Morrell said, “So, Hippolyte, Queen of the Amazons. You survived another battle.”

“I guess they haven’t sent Hercules to fight me yet. How long have you been here?”

“About half an hour. They told me when I called last night they were going to discharge you in the morning, and I figured you might want a change of underwear.”

“You’re almost as good as a girl, Morrell, figuring that out. You can join my horde of wild women, you can set us an example of breastlessness.”

He leaned over to kiss me. “That’s a myth, you know, that they cut off their breasts. And I especially like yours, so don’t do anything rash. Although that’s the most futile statement ever made, considering the way you’ve been treating your body the last ten days.”

“Spoken by the man who still has a bullet chip near his spine.”

He handed me a carry-on bag, packed with his usual precision: toothbrush, hairbrush, bra, clean jeans, and a cotton sweater. The bra was my favorite rose-and-silver lace, which I’d left at his place several weeks ago, but the clothes were his. We’re the same height, and the clothes were a pretty good fit-although I’d never have gotten the jeans buttoned if I hadn’t been fasting for thirty-six hours.

We took a cab to my apartment, where Mr. Contreras and the dogs greeted me as a sailor returned from a shipwreck. My neighbor had bathed Mitch and taken him to the vet, who’d put stitches in one of his feet where he’d sliced it on a can or the barbed wire. After his initial ecstasy, Mitch went back inside my neighbor’s apartment and climbed up on the couch to sleep. Mr. Contreras didn’t want to leave him, so we settled in the old man’s kitchen. Mr. Contreras began making pancakes, and we exchanged war stories.

When he’d seen Mitch lead me into the swamp, Mr. Contreras had tried to follow us in the car, but the road went too far to the west of where we were walking, and, anyway, after a couple of minutes he couldn’t see us at all through the marsh grasses. He’d gone back to the place where Mitch started into the swamp, but after half an hour a state trooper came along and ordered him to leave.

“I tried to tell the guy you was lost in there, and he says, tell the local cops, not him, it’s Chicago’s responsibility, so I beg him to call the Chicago cops, and he won’t, only tells me he’ll impound the car if I don’t move it, so I had to go home.” The old man’s voice was still thick with grievance. “When I got home, I called 911, and they told me to wait until morning, and, if I hadn’t heard from you, to file a missing persons. I should have called Captain Mallory, I guess, didn’t think of that, but, anyway, by and by I heard from Morrell here, he told me about Mitch leading you all the way to that Miss Love.”

“I don’t understand that part,” I said. “Not that I understand anything right now, but-whoever attacked Marcena and Romeo must have done it around 100th and the river, because that’s where Mitch disappeared. He was following the two thugs who attacked Billy’s car, and then, all I can figure is, he somehow caught Marcena’s scent and went after her. Has Conrad been looking by the river?”

Morrell shook his head. “I haven’t talked to him since we parted company at the hospital yesterday.”

“How did you and Conrad hook up, anyway?” I demanded.

“I called him after you phoned me from your pit-do you know where you were, by the way? The edge of the Harborside Golf Course, where it peters out into a no-man’s-land leading down to the garbage dump. Anyway, South Chicago is Rawlings’s turf; I thought he was the fastest route to finding you and getting Marcena to a hospital.”

I hesitated over the question, but finally asked how Marcena was doing.

“Not good, but still on planet Earth.” He must have seen the tiny sigh of relief I gave, because he added, “Yes, you’re a jealous street-fighting pit dog, but you’re not mean-spirited. She wasn’t conscious when she got to the hospital, but they put her into a medical coma, anyway, to make sure she didn’t wake up. She lost skin over about a quarter of her body, and is going to need massive grafts. If she were alert enough to answer questions, she’d be in so much pain the shock would probably kill her.”

We sat in silence for a time. To Mr. Contreras’s consternation, I could only manage one pancake after my fast, but I ate it with about a quart of honey and started to feel better.

After a bit, Morrell picked up his part of the story again. “When Rawlings called to tell me they’d found you, I phoned Contreras, here, and got a cab to pick him up on the way to the hospital-which was a mercy, let me tell you, Queen of the Amazons, because your guard dog wasn’t going to leave your side.”

“Really?” I brightened. “Yesterday, he attached himself so thoroughly to Marcena I thought he didn’t love me anymore.”

“Maybe he just figured you were his last tie to her.” Morrell wiggled his eyebrows provocatively. “Be that as it may, if Contreras hadn’t shown up you’d probably be in County Jail right now, not County Hospital, and the dog would be dead. But it all worked out. Contreras here persuaded the Hound of the Baskervilles to let go of the security guard’s leg, I saw you into the emergency room, we waited until the charge nurse said you just needed rest and rehydration, and then Rawlings arrived, wondering if he could get a statement from you about Marcena. When he saw that was no go, we found a cabbie who’d take Mitch; Contreras set off with him. Rawlings left to do police stuff, but I went across the street to the morgue and talked to Vish; he was doing the autopsy on Bron Czernin.”

Nick Vishnikov was the deputy chief medical examiner at the Cook County Morgue, and an old friend of Morrell’s-he did a fair amount of forensic pathology for Humane Medicine, the group that had sent Morrell to Afghanistan. Because of that, he’d given Morrell a number of details he would probably have kept from me if I’d asked.

“They were beaten so badly.” I shivered at the memory of that flayed and mottled flesh. “What happened to them?”

Morrell shook his head. “Vish can’t figure it out. It’s true they were beaten, but he doesn’t think with something conventional, like clubs or whips. He says oil was embedded in Czernin’s skin. He was hit hard on the head, hard enough to break his spine, but it didn’t kill him, at least not right away. He died from asphyxiation, not from spinal injuries. But what has Vish really baffled is that the injuries are uniform across both their bodies. Except for Czernin’s broken neck, obviously. Whatever brutal hit he took, Marcena managed to avoid, which is hopeful for her ultimate recovery.”

The two men tried to think of things that would cause that kind of injury. Morrell wondered about rollers from a steel mill, but Mr. Contreras objected that those would have crushed the bodies. In his turn, the old man suggested that they’d been dragged along the road from the back of a truck. Morrell thought that sounded plausible and phoned Vishnikov to propose it, but apparently dragging would have left burn marks and distended tendons in the arms or legs.

The images were too graphic for me: I’d seen the bodies, I couldn’t deal with them right now as an academic exercise. I abruptly announced I was going upstairs. When I got to my own place, I decided to wash my hair, which the hospital had left alone when they hosed me off. I figured my back had healed enough that I could stand under a shower.

When I was clean, and had my own jeans on, I checked my messages. It was getting hard to remember that I run a business, that life wasn’t all coaching basketball and hiking across swamps.

I had the predictable queries from Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star and Beth Blacksin, a television reporter with Global Entertainment. I told them what I knew, which wasn’t much, and checked in with clients who were waiting for reports-with ever-decreasing patience.