"Let go. What's the matter with you?"

"You didn't keep your promise."

Birdie tried to move her feet to get away but couldn't. It wasn't funny. "That's ridiculous."

"Don't call me ridiculous."

Birdie was less than a dozen paces from help. She reached out to the barking dog. "Help!"

Thunder drowned out her voice. The dog strained against its leash, but its master was the one controlling the choker collar. The dog obeyed the command for quiet as it disappeared into the downpour.

Then Birdie was really scared. He had her by the throat. Her heart felt as if it would burst with fear, worse than when she'd heard that Max was dead. She tried to knee him in the crotch, but he just caught her foot and twisted it until she yelped. Then he caught her before she fell.

"Don't play like that, and I won't hurt you. I promise. Let's dance. You like to dance."

The rain started in earnest as he spun her around, brushing the soles of her shoes against the pavement, then lifting them off again. Men had been doing that to Birdie ever since she was a little girl-lifting her off the ground-but never in a way that prevented her from breathing.

Her eyes bulged. Okay, I'll keep my promise. Fireworks exploded in her eyes as she fought against her own weight. His hands were around her neck, choking her. Her own weight was killing her. Panic rose with the agony. She kicked again and missed again. As she sank into darkness, her thoughts drifted to Max. He'd left her to swim with sharks. She lost consciousness.

She was almost gone when her feet touched the ground, and air suddenly came in. She sucked it in, saved. Thank you. She was breathing. Saved. Thank you.

"I'll keep the promise." She gasped.

"Too late!" The powerful strike at her throat came so fast she didn't see the hand retract, then fly at her like a launched missile. A sharp crack sounded on impact as the cartilage gave. Like Bernardino, Birdie was dead before she hit the ground.

Thirty-three

At ten-thirty-five on Wednesday evening Mike and April returned home from a long and unsettling day that ended with a hamburger dinner at the Metropolitan, a heavily cop-frequented restaurant close to headquarters. The energy level was rock bottom among the bosses gathered there. Ebullience at having resolved a sticky case within the week had turned to bitter disappointment late in the day when the Manhattan DA won the first round in the game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

No one in the Department wanted to hang a prosecutor for a cop murder, especially if the prosecutor happened to be the son of the dead cop in question. But between the two possible suspects on the table- a prosecutor and a retired cop, working alone, with each other, or Harry working with an unknown third party-the most comfortable choice was the prosecutor and no third party. The Tiger Liniment in his gym bag and on the victim was good enough for them.

Marvin Cohn, the Manhattan DA, however, wasn't buying. "I don't fucking care where you found stink oil. I don't care if it matches the oil on the victim's shirt and jacket. I don't give a shit. This isn't physical evidence. This is madness." He'd gone ballistic.

"Listen to what you're telling me! Nothing! We already know Bill had been in contact with his father that evening. The two men could have hugged. Traces of the oil could have rubbed off on him at the party, or at some earlier time. Drop it, unless you can do a lot better. What are you, stupid? Are you crazy? You have nothing but circumstantial. And that's fucking nothing."

And he'd said worse things to just about everybody. Bill's wife had confirmed that he was home at the time of the murder, and she passed a lie-detector test. That would be tough to fight in court.

"Give me a fucking break," Cohn had shrieked. It was the same thing that Bill himself kept saying.

Avise didn't like Cohn's attitude, which he considered nothing more than politics. But without the prosecutor's green light, the task force was back to Harry, working with a third party, because Jack Devereaux wouldn't ID Harry himself as April's attacker. There was no question that Harry was in deep, was connected somehow. According to Cherry and her bank records, he'd given her two hundred and fifty grand at least two weeks before Bernardino was murdered.

Harry had received the money right after Lorna died, just about the time four million was withdrawn from Bernadino's brokerage account. How much more of that Harry had come away with was anyone's guess. For all they knew, the two hundred grand might be just a drop in the bucket. If Harry didn't have the rest of it, maybe he knew where it was. He was It now. Every corner of his dusky life was under the microscope. Mike figured if he had more dough, he'd be spending it somewhere. They were checking Harry's every known associate for leaking money.

But April kept being teased by the karate thread. Every cop in the world could kill with a choke hold, but there was more to this than the choke hold. There was the need to kill in public, almost ninja style, the need to show off. You couldn't separate that aspect out. A little niggle about the competence of the two karate fans from Bernardino's own unit made her uneasy. If they were tracking a karate expert close to Harry, they had to be good. She knew them, but were they good enough? Were they going to the right places, talking to the right people, asking the right questions? The karate thread suggested she should take over the search herself, bring her own people in, figure it out her own way. Going it alone in investigations was a little problem for April. She didn't like being a team player. She didn't trust anybody else to get it right. She wanted to solve the cases fast. She didn't want to wait while the primaries dicked around with endless speculations.

As soon as she got home, she ran the water in the bathtub and started stripping off her clothes. She'd been the only woman at the table that night, and her gift for being there was a dry throat and smoky hair. She wanted to wash the male experience off as fast as possible. As a sergeant she was permitted to sit down with the big boys only because of her relationship to Mike. It always made her want to sink through the floor. That night she'd spent the time turning the pieces of the Bill and Harry puzzle around and around in her head to make them fit. They wouldn't fit unless Bill and his father's old partner were working together, or Harry had another friend.

"You don't need to look further. You've got your man right there," Bill had screamed at April in the late afternoon. "And tell Mike I want my fucking computer back." It didn't seem likely that Bill would be pushing for a partner's arrest.

April let her hair down and slid gratefully into the hot tea rose-scented water. She knew the answers would come to her if she let the questions go, if she loosened up her mind and relaxed a little. She breathed to slow her racing heart and was just beginning to calm down when the phone in the living room rang. She could hear Mike pick up.

"Sanchez." Then, "Shit." Then, "Give me thirty minutes."

She was out of the tub at "Shit." Shit always meant more than shit. She grabbed the towel and the pair of slacks that she'd hung on the back of the bathroom door, then dashed into the bedroom for some clean underwear and a blouse. She had a towel wrapped around her head and was zipping up trouser boots when Mike's face appeared in the doorway.

"There's been another homicide in Washington Square," he said.

The familiar sick feeling sucked air out of April's lungs. "Who?"

"A woman called Birdie Bassett. Rich widow. She'd been at a dinner at York U. She was a donor."

York U! She was stunned. "Did he get away?"