, on a smile.

"Not necessary," Tank said. "But I'm holding you responsible."

I ruffled Bob's head and slipped past Morelli. He shut the door and looked at my T-shirt.

"Powdered sugar?" he asked.

"I needed a doughnut. I had Hal stop at Dunkin' Donuts on the way across town."

"Ranger called and told me you were safe and on your way here, but he wouldn't tell me anything else."

Ranger was going to take Stiva down, and he didn't want anything going wrong. He didn't want to lose Stiva. He wanted to do the takedown himself, without a lot of police muddying the water.

"I accidentally got lost trying to find the memorial service and happened to stumble into Con's personal workroom. I tripped an alarm and Con found me snooping."

"I'm guessing he wasn't happy about you snooping?"

"It turns out Spiro is dead. Con said he found Spiro's ring in the fire debris. Con needed a scapegoat and decided Spiro was the ghost for the job. So Con's been going around in mortician's makeup, looking like a scarred Spiro."

"Why did Con need a scapegoat?"

I told Morelli about the hijacking and the money missing from the vault, and I told him about the mass murder.

Morelli was grinning. "Let me get this straight," he said. "In the beginning, you basically made all the wrong assumptions about Anthony's involvement and Spiro's identity. And yet, at the end, you solved the crime."

"Yeah."

"Fucking amazing."

"Anyway, Stiva locked me up in a casket and took me somewhere to kill me. He left so he could do one last Spiro impersonation, and while he was gone Ranger found me."

"And Ranger's waiting for him to return?" "Yep."

"He should have told me," Morelli said.

"Probably didn't want the police involved. Ranger likes to keep things simple."

"Rangers a little psycho."

"Marches to his own drummer," I said.

"His drummers are all psycho, too."

I looked at Bob. "Has he been out?"

"Only in the yard."

"I'll take him for a short walk."

I went to the kitchen and got Bob's leash. And while I was at it I pocketed the keys to the Buick. I was feeling left out. And I was feeling pissed off. I wanted to be part of the takedown. And I wanted to release some anger on Stiva. I'd quit my job in an effort to normalize my life, and he'd sabotaged my plan. Of course, he'd done some good things, too, like blowing up Mama Macaroni and sending my cello to cello heaven. Still, it was small compensation for mowing Joe down and stuffing me into a casket. Maybe I should be feeling charitable because it appeared he was insane, but I just didn't feel charitable. I felt angry.

I snapped the leash on Bob, took him out the front door, and loaded him into the Buick. There was a slight chance we'd both be blown to smithereens, but I didn't think so. Blowing me up wasn't in Stiva's plan. I shoved the key in the ignition and listened to the Buick suck gas. Music to my ears. Morelli wouldn't be happy when he heard the Buick drive off, but I couldn't risk telling him I was going back to help Ranger. Morelli would never let me go. I'd paid attention when we left the little ranch house where I'd been held captive, and in fifteen minutes I was back in the neighborhood. I cruised by the house. It was dark. Half a block away I spotted the Explorer. Hal and Tank were in the house with Ranger. I backed the Buick into a dark driveway directly across from the little ranch. I sat with the motor running and my lights off. Bob was panting in the backseat, snuffling his nose against the window. Bob liked being part of an adventure.

After ten minutes, a green sedan came down the street. The car passed under a streetlight, and I could see Stiva behind the wheel. He was wearing the hat, and a splash of light illuminated his fake scars. He turned into the ranch house driveway and stopped. The garage door started to slide up. This was my moment. I stomped my foot down on the gas and roared across the street, slamming into the back of the green sedan. I caught it square, sending it crashing through the bottom half of the garage door, pushing it into the back of the garage.

Bob was barking and jumping around in the backseat. Bob probably drove NASCAR in another life. Or maybe demolition derby. Bob loved destruction.

"So what do you think?" I asked Bob. "Should we hit him again?"

"Rolf, rolf, rolf!"

I backed up and rammed the green sedan a second time.

Ranger and Tank ran out of the house, guns drawn. Hal came five steps behind them. I backed up about ten feet and got out. I inspected the Buick. Hard to get a good look in the dark, but I couldn't see any damage by the light of the moon.

Tank played a beam of light from his Mag across the green sedan. The hood was completely smashed, the roof had been partially peeled away by the garage door, and the trunk was crumple city. Steam hissed from the radiator and liquid was pooling dark and slick under the car. Stiva was fighting the airbag.

I took Bob out of the backseat and walked him around on Spiro’s front lawn so he could tinkle. I was thinking I'd move back into my apartment tomorrow.

And maybe I'd get a cello. Not that I needed it. I was pretty darned interesting without it. Still, a cello might be fun.

Ranger was standing, hands on hips, watching me.

"I feel better now," I said to Ranger.

"Babe."