"Park the car, Tom, please," Chief Inspector Coughlin said to his aide, "and then come back and take care of their car, too."

He got out of the Oldsmobile and stood in the street, waiting for Matt and Patty to drive up.

Staff Inspector Peter Wohl walked up to him.

"Can't we run those fucking ghouls off, Peter?" Coughlin said, nodding toward the press behind the golf course fence.

"I wish we could, sir," Wohl said. "If you've got a minute, Chief?"

Matt stopped the Mercury at Coughlin's signal. Patty lowered the window, and Coughlin leaned down to it.

"Just leave the keys, Matt," he said. "Lenihan will park it, and then catch up with us." He opened Patty's door, and she got out. "I'll be with you in just a minute, dear. I gotta talk to a guy."

He walked Wohl twenty feet down the sidewalk.

"Shoot," he said. "I gotta get inside. That's Dutch's sister-in-law. Ex -sister-in-law. And his nephew."

"The commissioner said if I saw you before he did, I should tell you what's going on."

"He here?"

"Yes, sir," Wohl said. "There was an eyewitness, Chief, Miss Louise Dutton, of Channel Nine."

"The blonde?" Coughlin asked.

"Right," Wohl said. "She was with Captain Moffitt at the time of the shooting," he added, evenly.

"Doing what?"

"I don't know, sir," Wohl said.

"You don't know?" Coughlin asked, on the edge of sarcasm.

"She said that she was meeting him to get his reaction to people calling the Highway Patrol 'Carlucci's Commandos,' " Wohl said. "She was very upset, sir, when I got there. She was kneeling over Captain Moffitt, weeping."

"Where is she?" Coughlin asked.

"She went from the diner to Channel Nine-"

"They didn't take her to the Roundhouse?" Coughlin interrupted. "Who let her go?"

"The commissioner… I was a couple of blocks from the Waikiki Diner, and responded to the call, and I was the first supervisor on the scene, and I called him. The commissioner said I should do what had to be done. I didn't think sending her to the Roundhouse was the thing to do. So I borrowed two uniforms from the Second District, and sent them with her. I told them to stay with her, to see that she got home safely. Homicide will send somebody to talk to her at her apartment."

Coughlin grunted. "McGovern say anything to her?" he asked.

"I don't think Mac saw the situation as I did, Chief."

"Probably just as well," Coughlin said. "Mac is not too big on tact. Is there anything I should be doing?"

"I don't think so, sir. The commissioner knows how close you were to Dutch…"

"Is there… is this going to develop into something awkward, Peter?"

"I hope not," Wohl said. "I don't think so."

"Jesus H. Christ," Coughlin said. "This is going to be tough enough on Jeannie without it being all over the papers and on the TV that Dutch was fooling around with some bimbo…"

"I think we can keep that from happening, Chief," Wohl said; and then surprised himself by adding, "She's not a bimbo. I like her. And she seems to understand the situation."

Coughlin looked at him with his eyebrows raised.

"The commissioner asked me to make sure nothing awkward develops, Chief," Wohl said. "To find out for sure what Captain Moffitt' srelationship with Miss Dutton was…"

"I went through the academy with Dutch's brother," Coughlin interrupted. "Dutch was then, what, sixteen, seventeen, and he was screwing his way through the cheerleaders at Northeast High. He never, as long as I knew him, gave his pecker a rest. I've got a damned good idea what his relationship with Miss-whatsername?-was."

"Dutton, Chief," Wohl furnished, and then added: "We don't know that, Chief."

"You want to give me odds, Peter?" Coughlin asked.

Mrs. Patricia Payne and Matthew Payne walked up to them.

"Patty, do you know Inspector Wohl?" Coughlin asked.

"No, I don't think so," Patricia Payne said, and offered her hand. " This is my son Matt, Inspector. Dutch's nephew."

"I'm very sorry about this, Mrs. Payne," Wohl said. "Dutch and I were old friends." He offered his hand to Matt Payne.

"InspectorWohl, did he say?" Matt asked.

"Staff InspectorWohl," Coughlin furnished, understanding Matt's surprise that Wohl, who didn't look much older than Matt, held such a high rank. "He's a very good cop, Matt. He went up very quickly; the brass found out that when they gave him a difficult job, they could count on him to handle it."

There's something behind that remark, Patricia Payne thought. I wonder what?

"It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Payne, Matt," Wohl said. "I just regret the circumstances. I've got to get back on the job."

Chief Inspector Coughlin nodded, and then turned and took Mrs. Patricia Payne's arm and led her to Dutch Moffitt's front door.

FIVE

With some difficulty, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl extricated his car from the cars jammed together on the streets, driveways, and alleys near the residence of Captain Richard C. Moffitt. He turned onto Holme Avenue, in the direction of Pennypack Circle.

When he was safely into the flow of traffic, he leaned over and took the microphone from the glove compartment.

"Isaac Twenty-three," he said into it, and when they came back at him, he said he needed a location on Two-Eleven, which was the Second District blue-and-white he'd commandeered from Mac McGovern to escort Miss Louise Dutton.

"I have him out of service at WCBL-TV at Seventeenth and Locust, Inspector," the radio operator finally told him. "Thirty-five minutes ago."

"Thank you," Wohl said, and put the microphone back inside the glove compartment and slammed the door.

There would be time, he decided, to see what the medical examiner had turned up about the female doer. There was no question that there would be other questions directed at him by his boss, Chief Inspector Coughlin, and very possibly by Commissioner Czernick or even the mayor. Peter Wohl believed the Boy Scouts were right; it paid to be prepared.

A battered Ford van pulled to a stop in the parking lot of the medical examiner's office at Civic Center Boulevard and University Avenue. The faded yellow van had a cracked windshield. On the sides were still legible vestiges of aBUDGET RENT-A-CAR logotype. The chrome grille was missing, as was the right headlight and its housing. The passenger-side door had apparently encountered something hard and sharp enough to slice the door skin like a knife. There was a deep, but not penetrating, dent on the body on the same side. The body was rusted through at the bottom of the doors, and above the left-rear fender well.

The vehicle had forty-two unanswered traffic citations against it, most for illegal parking, but including a half dozen or so for the missing headlight, the cracked windshield, an illegible license plate, and similar misdemeanor violations of the Motor Vehicle Code.

Two men got out of the van. One of them was young, very large, and bearded. He was wearing greasy blue jeans, and a leather band around his forehead to keep his long, unkempt hair out of his eyes. After he got out of the passenger's side, the driver, a small, smooth-shaven, somewhat weasel-faced individual wearing a battered gray sweatshirt with the legend support your local sheriff printed on it slid over and got out after him. They walked into the building.

Staff Inspector Peter Wohl and Sergeant Zachary Hobbs of Homicide were standing by a coffee vending machine in the basement, drinking from Styrofoam cups. Wohl shook his head when he saw them.

"Hello, Inspector," the weasel-faced small man, who was Lieutenant David Pekach of the Narcotics Squad, said.

"Pekach, does your mother know what you do for a living?" Wohl replied, offering his hand.

Pekach chuckled. "God, I hope not." He looked at Hobbs. "You're Sergeant Hobbs?"