And what comes after is for tomorrow to decide.

He took her in his arms, kissed her. He wanted to be gentle; she wanted to be fierce. As though, in making love, she was battling some inner demon, struggling against it and him, against even herself. Love and war, delight and despair, it was what he felt that night, making love to her.

When it was over, when she'd fallen asleep in pure exhaustion, he lay awake beside her. He gazed around his darkened bedroom, saw the gleam of antique furniture, the vaulted ceiling. It comes between us, he thought. My wealth. My name. It scares her.

And in a way, she scared him. There was too much fire, too many sparks in this Mariana Josefina. He thought of all the turmoil she'd brought into his life. In one short week she'd introduced him to dead bodies, street fights, and exploding houses. She'd forced him to confront his failure as a father and his guilt as a man of wealth. She intrigued him, infuriated him, delighted him. How would he ever fill the vacuum she'd leave behind?

She whimpered in her sleep and turned towards him, burrowing against his chest.

How could he keep this wild and crazy woman in his life? he wondered, holding her tightly.

Maybe I can't.

Ratchet was back from vacation, sporting a red sunburn and even redder mosquito bites. While the mosquitoes had found the pickings good, Ratchet, it seemed, had not.

"One lousy fish," he said. "The poorest excuse for a trout I ever saw. I didn't know whether to cook it or put it in a bag of water for my kid's goldfish bowl. A whole damn week, and that's what I had to show for it. Lost three of my best lures, too. I tell you, the rivers up there are fished out. Totally fished out."

"So how many did Beth catch?" asked M. J.

"Beth?"

"You know. Your wife."

Ratched coughed. "Six," he mumbled. "Maybe seven."

"Only seven?"

"Okay, maybe it was more like eight. A statistical fluke."

"Yeah, she's good at those flukes, isn't she?"

Ratchet yanked his lab coat off the door hook and thrust his arms into the sleeves. "So how's it been here? Anything exciting happen?"

"Not a thing."

"Why do I bother asking?" Ratchet muttered. He went over to the in-box and fished out a pile of papers. "Look at all this stuff."

"All yours," said M. J. "We left 'em for you."

"Gee, thanks."

"And you've got two dozen files on your desk, waiting for signatures."

"Okay, okay. It's enough to keep a guy from ever going on vacation." He sighed and headed down the hall to his office.

M. J. sat at her desk, listening to the familiar squeak of his tennis shoes moving down the hall. It was back to business as usual, she thought. The same old routine she had had for years. So why was she so depressed?

She rose and poured another cup of coffee-her third this morning. She was turning into a caffeine junkie, a sugar junkie. A love junkie. Hopeless relationships-that was her specialty. She dropped back into her chair. If she could just stop thinking about Adam for a day, an hour, maybe she'd regain some control over her life. But he had become an obsession for her. Even now, she wondered what he was doing, whether he was sitting at his desk, missing her. Or was he like most other men she knew, able to separate the various parts of his life into neat little boxes, to be opened at the appropriate times? I need to learn that trick , she thought. But every time she opened a file, signed her name, those images of the night before would float through her head.

They'd made love, slept a few hours, made love again.

She'd awakened with the sinking realization that things had careened way beyond her control. She wasn't going to be able to walk away from this one without hurting. To think that the affair had started off as nothing more than a lark, a fantasy. Now she could lack herself for getting into this fix. This addiction. This craving for the touch of him, the sight of him. She was as hooked as any junkie on a drug, as hooked as Nicos Biagi and Xenia Vargas had been.

She loved him.

She was going insane.

M. J. grabbed a file from the stack on her desk, signed her name, and slapped the file shut again. She almost groaned when she heard those tennis shoes come squeaking back down the hall toward her office.

Ratchet reappeared in her doorway. "Hey, M. J.," he said.

"What?"

"What the hell's this supposed to mean?" He read aloud from a lab slip. "'Results of mass and UV spec-trophotometry show following, noriquantitative: Narcotic present, levo-N-cyclobutylmethyl-6, 10-beta-dihydroxy class. Full identification pending.'" He looked up at her. "What is this gobbledygook?"

"You must have one of my slips. The drug's Zestron-L."

"Never heard of it."

"Here, I'll take care of the report."

"But it's got my name on it."

A frightening thought suddenly occurred to M. J. "Who's the subject?"

"Jane Doe."

"Oh." M. J. sighed with relief. "Then that's mine."

"No, it's my Jane Doe." He held the slip out to her. "See? There's my name."

Frowning, M. J. took it. On the line next to authorizing physician was typed the name Bernard Ratchet, M.D. She scanned the Subject ID data. Name: unknown. Sex: female. Race: White. I.DJ: 372-3-27-B. Processing date: 3/27.

A full week before her Jane Doe had rolled in the morgue doors.

"Get me this file," she said.

"Huh?"

"Get me the file."

"Whatever you say, mein Führer." Ratchet stalked away and returned a moment later to slap a folder on her desk. "There it is."

M. J. opened the file. It was, indeed, one of Ratchet's cases. She had seen this file before; she remembered it now. This was the Jane Doe of the glorious red hair, the marble skin. The page from the central ID lab was clipped to the inside front flap, with a notice of a fingerprint match. The corpse's name was Peggy Sue Barnett. She had a police record: shoplifting, prostitution, public drunkenness. She was twenty-three years old.

"Do we still have the body?" asked M. J.

"No. There's the release authorization."

M. J. glanced at the form. It was signed by Wheelock the day before, releasing the body to Greenwood Mortuary.

"I called it a probable barbiturate OD," said Ratchet. "I mean, it seemed reasonable. There was a bottle of Fiorinal next to her."

"Were barbs found in her tox screen?"

"Just a trace."

"No needles found on site? No tourniquet?"

"Just the pills, according to the police report. That's why I assumed it was barbs. I guess I was wrong."

"So was I," she said quietly.

"What?"

She reached for the telephone and dialed the police. It rang five times, then a voice answered, "Beamis, Homicide."

"Lou? M. J. Novak. We've got another one here."

"Another what?"

"Zestron OD. But this one's different."

She heard Beamis sigh. Or was that a yawn? "I'm real interested."

"The victim's name is Peggy Sue Barnett. She was found in Bellemeade-a week before the others. And get this-she was set up to look like a barbiturate OD."

"Are you going to tell me what is going on?" whined Ratchet.

M. J. ignored him. "Lou," she said. "I'm going to stick my neck out on this one." She paused. "I'm calling it murder."