“I guess so. It really depends. The ones who are single, they have a little less to worry about, and most-”

I had a thought. “Hold on. Clear your mind for a second. Stop looking for a man. Think of the women. Specifically the married women. I’m not expecting you to know the circumstances of everyone’s private life, but I’m sure sometimes you get a sense. Does any woman stand out who seemed upset over how her husband was going to take the news? Maybe someone who mentioned that her husband was recently laid off himself or was out looking for work or maybe just made a large investment? A house. Or the kids’ tuition. Someone who worried that she was really going to be strapped by losing her job? Did anyone seem uncommonly scared?”

Jeffrey spoke up. “You mean like a woman who was afraid her husband was going to yell at her or even beat her up for losing her job?”

“Exactly. That’s one example. The violent spouse. Does anything like that come to mind, Allison?”

“Possibly.” She nibbled lightly on her lower lip before continuing. “There was a woman during the pre-Christmas layoffs who said exactly what you just said. But people say stuff all the time. I mean, it’s a figure of speech.”

“What’s a figure of speech?”

“‘My husband is going to kill me.’”

I took out my notebook and slid it across the table. I handed her a pen. “It’s time for names, Allison. I want this one, and I want the man you mentioned who got angry when you fired him. This is no time for you to be protecting anyone. Do you remember the names?” She nodded. I reached across the table and tapped my finger on the notebook. “Write them.”

She scribbled down a pair of names. “I’m not going in to work today. I’m just too freaked out. But if you’d like, I can call my assistant and have her pull the files on these two.”

“That’ll be good. I know where your building is. Tell her I’ll stop by later this afternoon.” Allison produced a business card and handed it to me. I tucked it into my notebook and thanked her for her time.

Jeffrey accompanied me to the front door. He looked like he could use some air.

“I don’t get it. Why would somebody want to kill Allison? Do you really think it’s got something to do with her job?”

“I plan to find that out.”

“I’m afraid to leave her side.”

I looked back at Allison. She was staring a hole into her hands. I turned back to Jeffrey. “If I were you, that’s exactly what I’d do. I’d be on her like glue.”

17

PETER ELLIOTT STUCK his thumbs in his maroon suspenders and put his feet up on his desk. I settled into a brown leather chair that smelled faintly like a new shoe. “All you need is a stogie in your mouth, counselor.”

Peter laughed. “Shelly hates it when I smoke cigars.”

“Shelly is a civilized woman.”

“No argument there. So you met with Ms. Jennings?”

I gave him a rundown. He listened without interrupting, consulting the ceiling as I spoke. When I was finished, he brought his feet back down to terra firma and drummed his fingers on the desk.

“Okay. Those sound like lukewarm leads.”

“That’s how I see it, too. But they should be tracked down.”

“Give them to the police. It’s the Fox connection we want.”

“That’s a zero,” I said.

“Anything to the Jennings woman looking like Robin Burrell?”

“I didn’t see it,” I said. “I mean, she looks more like her than you or I do. Though maybe you’ve got dishy legs. I’ve never had the privilege.”

“Ms. Burrell did have a nice set of sticks, didn’t she?”

“She was not an unattractive woman.”

Peter scoffed, “Come on, Fritz. The woman was gorgeous.”

“But no sexual predator.”

The attorney held up a hand. “Please. If I never hear that term again, I’ll be grateful. You’ve got to give Riddick credit for that one. He really pounded it into the jury. Basic brainwashing 101. What was I supposed to do, go up there and ask the witness to explain to the jury that she wasn’t a sexual predator? That just keeps the damn term floating out there longer.”

“You weren’t exactly painting Robin Burrell as a nun.”

“It’s an ugly business. We had to bring out the extent of Fox’s sexual deviance. That was key. The man liked it rough. He liked his toys. Especially his handcuffs. Burrell was our best witness to Fox’s fun and games. I’m not saying I enjoyed dragging her through the mud.”

“ America enjoyed it.”

“Yeah, well. America enjoys all sorts of things.”

Nikki Rossman, the second victim, had been found with one end of a pair of handcuffs fastened around her left wrist. Under Peter Elliott’s questioning, Robin had revealed that early in her five-month affair with Fox, she had relented to his urgings that the two indulge in various bondage games, particularly the ones including the use of handcuffs. The testimony had been damning to Fox. What Peter hadn’t anticipated was that Fox’s defense team would take up the challenge and attempt to portray Robin as the aggressor, the one who had encouraged country boy Fox to loosen up and try some new things. Unfortunately, their cause was bolstered when they invited to the stand a man who testified about “some pretty inventive sex” with Robin Burrell back when the two were undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. The man described several episodes that had involved his binding Robin’s ankles and wrists with knotted socks and securing them so she was essentially immobile during the ensuing sex. Worse for the prosecution, he had insisted on the stand that the idea of the bondage had not generated from him but from Robin. Peter Elliott objected to the testimony and tried to get it struck from the record, but the judge had allowed it. From that point on, Fox’s defense team never missed an opportunity to portray Robin as not only a willing and eager partner to the colorful sex she and Fox had indulged in, but as the initiator. The notion took hold, and soon enough, Robin’s image in the media rarely appeared without at least a passing allusion to her spirited sexual history. Riddick had also managed to dredge up the fact that while she was an undergraduate, Robin had become pregnant not once but twice, each time terminating the pregnancy. Judge Deveraux did order this irrelevant factoid stricken from the record, but even so, Robin’s stability as a witness for the prosecution had taken its hits.

The buzzer on Peter’s phone buzzed. The call was short.

“That was Lewis,” Peter said, hanging up. “He’d like us to come into his office.”

If I thought the fragrance of Peter’s office chair suggested a new shoe, state’s attorney Lewis Gottlieb’s entire office positively reeked of a tannery. Gottlieb was acting as lead prosecutor in the Marshall Fox trial. For a man nearing his seventy-fifth birthday, he was still in impressively good physical condition, tall and unstooped, rumored to jog three miles every morning before taking the train down to the city from Westchester. It had been widely rumored that Gottlieb was on the cusp of announcing his plans for retirement just before the indictment of Marshall Fox on multiple counts of murder and that Peter had been instrumental in convincing his mentor to stay on and crown his career with what would no doubt be recorded as one of the more notorious prosecutions of the Manhattan criminal court system. Word along the grapevine was that Gottlieb was apoplectic at the possibility of losing such a white-hot spectacle of a case as the Marshall Fox prosecution. The notion was unimaginable, the sort of wrong note that a person like Lewis Gottlieb quite simply would not tolerate.

Peter had admitted to me on our way down the plushly carpeted corridor to Gottlieb’s office that the esteemed attorney was especially nervous about the jury’s increasing fractiousness.

“A hung jury is the least of his worries. Lewis has Deveraux’s promise-off the record-that he’ll do everything humanly possible to get everything through to a conclusion on this go-around. It’s not the mistrial that’s got Lewis worked up, it’s the prospect that the jury will actually let Fox go free. If things were to go that way…I don’t even want to think about it.”