"Then the perps got it. They tortured Lyle an' Schnittke until they handed it over, an'-"

"Did you find evidence of torture?"

"No, just a couple of bullets in their heads."

"That may have hurt," I said, "but it wouldn't have made them talk."

"Then they talked without bein' tortured, or the perps found the stuff on their own, and you know how I know that? Because if it was there an' they missed it, thenwe would have found it."

"I know they didn't find it, Ray. Otherwise they wouldn't have looked for it in my apartment."

He sighed. "It was us tossed your place, Bernie. We had a court order, it was all opened up aboveboard."

I told him about the second search, and when he protested that I hadn't reported it, I told him about Edgar the Doorman and the INS.

He looked hurt. "We wouldn't rat a guy out to those assholes," he said. "Half the guys on the force are Irish, an' half of them got a relative with a fishy Green Card or none at all. All the same, I can see why he'd be worried. But I have to say you're right. Same MO with the doorman means the same bunch of mopes, and if they found it they'd quit lookin'. So you know what I think? I think it wasn't there in the first place."

"Because the murder scene was searched by trained police investigators."

"Right."

"What were you looking for, Ray? And where did you look for it?"

"I can answer the second part. We looked high and low, searched the place top to bottom. What were we lookin' for? We'da known if we found it."

"I'm a trained burglar," I said, "and I know more places to hide things than you do, and more places to look for them. And I even have a sort of an idea what I'm looking for."

"An' you want me to sneak you in there. Against all rules, in a case that ain't my case anymore."

"Right."

"Get me two more of those crullers," he said. "With the chocolate on 'em, an' the jimmies." I went and fetched them, and he ate them without a word. Then he drank down the rest of his coffee and got to his feet.

"Well, what the hell," he said.

There were things I wanted to look at before I started hunting the McGuffin. First was the lock on the door to the Lyles' apartment. You can pick a lock without leaving traces, if you're careful not to scratch the face of the cylinder. But the cruder forms of entry all tend to involve gouges of some sort or other, and I couldn't see any, or any scratches, either. It looked to me as though the Lyles had let their killers in.

Ray had badged his way past the doorman, picking up a set of keys in the process, and the two of us had pulled down all the yellowCRIME SCENE tape from the door, and I balled it up and pocketed it for disposal later, far from the scene of the crime. After I'd studied the lock, he opened it with the key, and in we went.

The forensics team had long since come and gone, but it was still hard to resist an impulse to mince around on tiptoe. I did pull on a pair of Pliofilm gloves, which got a raised eyebrow from Ray, but I couldn't see any reason to leave a print behind, and several reasons not to.

"The Lyles let them in," I'd told Ray before we entered, and after a close examination I said as much for the safe. "Either Lyle opened it for them, or he told them the combination and let them do it themselves. But nobody blew it or peeled it, and I don't think there are fifteen people in America who could open it without force and violence."

"Fifteen, huh? You an' fourteen others?"

"It wouldn't be easy. The thing is, if they were good enough to get through this safe, they wouldn't have kicked my door in. I had a good lock on there, but it would have been child's play compared to this baby."

It wasn't locked, so I didn't have to show off. I opened the thing, and it was as empty as he'd said it was.

"If it was like this when Lyle opened it for 'em," he said, "an' if they looked all over an' still didn't find it, why the head shots? I can see doin' one of 'em, to show the other one you're serious, but why cap 'em both?"

"Head shots," I said.

"That can't be news to you, Bernie. I told you, an' even if I didn't you'da got it from TV or the papers. They were both shot in the head, and with the same gun. And no, before you ask, it wasn't the same gun as killed Berzins. That was a Lindbauer TDK on full auto. Lyle and the lady were shot with a.22 caliber pistol."

"Your crew searched the place."

"I told you that."

"But neatly," I said, looking around. "You put things back where you found them."

"It's a crime scene, Bernie. You don't touch it until the forensics guys are done, an' then you do what you have to do an' put everything back where you found it."

"That's what you did at my place," I said. "But it's not whatthey did."

"They made a mess? Yeah, you said they did."

"But they didn't make a mess here. Aside from a pair of dead bodies in the living room, I'd say they left the place pretty much as they found it. Which means they didn't search it, and what does that tell you?"

"That they got the damn thing outta the safe, just like I told you right from the beginning."

"But I already explained why they couldn't have. So that leaves another possibility, and it's the only one I can think of."

"Let's hear it."

"They got something," I said, "and they thought it was the McGuffin, and at that stage they had no reason to leave the Lyles breathing."

"Bang bang."

"And away they went, and it wasn't until hours later that they found out they didn't have what they wanted. Because it's still here."

He took his time thinking it over. "Okay," he said at length. "I can't find the holes in that, so all you gotta do is prove the pudding. If it's here, show it to me."

Twenty minutes later, we stood looking down at four photos which I'd laid out on the dining room table. They were color prints, four inches by five inches, and looked to have been taken by the same camera. All four were framed with Scotch tape that held them to pages recently torn from a book. If you looked closely, you could see another thickness of tape, half as wide, which suggested that they'd been mounted somewhere else, then cut loose and mounted anew. The book from which they'd been most recently removed wasQB VII, by Leon Uris. I'd read the book years ago and remembered it fondly, and it had bothered me to rip out the pages, especially with the author having died not long ago. But it was a book club edition and its dust jacket was missing, so it could have been worse. I'd put it on the table next to the photos, where it sat looking deceptively intact.

The photographs showed two faces, full-face and profile. Both faces, stern and expressionless, were those of middle-aged white men, and they filled the photos; if anything of either man existed below the chin, you couldn't have told from these pictures. Madame Defarge might have just plucked them from the basket at the base of the guillotine.

"There," I said, triumphantly. "Head shots."