She was always such a loner, said Louis Markowitz's letter which Charles had opened on the day the body was found. She never hung out in cop bars, never saw the sad, mean side of burn-out. She keeps company with machines.

When Louis Markowitz had given him the letter to hold against that day, Charles had felt honored, but curious, too. Why him, why not Rabbi Kaplan or someone else he had known longer?

Louis had said then, "Kathy's a special case. You deal with special cases all the time."

Indeed. Kaplan or any other man of the cloth would be a poor match for what Louis had described in his letter as an amoral savage:

When my Helen died a few years back, Kathy wanted to kill the whole world. It was all I could do to convince her it wouldn't be civil to gut the surgeon who failed Helen. When I'm dead, Commissioner Beak will bump her out of Special Crimes Section and put her on compassionate leave. Make her understand this is department policy, and Beale is not to be found in an alley strung up by his balls.

As he recalled, she had been very civilized about the forced leave. She had taken his advice on that matter with no argument, no protest at all. Why hadn't that made him suspicious? Well, obviously because he was an idiot.

He could only wonder what else had gone by him. He supposed there wasn't much point in asking her a direct question. He believed she really did like him well enough to count him as a friend, to confide in him at times, but there were limits. He would have to settle for damage control.

He looked around this perfectly ordered room. It was obvious to both of them that he needed her, even if she didn't need him, not him or any other creature on this planet. But her proposal of a partnership would cost him sleep. The things she did with other people's computers, and without their knowledge or consent.

She had a gift that would have gone begging in an era without computer technology. He marveled over the far-sighted genetic blueprint. Each encounter with a human born to a specific talent, applied or not, gave him a window on the future of all mankind. But his limited window on Kathleen Mallory was frightening. The partnership was an insane idea to be considered with the same careful thought he might give to walking through a minefield or jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. And Louis would have been the first to tell him so.

In a far corner of his compartmentalized brain, he could see the specter of Louis Markowitz rolling his eyes and saying sardonically, "Ah, Charles?" and shaking his head from side to side with the sentiment of "No. Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all."

"All right, Kathleen, a partnership." He extended his hand and she shook it with a firm grip. "Call me Mallory, now that it's business."

"And you'll call me Butler, I suppose? No, I don't think so. I know you too well for that. It would seem unnatural."

"All right. I'll call you Charles. When the stuff shows up, just sign for it. Here," she said, handing him a business card. "Just a sample. You like it?"

Business cards? Hardly samples, they were printed on good stock in two colors, maroon and gray. She had to have ordered them at least two weeks ago, perhaps on the very day of the funeral.

"Kathleen – "

"Mallory."

"Sorry. I'm just a little curious about the wording. Discreet investigations? As in private investigations?"

"What's the problem, Charles?"

"We're a consulting firm."

"What does a consultant do, Charles?"

"Well, someone comes to me with a problem, and I look into it and come up with a solution for them."

She kissed the top of his head and walked to the door as if his own answer were answer enough. And it probably would be if his field was not finding practical applications for new modes of intelligence and odd gifts. And she was not even going to deal with the little matter that her own name preceded his in Mallory and Butler, Ltd.

"Wait," he called to her as she was pulling the door closed behind her. "Wouldn't I need a special license for this kind of thing?"

"You have one," she said.

"How -?" He aborted this stupid question. Of course, she had simply arranged it with a midnight computer requisition. Willing or no, he was in the computer system as a properly licensed private investigator… while she remained a police officer on compassionate leave, and with certain restrictions on her behavior.

Their partnership was minutes old, and already he'd been had. This could not possibly be legal. There were rules and regulations and -

She smiled. The door closed.

He was feeling a sense of loss when she had been gone only a few seconds. She always had that effect on him. When she left a room, she left a vacuum, a hole in the air which smelled faintly of Chanel.

Only in daydreams had he considered that they might ever be more than friends. She was a beauty, while he was… a man with a prominent nose, a beak actually. And when he smiled, he had the aspect of a happy lunatic. And there were other stand-out qualities which some called freakish.

His eidetic memory called up the last page of Markowitz's letter. He projected it onto a clear space of the wall. The mental image was perfect to the details of the folds in the paper and the black ink blots of the fountain pen Louis favored over the ballpoint:

She never worked the field beyond her rookie days, and I don't want her working it now, dogging my last tracks. It makes me a little crazy that I won't always be there to keep her safe. She spent most of her childhood on the streets, stealing breakfast, lunch and dinner, and her shoes. She's fearless. She thinks there isn't a human born she can't outsmart or outshoot. The pity is that she's so freaking smart and a great shot, beautifully equipped to do the job. Scary, isn't it, Charles?

He missed Louis sorely. The day he had been given the letter was his last memory of the man. Louis had handled his sherry glass delicately. He had been graceful in all his gestures and in the way he carried himself and his excess poundage. Yet, at rest, the first creature the inspector called to mind was a fat basset hound. Then, the fleshy folds of Louis's face would gather up into a smile, dispatching the hound and exposing the great personal charm of the man. One tended to smile back, willing or no. People in handcuffs tended to smile back.

Had Louis known whom his killer would be? Was it the man who killed the elderly women? He supposed he could assume it was a man. This was not the sort of violence a woman would do. And he could assume great intelligence. If Louis thought the killer was not a fair match for Mallory, that put him in the upper two percentile.

But he was thinking out the wrong puzzle. Louis had not asked him to find his murderer, he had asked him to look after his daughter, a more convoluted problem and the greater challenge of the two.

Mallory switched off the car ignition and settled back to watch Jonathan Gaynor pay off the cab and enter his apartment building. Monday through Friday his routine seldom varied. She would stay on him until dusk. The daylight timing was a constant in the killing.

A shift in the late September breeze carried the pungent smell of new-cut grass. She approved of Gramercy's clean streets, well-tended park and perfect order. It was so quiet here, and while the flowers bloomed, so unlike the rest of the town in the way it soothed all her senses and brought her a kind of peace unknown in her normal workaholic existence. She stared at the small park maintenance building where Anne Cathery had lain beneath a garbage bag on the blood-soaked ground amid her scattered beads. And there, seated on a bench only a few yards from the building, was the victim's grandson, Henry Cathery.