“It’s racket string,” Mary Ann said tersely.

“Yes,” I agreed quietly.

It was a piece about five inches long. I unrolled all the paper toweling and newsprint a sheet at a time. By the time I finished I had three more little pieces. Since the garrote that killed Gary had been deeply embedded in his throat, these might have been cut from Nicole’s racket to point suspicion at her.

“But the mittens…” My old coach Couldn’t bring herself to say more.

Clare Rutland was watching me, her face frozen. “The mittens are Lily’s, aren’t they? Her brother got them for her for Christmas. She showed them off to everyone on the tour when we had our first post-Christmas matches. Why don’t you give them to me, Vic? The string should be enough to save Nicole.”

I shook my head unhappily. “Could be. We’d have to have the lab make sure these pieces came from her racket. Anyway, I can’t do that, Clare. I’m not Gary Oberst’s judge and jury. I can’t ignore evidence that I’ve found myself.”

“But, Vic,” Mary Ann said hoarsely, “how can you do that to Lily? Turn on her? I always thought you tried to help other women. And you saw yourself what her life was like with Gary. How can you blame her?”

I felt the muscles of my face distort into a grimace. “I don’t blame her. But how can you let her go through her life without confronting herself? It’s a good road to madness, seeing yourself as above and beyond the law. The special treatment she gets as a star is bound to make her think that way to some degree already. If we let her kill her father and get away with it, we’re doing her the worst possible damage.”

Mary Ann’s mouth twisted in misery. She stared at me a long minute. “Oh, damn you, Vic!” she cried, and pushed her way past me out of the locker room.

The last vestiges of Clare Rutland’s energy had fallen from her face, making her cheeks look as though they had collapsed into it. “I agree with Mary Ann, Vic. We ought to be able to work something out. Something that would be good for Lily as well as Nicole.”

“No,” I cried.

She lunged toward me and grabbed the mittens. But I was not only younger and stronger, my Nikes gave me an advantage over her high heels. I caught up with her before she’d made it to the shower-room door and gently took the mittens from her.

“Will you let me do one thing? Will you let me see Lily before you talk to the police?”

“What about Nicole?” I demanded. “Doesn’t she deserve to be released as soon as possible?”

“If the lawyer the other women have dug up for her doesn’t get her out, you can call Sergeant McGonnigal first thing in the morning. Anyway, go ahead and give him the string now. Won’t that get her released?”

“I can’t do that. I can’t come with two separate pieces of evidence found in the identical place but delivered to the law eight hours apart. And no, I damned well will not lie about it for you. I’ll do this much for you: I’ll let you talk to Lily. But I’ll be with you.”

Anyway, once the cops have made an arrest they don’t like to go back on it. They were just as likely to say that Nicole had cut the string out herself as part of an elaborate bluff.

Clare smiled affably. “Okay. We’ll go first thing in the morning.”

“No, Ms. Rutland. You’re a hell of a woman, but you’re not going to run me around the way you do the rest of the tour. If I wait until morning, you’ll have been on the phone with Lily and Monica and they’ll be in Majorca. We go tonight. Or I stick to you like your underwear until morning.”

Her mouth set in a stubborn Une, but she didn’t waste her time fighting lost battles. “We’ll have to phone first. They’re bound to be in bed, and they have an elaborate security system. I’ll have to let them know we’re coming.”

I breathed down her neck while she made the call, but she simply told Monica it was important that they discuss matters tonight, before the story made national headlines.

“I’m sorry, honey, I know it’s a hell of an hour. And you’re under a hell of a lot of strain. But this is the first moment I’ve had since Nicole found Gary. And we just can’t afford to let it go till morning.”

Monica apparently found nothing strange in the idea of a two A.M. discussion of Lily’s tennis future. Clare told her I was with her and would be driving, so she turned the phone over to me for instructions. Monica also didn’t question what I was doing with Clare, for which I was grateful. My powers of invention weren’t very great by this point.

V

A single spotlight lit the gate at Nine Nightingale Lane. When I leaned out the window and pressed the buzzer, Monica didn’t bother to check that it was really us: she released the lock at once. The gate swung in on well-oiled hinges.

Inside the gate the house and drive were dark. I switched my headlights on high and drove forward cautiously, trying to make sure I stayed on the tarmac. My lights finally picked out the house. The drive made a loop past the front door. I pulled over to the edge and turned off the engine.

“Any idea why the place is totally dark?” I asked Clare.

“Maybe Lily’s in bed and Monica doesn’t want to wake her up.”

“Lily can’t sleep just knowing there’s a light on somewhere in the house? Try a different theory.”

“I don’t have any theories,” Clare said sharply. “I’m as baffled as you are, and probably twice as worried. Could someone have come out here and jumped her, be lying in ambush for us?”

My mouth felt dry. The thought had occurred to me as well. Anyone could have lifted Lily’s mittens from the locker room while she was playing. Maybe Arnold Krieger had done so. Gotten someone to let him in through the permanently locked end of the women’s locker room, lifted the mittens, garroted Gary, and slipped out the back way again while Rubova was still in the shower. When he realized we were searching the locker room, he came to Glenview ahead of us. He’d fought hard to keep me from going into the locker room, now that I thought about it.

My gun, of course, was locked away in the safe in my bedroom. No normal person carries a Smith & Wesson to a Virginia Slims match.

“Can you drive a stick shift?” I asked Clare. “I’m going inside, but I want to find a back entrance, avoid a trap if I can. If I’m not out in twenty minutes, drive off and get a neighbor to call the cops. And lock the car doors. Whoever’s in the house knows we’re here: they released the gate for us.”

The mittens were zipped into the inside pocket of my parka. I decided to leave them there. Clare might still destroy them in a moment of chivalry if I put them in the trunk for safekeeping.

I took a pencil flash from the glove compartment. Using it sparingly, I picked my way around the side of the house. A dog bayed nearby. Ninja, the Great Dane. But he was in the house. If Arnold Krieger or someone else had come out to get a jump on us, they would have killed the dog, or the dog would have disabled them. I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

A cinder-block cube had been attached to the back of the house. I shone the flash on it cautiously. It had no windows. It dawned on me that they had built a small indoor court for Lily, for those days when she couldn’t get to the club. It had an outside door that led to the garden. When I turned the knob, the door moved inward.

“I’m in here, Vic.” Monica’s voice came to me in the darkness. “I figured you’d avoid the house and come around the back.”

“Are you all right?” I whispered loudly. “Who’s inside with Lily?”

Monica laughed. “Just her dog. You worried about Paco interrupting us? He’s staying downtown in a hotel. Mary Ann called me. She told me you’d found Lily’s mittens. She wanted me to take Lily and run, but I thought I’d better stay to meet you. I’ve got a shotgun, Vic. Gary was obsessive about Lily’s safety, except, of course, on the court. Where he hoped she’d run herself into early retirement.”