Tony sipped his cold coffee.

"Stride came to see me this evening," Maggie went on. "Abel Teitscher was in the Cities this afternoon talking to Nicole about the Enger Park case."

"Oh?"

"It turns out Nicole thought she was close to a breakthrough on the case right before she was arrested. She said you were a big help."

"Me? I don't recall."

"She says you pointed her in the right direction. Told her to walk this way. Get it? Aerosmith? Pretty funny, huh?"

"You've lost me."

"Well, you helped her find out a lot about Aerosmith fan sites and chat rooms, and wouldn't you know, she thinks she found out who the Enger Park Girl was. She thinks it was a girl who got picked up by a bad, bad guy at an Aerosmith concert in Kansas City in 1997. That was a couple days before we found the body in the park. So Nicole figures the murderer was at the concert, too."

"Sounds like a pretty big haystack in which to find a needle," Tony said.

Maggie rolled her eyes. "Yeah, that's for sure. Nicole was optimistic. Those concerts are zoos, right? Tens of thousands of people there. But I don't need to tell you that."

"No."

Maggie turned around and squinted up at the diplomas hung on the wall behind her. "I need glasses. It kills me. Say, I'm right, you went to the University of Minnesota, didn't you? You were there in the early '90s?"

"Yes. I got my B.A. and then did my graduate work there, too."

"We were probably both there around the same time, but we never ran into each other."

"The U is like a city," Tony said.

"It sure is. Thousands of students, and you never meet more than a fraction of them. You never hear their stories. Like Helen Danning, she went to the U at the same time we did, but she dropped out and never went back to school. Too bad."

"Who's Helen Danning?" Tony asked blandly.

"She's the second Enger Park Girl," Maggie told him. "The woman we just found yesterday."

Tony stroked his beard and briefly closed his eyes. When they opened again, Maggie stared at him without blinking. Her eyes were bright and cold. She was talking to him silently. Telling him the truth. Daring him. It was as if they were connected by an invisible tether, a waxy string tied to the bottom of two foam cups, and she was whispering in his ear.

"I didn't hear that you had identified the body," Tony said.

"No, they haven't released that to the press, but it's her. The killer made a big mistake. He missed a small tattoo on her ankle."

"Oh?"

"The tattoo said TLIM. Helen kept a blog. The Lady in Me. The blog was how Eric traced her to the Ordway in St. Paul."

"Eric?"

"That's right. Eric went to see Helen Danning just before he was killed. Helen disappeared the next day. You see, we're still putting the pieces together, but we think Eric found her because of a story she posted on the Web about being sexually assaulted while she was at the U."

Tony shrugged. "Why would Eric want to talk to her about that?"

"Yeah, that's the real question, isn't it? What would lead Eric to believe that a girl named Helen Danning getting raped in college would have anything to do with me being raped fifteen years later?"

"I assume you're going to tell me."

Maggie reached inside the pocket of her jacket and slipped out a single sheet of paper. "Here's the part of the blog that Stride and I found really interesting," she said. "This is what Helen wrote. 'The real kicker is that the bastard who did this to me is now in the business of counseling rape victims! He's some shrink up in Duluth!' "

Tony stared at the glossy surface of his desk as if it were a mirror.

"So let me know where I go wrong on this, Tony," Maggie said. "Eric was trying to find out who assaulted me and Tanjy, and he wound up on this Web site for rape victims. He saw what Helen wrote, and alarm bells started going off in his head, because he knew that Tanjy and I had one thing in common. Our shrink. So Eric went to see Helen Danning to confirm exactly who she meant, exactly who this Duluth psychiatrist was who raped her back in college. But he knew what she was going to say. She told him it was you, Tony. That's why Eric came to see you the night he was killed. He wasn't there to find out how someone ordinary could be a rapist. He didn't tell you he was going to see someone else after he left. He was there to accuse you of raping me and Tanjy."

Tony looked up from his desk. "The problem with your little story is that I didn't rape you, Maggie. Or Tanjy. Even if Eric suspected something ridiculous like that, why would I care? I was innocent."

"Sure, you may have been innocent of raping me and Tanjy. But what about your DNA?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the Enger Park Girl. Teena. The girl you met at the Aerosmith concert in Kansas City. The girl you raped, killed, and dismembered. You left semen inside her, Tony. You didn't think about that back then, did you? But if we ran your DNA now, it would lead us right back to the Enger Park case. That's why you killed Eric. To make sure that didn't happen."

"Please, Maggie, I've been around the block," Tony said. "I know the standards a court would apply in granting a motion to take a DNA sample. Rumors and innuendo like that wouldn't constitute probable cause."

Maggie pointed a finger like a gun at Tony's right hand, where he was cradling his coffee mug. "But Eric didn't care about that. He just took a sample for himself. You know, I forgot all about the coffee mug. When I came back home the night Eric was killed, I was so drunk. Eric left me a note, and he put it on the counter under a black coffee mug. I didn't think twice about it. The damn thing disappeared, and I never realized it. I didn't even put it together until I saw you holding that coffee cup of yours. Same as always. Like you were daring me to notice. Eric took it from you that night, didn't he? He was going to get me to run your DNA. So you had to get that mug back."

Tony laughed. It sounded odd, laughter bubbling out of the man who never even smiled. He stared at the mug, shook his head as if it were the funniest thing in the world, and then flipped it across the room. The mug twisted in the air, and coffee streamed and splattered on the carpet, leaving a dark trail of stains. When the mug hit the floor, it bounced and rolled to a stop near the far wall.

Tony slid open the middle drawer of his desk.

"Don't," Maggie said. She knew what he was reaching for.

Tony drew out a black Glock from the drawer and cradled it in his hand.

"Take a look at the camera," she said.

He glanced at the monitor that kept an eye on his waiting room. Stride was there, his own gun in his hand, staring back up at the camera as if he knew that Tony was watching him and deciding whether to run.

"And the door," Maggie added.

Tony turned and studied the glass door that led out of the office into the field of birch trees, and Abel Teitscher was there, tall and windswept, looking back at Tony with his grizzled face. He had a gun in his hand, too.

"There are more," Maggie said. "The place is surrounded. You're not going anywhere, Tony. So just put down the gun, and let's go."

Tony held the Glock as if he were measuring its heft and how solid and heavy it felt in his hand. "You know, I was planning to kill you, too, Maggie. That night. But I didn't."

"Instead you used my gun to kill my husband and frame me," she snapped.

"Don't pretend it was such a loss. You didn't love him."

"Fuck you, that's not the point."

"Once I killed Eric, I couldn't risk going back upstairs," Tony said. "Kicking your husband out of your bed kept you alive. That's rather ironic."

"What about Nicole?" Maggie asked. "You framed her, too, didn't you?"