"So, Jo, who picked out my ensemble?"

"I did. That's your shroud. You're dead today." She smiled, as if this might be a good thing. "It's a trick I learned in college. Remember final exams? Those days when you didn't want to get out of bed – ever again? Playing dead can actually cheer you up. Nobody expects anything of a corpse. Life gets so much easier after you die. Oh, did I mention that I'm the one who dressed you? And now that I've seen you naked, shouldn't I at least know your first name?"

"I told you the day I met you, Jo. I don't have a first name, never did." He fished in one pocket and found it empty. "Go get my ID. Check it out." "I already looked at it. There's an initial, a P. What does that stand for?" "That's all it says on my birth certificate." He watched her remove the needle from his arm, then noticed the puncture wounds of other injections, a chemical soup. He felt docile but not dopey, no fog in the mind, and he needed no help to get out of his bed. Had he known what Jo had in mind for the day, he would have rolled over and gone back to sleep.

Lieutenant Coffey had a comfortable front-row seat in the shadows, but the show on the other side of the one-way glass was over. In the next room of bright lights, an elderly prisoner sat with his baby-sitter, a great hulk of a cop, whose facial features suggested that he might be prone to bone-snapping violence. Detective Janos was under orders not to speak, for his soft and gentle voice was evidence of a benign soul adored by dogs and children. So he merely stared at the old man, sometimes grunting a reply. The prisoner was smiling, apparently enjoying Janos's company and chatting amiably, not caring that the guttural responses were somewhat limited.

Lieutenant Coffey turned to the young detective seated beside him in the dark. "What possessed you to arrest a lawyer?"

"Always wanted to," said Mallory.

Jack Coffey nodded. This was every cop's fantasy.

"What the hell?" Riker would have decked anyone else for trying to wrap him in an apron, but since it was Jo, he was helpless to untie the bow she had fashioned behind his back.

"We'll start with the kitchen," she said. "It's a pit."

A good description. The floor was so sticky with spilled food and beer, he sometimes got stuck like a bug on flypaper when he walked through the room barefoot. She led the way down the hall to the kitchen, where a familiar object was waiting. Riker had never seen Charles's cleaning woman separated from her wire cart of tools and supplies. "Don't tell me what you did with Mrs. O.'s body. It's better if I don't know."

Jo pulled a garbage bag from a box on the cart and handed it to him. "I supervise. You do the work." She sat down at the table and watched him bundle junk mail and beer cans into the bag. After the floor had been cleared, she handed him a plastic bottle. He struggled with the concept of a spray nozzle as she explained that the liquid would cut through the grease on the tiles, then asked, "So what did your parents call you when you were little?"

After spraying the floor, he pushed the mop around in silence. Jo's foot tapped to an impatient rhythm, and he said, "My dad called me Hey Kid. My little brother's name was You Too."

"You never asked what the P stood for?" Highly unlikely, said the tone of her voice.

"Okay, I'll tell you the story my old man told me." Riker pretended interest in the floor tiles emerging from the dirt. "Dad's name was Phillip. He said I was named after him. But he didn't want me to get stuck with a tag like Junior for the rest of my life, so he just put the P on my birth certificate. He said it was a secret, just between us, and even my mom didn't know. Well, I loved that story, and I never told it to anybody, not ever. Not having a first name – that drove the other kids nuts. It was great."

"But when you were older and less gullible, you asked him for the real story, right?"

Chapter 17

THE ODOR OF RANCID FOOD WAS FOUL, AND SO Johanna supervised the cleaning from a distance. Riker was stalled. He stood barefoot in the light of the refrigerator's grease-splattered bulb, his hands filled with small packets of mustard and ketchup salvaged from take-out containers, and now he debated the value of his condiment collection.

"Oh, get crazy," said Johanna. "Just toss it. Every time you throw something away, your load gets a little lighter."

Mrs. Ortega's philosophy of clutter was carried through all the drawers of the kitchen, repositories of empty matchbooks, dead batteries and metal parts that had fallen off of appliances that he no longer owned. One broken swizzle stick was tied to a memorable binge, and he was allowed to keep it. Out on the street, Johanna watched him load the garbage cans with bags of trash and throwaways, including socks with holes that could not be mended, not even with the yarn of entire socks. The effect of her drugs was wearing off. He objected to bare feet on cold pavement, but she would not let him put on shoes, arguing that dead men had no need for them, but socks might be all right. He found one hardly used pair beneath the bed, and she stood over him as he sat on the rug and put them on.

"So how old were you when you knew your father lied about your first name? When did he tell you the real story?"

Instead of answering her, he lowered his head to take on the next task, foraging under the bed for the wildlife of spiders and dust bunnies. And now it occurred to her that the story of his first name was not the small, easy confidence that she had counted on to open his mind to the healing process and the toxic secret that poisoned him.

"All right," she said, spilling pharmacy tablets into her hand. "Never mind."

The meds, a chemical cheat, would destroy his resistance. Jo held out the pills in one hand and a glass of water in the other. He took them willingly enough, trained from childhood to follow the doctor's orders with absolute trust. She planned to render him defenseless so that she might crack his mind wide open before this day was over.

"Let's try something easier," she said. "Why do you always slam doors?"

Coffey sat in the dark, irritated beyond belief. In the interview room on the other side of the one-way glass, his detective was not faring as well. To some extent, the silent treatment had worked, for the suspect was certainly talkative. However, the elderly lawyer was winning the day, slowly wearing down poor Janos with endless prattle about the great game of cops and killers, and displaying ignorance of both. Jack Coffey turned to Mallory. "You got his stats?" She nodded. "Old and rich. I'm guessing he got fed up with retirement. He thought I was going to arrest him for obstruction of justice."

Perversely, Mallory had arrested him for everything but that. Jack Coffey scanned the list of charges against the old man: littering, assault on a police officer and two counts of bribery. And she had no less than twelve corroborating statements. God bless eyewitness testimony, worthless as it was, and the power of suggestion. Though the evidentiary twenty-dollar bill was certainly Mallory's own money, eight of her witnesses had come to believe that they had actually seen the old man hand her the bribe. But all the lieutenant had really needed to know was that the elderly lawyer represented a young man with an obsessive interest in Detective Sergeant Riker.

"I guess this'll hold him for a while," said Coffey. "But he'll never give up his client. And now he's going to sue the city just for fun."

"Wrong," she said. "He's going to fold after a few hours in a lockup cage. The old man was a probate attorney. No criminal practice – only wealthy law-abiding clients. I'm betting this is his first visit to a police station."