"I hate to be prosaic, sweetheart," Douglas had said at that point, "and I know we have to find out what's going on with your mother, but if I don't get something to eat pretty soon I'll starve to-I mean, I'm really hungry."

Pushing away the spotless dessert plate, Caroline now found that she was smiling at the memory: by all means, let us avoid using the word "death" with its air of dark reality. Douglas was a born politician.

"We may have to send your aide to town for a McDonald's," she had told him lightly, adding in saccharine tones, "right before you fire her."

"It's never a good idea to fire somebody who knows too much, darling," Douglas had protested. "Wouldn't it be better if I just found her a job somewhere else?"

"At a higher salary," the politician's wife had suggested.

And in amity at last, looking the very picture of the successful political couple, the Blessings had gone in search of food and information. Food they had found, and information they were about to receive, both of those commodities in greater abundance than they had dared imagine.

The dinner that Mike LeMat's various family members had provided was a smashing hit, a meal that went far to counteract the depredations of the last days-both on the waistlines and in the minds. After Mike's restaurateur cousin, grocer brother, and baker mother had done their parts (the spa's chef having taken to his bed in horror), everyone in the dining room was replete, stunned with the unaccustomed bounty, drunk on carbohydrates and fats (both saturated and un-), tipsy with refined sugars and the first caffeine most of them had had since setting foot on the premises.

And Vince Toscana saw that it was good.

However, Vince reminded himself sourly, Detective Vince Toscana was no longer the chief investigator here. He couldn't think about it without a jolt, the sight of that authoritative ID wallet in the hands of the near-naked man. If he hadn't made the calls to Washington and confirmed it, he'd have slapped the guy in cuffs, too, for impersonating an officer.

Well, he'd have tried to.

Vince had to hand it to the state of Virginia: Even Philly'd never thrown anything like this at him.

Okay, he decided, these jokers had stuffed in about as much food as any Italian mother could hope for. If he waited any longer, they'd fall asleep into their tiramisu. He caught Mike's eye, and they began to encourage the players to move next door. Into the library.

Caroline wondered for an instant who the gorgeous guy in the pricey suit was and then blushed furiously when she realized that the first time she'd come in-no, not in contact exactly, the first time they'd had relations-no! The first time she'd seen the guy, he'd been wearing rather less fabric than the scrap of paisley silk that was currently sticking out of his breast pocket. Adonis, Thong Man, the hunk-of-all-trades with the Italian name and the Oxbridge accent who'd hauled Claudia out of the mud bath, a man (a whole lot of man) she'd never seen wearing more than brief shorts and a briefer tank top, was dressed in a suit that made the custom three-piece that Douglas had changed into look like it came from Penney's. Constanza straightened from applying a match to the kindling in the stone fireplace, and the room could see that, along with several yards of wool and linen, he had donned an unmistakable air of authority. They all forgot instantly that Detective Toscana was there.

"Emilio," Phyllis Talmadge said sharply, "what is going on here?"

"Why don't you take a seat, Ms. Talmadge? We'll explain when you're settled." His voice was reassuringly that of his previous incarnation, and gradually, with curiosity now overlying their exhausted apprehension, the sadly depleted band subsided into the chairs circling the fire. Caroline and Douglas sat near the fireplace; Phyllis Talmadge, a bandage still on the back of her head, sat next to Caroline; Lauren Sullivan, the only one who had picked without interest at her rich food, was joined by King David, his multicolored Medusa locks tamed into a ponytail, the lines on his face carved into gouges by the strain of the last days. Dante the masseur was there, and his colleague Marguerite, with Gustav the weight trainer, Ginger the receptionist, Jean-Claude the dietitian, and a handful of others, including Geoff the assistant pastry chef, surely the most underemployed talent on the premises. Near the door, Vince and Mike stood watch. Emilio waited for their attention to return to him, and then he began.

"Normally, in such a case as this, the police would take your statements and let you go, and you would hear nothing more until you were called upon to testify.

"Because of the glare of publicity already generated by recent events, and because some of the people involved wish to keep what has gone on here as quiet as possible, it has been decided that you should be told everything, in the hopes that you will keep your statements to the press to a minimum. And since Detective Toscana had already set up this rather literary device of the meeting in the library"-here Constanza shot a glance at the back of the room; Vince Toscana's eyebrows went up in what might have been wry apology-"I decided that we may as well make use of it. I had to draw the line at the traditional denouement of the Golden Age mystery story, namely, the unmasking of the villains and their arrest in front of the other suspects. Modern police techniques render that irresponsible, as I'm sure you understand. As for the other, I trust you will forgive the melodramatic overtones."

Here he reached into the inner breast pocket of his suit to draw out the small leather booklike object that Caroline had seen Toscana throw to the ground. He flipped it open and handed it to Douglas on his left.

"You know me as Emilio Constanza. I was hired under that name eight months ago by Claudia de Vries, who thought she was getting an herbalist from Bombay. My name is Jonathan Sassoon." ("I knew he was no paesan," Vince muttered.) "I actually was born in India, into the ancient Jewish community in Goa, although what I know about herbs I got from a book I memorized on the plane coming to take Claudia's job. My expertise," he said, "is drugs."

The leather wallet indeed identified the impressive figure before them as an agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency.

"The feds," murmured Douglas as he passed the article of show-and-tell on to Phyllis Talmadge, on Caroline's left. "No wonder Toscana looks pissed."

"You're also going to have to forgive a certain amount of apparently disconnected narrative as I go along," said Adonis the Fed in his plummy accent. "This case has roots that go back quite a way."

("I knew this case stank of ancient history," Vince said sotto voce to Mike. Mike did not respond; he was too awestruck by the man at the front of the room.)

"You have been the unfortunate witnesses to a series of deaths, all of them related in the sense that the deaths during an earthquake are related: They share the same underlying cause, if by different actual instruments. We have here five deaths and one assault, committed by three different individuals. I do not believe any of the other murders would have occurred had it not been for the first.

"The first to die, of course, was Claudia de Vries, and the means of death may be taken as highly symbolic-a patchwork shawl drawn tight, knotted around her neck, representing the tightening knot of her various crimes and deceptions that were pulled in around her."

He caught himself and looked mildly embarrassed. "Pardon the romance," he said. "It must be the surroundings. At any rate, Claudia de Vries was killed because she was a thief, a blackmailer, and a source of illegal drugs, and because there was a struggle for power among her fellow criminals. We will return to that aspect of the case in a minute.