She broke off, stepping back, light as a cat, to the end of the strip. When she moved forward again, it was still on cat’s feet, an unhurried, stalking advance.

She began this bout in slow-action time, the cadence of casual conversation, as her blade met his in easy strikes and counters. The swordplay accelerated with more rapid strikes, but still no force, light touches only- You kiss my sword, and I kiss yours. Faster now, and faster-quick reports of steel sounded on steel. The tempo was more the breathless pace of something carnal, heart pounding-

Suddenly, Mallory broke with him and retreated to the edge of the strip.

Sweat blurred his eyes as she came dancing back to him with short steps and a rather ordinary gambit. He parried easily, and this should have made him suspicious. Instead of answering his parry with a riposte, she let her steel slide down his sword until she closed with him, hilt to hilt, swords pointing up, only a few inches between their bodies. She pressed closer until they stood corps-a-corps, in the forbidden contact of opponents.

Softly, she said, “I’m going to take you now.”

And he believed her. He was staring into the long slants of her green eyes. Her sword was disengaging, lowering. And this was the moment where he lost the match, even before he felt her metal slipping into the handle of his saber. With one elegant move, she backed away and ripped the steel from his hand with the pry bar of her own sword and sent his saber flying across the court, clanging to the floor.

He glimpsed the bright triumph of a child in her stance and in her eyes-and then the child was gone. Deadly serious now. “I won.”

Stone silence. She stepped forward, sword rising.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “It was my job to keep score, wasn’t it? Well, would you like me to tally up the bloodings?” He looked down at the cuts, thin lines of blood on his side, his arms and one leg. “There are a few tears in the material that didn’t get through to the skin, but of course they count too.”

“I want to collect my bet now.”

“Suppose I sign a confession to the murders of Dean Starr and Avril Koozeman. Would that be satisfactory payment?”

“No. You’re not the type. You won’t even make a strike to save yourself. And leaving your sister out in the rain-well, that doesn’t count as violence.”

“What was I supposed to do? Lock her up in a maximum-security ward for the rest of her life? She’d rather be dead.”

She moved in close to him. “I think you meant to say that she’d be better off dead.” Too late, he felt her leg hook around his own, unbalancing him as she pushed him to the floor. She stood over him with the sword to his throat. “Pay up! I want Sabra.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

“Liar!” She pulled the sword back only a little, slowly angling the point to his face. She thrust it into his mask again and again. “How many drives before I get your eyes? I won! Deliver what you promised.”

“Wait!” He raised one hand, and she stopped. He removed the mask and held it out to her. “This should make it easier for you.”

Her blade came closer. He no longer believed he understood her well enough to anticipate her. But he had well understood Louis Markowitz, and now he was betting his eyes on the man who had raised her.

She put up the sword. “You know, there’s stabbing, and then there’s stabbing.”

She backed away from him. “Aubry was never meant to die that night. I figured it out with the messages. You didn’t know about the message left at the ballet school, did you?”

He shook his head, and she continued. “I got that from my interview with Gregor Gilette. You figured they already had her when that message was left at your paper, right?”

He nodded and closed his eyes. Her next words came from behind him.

“According to her father, Aubry’s message was a long one. That’s what made me think she was being sent somewhere else-so you wouldn’t be able to reach her by phone when you got your own message. Aubry’s was garbled by the clerk, too many instructions to write down in a hurry. So she killed a lot of time trying to decipher the message, and then more time trying to locate you. Finally, she called your newspaper. By then, a message had been left for you. A receptionist probably checked your message box and confirmed the meeting at the gallery. It’s the only scenario that fits the two messages. Too bad you wouldn’t let Markowitz near the family. He could’ve worked it out twelve years ago. It only took me five minutes with Gregor Gilette.”

“Oh, God.”

“Markowitz usually went for the money motive. My father was a smart cop, but with Aubry as the primary target, he had nowhere to go with this case.”

She was very close to his side, speaking into his ear. “If he’d only known that Aubry was there by accident, he would’ve gone after the man with the profit motive to kill Peter Ariel, someone who knew your family connections.”

He opened his eyes. She was in front of him now, leaning down, her face close to his.

“Everything pointed to Koozeman,” she said. “The killers would have been jailed-if you’d only stepped out of my father’s way. And Sabra? She’s been strung out on the street all these years for nothing.”

His head lolled back, eyes rolled up to the ceiling. He felt as though he had been mortally wounded. As she had said, there was stabbing, and then there was stabbing.

“So, Quinn, would you call this a clear win?”

He nodded.

She sat on the floor beside him and laid down her sword. “You knew the link between the old murders and Dean Starr. How did you know he was one of the killers? Did Sabra tell you, or did you tell her?”

“I didn’t send that letter to Riker.”

“I never said you did, Quinn. I know who sent that letter. I figured that one out a long time ago. How did Sabra know about Dean Starr’s connection?”

“Sabra surfaces now and then. When she turns up, I give her walking-around money and a place to stay. I keep an apartment for her-she keeps losing the key. But there are times when she seems fairly rational. She visits old haunts, old friends. For a while, she’s almost herself, almost sane. But then in a few days, she’s back wandering the streets again, looking for-”

“Answer the question! How did she know about Dean Starr?”

“I’m trying to tell you she doesn’t exist in a vacuum. She has sources in the art community. Koozeman has no idea how much the gallery boys hate him-they talk about him incessantly. So she was in Godd’s Bar one night and heard something strange, just snatches of conversations among the gallery staff. Sabra thought Starr might be blackmailing Koozeman. She asked me to find out more about it.”

“And did you?”

“Yes. It only cost me a few hundred per gallery boy to get all of it. It didn’t really sound like blackmail. Starr was only pressuring Koozeman to make him into a hot artist. Starr said he wanted to use the same scheme he used for Peter Ariel. I never heard Koozeman’s end of that conversation.”

“Is that all you told her?”

“That’s all there was to it.”

“She was crazy, you knew that. You just let her draw her own conclusions?”

“Well, they were the right conclusions, weren’t they? I gave her whatever she asked of me.”

“And then you went down to the morgue to view the remains of the jumper, the homeless woman who died in Times Square. You thought Sabra had killed Starr and then killed herself, right?”

He nodded.

“But now you believe your sister killed them both, don’t you? Starr and Koozeman?”

“We never discussed the murders.”

“How convenient. Was that on your attorney’s advice? Were you worried about conspiracy charges?”

“Mallory, I have an idea you know that feeling of nothing left to lose. So does Sabra. She can’t depend on the police to finish it for her, can she? Look at the way they-”