She thought she’d blown the audition. The following evening she was on her way to Los Angeles.

Tracy had kept her copy of the audition script, and she was able to tell Gallo where it could be found in her apartment in West Hollywood. Gallo immediately contacted the LAPD, and within hours, the single page was faxed to New York.

Joe showed it to me in his office.

I want you to listen to me and I don’t want any interruptions. Kevin Daly can’t be trusted. He was having an affair with Missy Welch and I know that he is the one who got her pregnant. If he knows what’s good for himself, he’ll go to the police and tell them about Missy. If he doesn’t, I’ll do it. And I mean it. Don’t think I won’t.

“Scintillating,” I said.

Gallo asked, “Do you see what I see?”

I nodded. “Ross already had the tape of Tracy’s visit from the day before. She’d have been throwing Fox’s name around, accusing him of being the violent punk he really is. Ross sends her off with the promise of a so-called audition, then he cooks up this piece of crap and has her come back in and read it a dozen different ways. All sorts of inflections.”

“Exactly. Do a nifty splice job with bits from the day before, and he’s got her on tape saying whatever he wants.”

I looked down at the fax again. “‘Marshall Fox was having an affair with Cynthia Blair. He’s the one who got her pregnant. If he doesn’t tell the police, I’ll tell them myself, blah, blah, blah.’”

Joe nodded. “When Megan and I went up to Fox’s apartment, he and Ross and Riddick all said they wanted to get Fox’s affair with Cynthia on record themselves rather than have us hear it from this other source. This source that Fox thought was credible.”

“Except Tracy never knew.”

“That’s right.”

I held up the fax. “So which is it? Is our man Ross brilliant or pathetic?”

“We got Fox’s and Riddick’s phone records and checked all the calls that came in the week Tracy’s threat showed up. We found a pair of calls made to both of them within several minutes of each other, from the same public telephone five blocks from Alan Ross’s office. Tracy Jacobs wasn’t in New York at the time of the calls, so we checked all calls that came in to Fox and Riddick from the Los Angeles area as well. They’ve all been signed off as legit calls from known associates. Nothing from Tracy.”

“Thorough bastard, aren’t you? I’d sure hate to work for you.”

“I’ll remember that if you ever come crawling.”

“If I’m crawling, Joe, you won’t want me.”

NOT FORTY MINUTES BEFORE talking his way into Robin Burrell’s apartment and killing her, Alan Ross had been making nice with me in Samuel Deveraux’s courtroom. It took some work for the thought not to depress me. Cool, calm bastard. DNA evidence placed Alan Ross inside Robin’s apartment. Besides the hair samples from Ross located in Robin’s apartment, skin tissue samples removed from beneath her fingernails provided a match with Ross, as did a spot of blood lifted from the large mirror shard that Robin’s killer had thrust into her neck. The small sample of blood was located on the portion of the shard that the killer would have gripped while working the glass into place. Since there were no unaccounted-for fingerprints taken from Robin’s apartment, the assumption was that Ross had worn gloves but that either a finger or a thumb had gotten torn on the glass and the thumb or finger beneath had been nicked. A claw hammer retrieved from Ross’s garage also yielded blood samples that were traced not only to Robin Burrell but to Nicole Rossman as well.

The case against Alan Ross strapped on rockets.

MEGAN AND I TOOK the Metro North train up to see Tracy Jacobs. A golf-ball-sized lump remained under her left eye, which itself sagged somewhat and wasn’t opening completely. Her jaw was wired in place, and a temporary latex piece had been affixed to her lower gums in lieu of the teeth that were no longer there. She was having problems with the right side of her body; the leg in particular wanted to behave more like a noodle than a leg.

Megan did most of the talking. For the most part, she steered the conversation in neutral directions. Tracy’s family. Her recent trip to Paris. What it felt like to kiss Matt Damon during his recent guest appearance on Century City. I silently awarded Megan a daytime Emmy for her performance during that line of questioning. She actually behaved as if she really gave a damn.

We spoke with Tracy in the facility’s solarium, overlooking a sloping ten-acre lawn at the edge of which sat a half-frozen pond populated by black ducks. Tracy cried a few times during the visit. Thankfully, she had no memory of the beating she had taken at the hands of Alan Ross. Her final memory of the afternoon was of Ross’s car pulling into his garage. For her own peace of mind, she had not been informed of Ross dumping her bound body into the water. She had no clue of Megan’s role in her rescue. In the hour and a half we spent with her, Tracy thanked me half a dozen times for saving her life. A strong look from Megan the first time Tracy gushed this way had warned me off from setting the record straight. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t my call.

Before we left, we picked up a key piece of information. Three days before leaving New York for Paris, Tracy had bumped into Zachary Riddick at a DreamWorks party in midtown. She told us she had been unprepared for the reaction she’d received. Riddick lit in to her for the calls he said she’d placed both to him and to Marshall Fox, allegedly threatening to go to the police with her story about Fox’s relationship with Cynthia Blair. Of course, Tracy had never made those calls, and she went to great pains to convince Riddick that she had no idea what he was talking about. She swore that Danny Lyles had never breathed a word to her about Fox and Cynthia Blair. Tracy told us that Riddick had seemed baffled, then troubled, by her insistence that she in no way had placed the calls. She did tell him that she had raised her concerns about Fox with Lyles and that the driver had contacted Alan Ross. She related her meetings with Alan Ross, going on at some length about what a wonderful man Ross had been to take her under his wing the way he had.

“I thought Alan was a god,” Tracy said to us, gazing off toward the pond. “He was a god, and I was one of his very favorite angels.” She turned her broken face to us. The tears in her left eye seemed unable to fall. “How could he despise me so? What did I do?”

As we were leaving, Tracy’s mother and brother appeared, and I had to go through the whole hero thing again. Megan drifted off and looked out the window as I collected the praise.

“You know your humble act gets old fast,” I said to her on the ride back to the train station.

She fixed me with a look I hadn’t been ready for. “I’ve had the spotlight. I detest it.”

On the train back to the city, Megan and I put the scenario together. Riddick must have smelled a rat. In buying Tracy Jacobs’s story that she had not placed threatening phone calls to him and to Fox, the lawyer must have begun to suspect who was actually pulling the strings. He must have contacted Ross and aired his suspicions. Or if not, he must at least have put some hard questions to Ross.

“Ross couldn’t afford to have Riddick poking into this,” Megan said as the train raced past Valhalla. “Riddick was Fox’s lawyer. His job was to get his client cleared of these charges.”

I agreed. Zachary Riddick spelled trouble for Ross. “But why Robin?” I asked. The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I knew the answer. Megan did, too.

“Misdirection.”

“Precisely.”

“Ross targets yet another of Fox’s former lovers and arranges her killing to look just like Cynthia’s and Nikki’s. And who should know better than Ross how to do that? The result? Uproar and confusion. Big headlines. Is Fox innocent after all, or is there a copycatter coming out of the woodwork?”