DeSpain nodded, tiredly.

"You think there's a connection?" he said.

"Why ask me?" I said.

"I didn't even think there was a stalker."

DeSpain nodded again.

"You got the packaging this came in?" he said.

I had it in a big manila envelope. I put the envelope on his desk.

"We'll let the scientists take a look," DeSpain said.

"They'll study it and tell me it was mailed in Boston. But that's what we do.

We let the fucking crime lab study things." DeSpain shrugged.

"Spreads the blame around."

"I was out on Brant Island the other night," I said.

"Yeah?"

"Saw about a hundred Chinese come ashore in a small boat from a big boat."

"You got a subcontract with INS?" DeSpain said.

"Know anything about that?" I said.

"Nope."

We looked at each other. Neither of us spoke. There were no lights on in DeSpain's office. The gray afternoon light came weakly through the rain-streaked window.

Finally I said, "You were a good cop, DeSpain. What the hell happened to you?"

The lines in DeSpain's face got deeper. The eyes got tireder.

"How about you, Sherlock? How good a cop are you? What have you done since you showed up here, except fuck up."

We were silent again. DeSpain didn't seem angry. He seemed sad. There seemed no power left in him, only tiredness.

"So far," I said, "we're about even. Maybe we can recoup by finding this woman."

"I'll find the woman," DeSpain said. Suddenly there was force in his voice as if a switch had been turned on.

"You just stay the fuck out of my way."

I stood.

"Sure," I said.

But I didn't mean it. And he knew I didn't, but the force was gone from him as quickly as it had come.

I left and drove over to the theater in my car with Hawk and Vinnie trailing along behind in Hawk's car. There was a light mist coming down, perfect fall weather in Port City. I had the wipers on slow intermittent. I was thinking about Hawk's reaction when I'd told him about Jocelyn. There was no one following that broad, he had said. I felt the same way, and it bothered me. I was wrong sometimes, and Hawk was wrong sometimes, but we weren't usually both wrong about this kind of thing. Something else bothered me, and I couldn't find exactly what it was. There was simply something nibbling at the far corner of my consciousness. If I turned toward it, I lost it. If I thought of other things, it was back nibbling. DeSpain was a puzzle too. His reaction was all off.

DeSpain was a straight-ahead guy. He wasn't a remembrances-of things-past kind of guy. He was a get-out-of-my-way-or-I'llthrow-you-in-the-street kind of guy. And then there was the matter if we'd been wrong about Jocelyn's stalker, had we been wrong about Christopholous' stalker. And maybe I hadn't seen illegal Chinese immigrants being smuggled ashore, and maybe this was not Port City I saw but only Asbury Park.

I parked on a hydrant in front of the theater and got out with my duplicate tape and went in. Christopholous didn't have a VCR in his office. He took me to the conference room to view the tape.

The VCR and monitor were on a two-level wheeled deal table pushed against the far wall. We sat on a couple of folding chairs in the big empty room under the bright ceiling fixtures with the stylized theater posters marching in endless gallery around the walls and watched, me for about the fifteenth time, as Jocelyn sat helpless in her chair.

"For God sake," Christopholous said when the tape went blank.

"What is this?"

"You now know what I know," I said.

"Where'd you get this?"

"Came in the mail this morning," I said.

"Postmarked Boston."

"Well, is she what, a hostage? Do they want a ransom? What?"

I shrugged.

"Got any thoughts?" I said.

"Thoughts? Jesus Christ, Spenser, this is your work, not mine.

How would I have thoughts. Have you called the police?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's all I can think of. The theater has no money. If there's a ransom, we have no money to pay it."

"Be nothing left for those nice board member parties if you paid a ransom," I said.

"That's not fair, damn it."

"No, probably isn't," I said.

"I'm feeling kind of grouchy about things. You got any kind of personnel file on Jocelyn?"

"I imagine we have her head shot and resume, Social Security number, that sort of thing."

"Get it for me, will you?" I said.

"Why… oh, of course, certainly. Be glad to."

"Now," I said.

"Surely. Excuse me."

Christopholous hustled off and left me alone to sit and stare at the empty room and the myriad posters of things past, without seeing anything.

CHAPTER 40

It was late in the afternoon. I was in my office with about an inch of Irish whisky in the bottom of a water glass and my feet up on the window ledge, looking out. I had searched Jocelyn's apartment and found nothing, except that she appeared to be a neat housekeeper. I had read her folder and learned that she had been born in 1961 in Rochester, New York. I learned that she had studied theater at Emerson College, in Boston. I learned that she had once played Portia in The Merchant of Venice, at the Williamstown Theater Festival, that she had done some commercials for a local tire dealer, and that she had been with a theater company in Framingham before she came to Port City. I was closing in fast.

Hawk and Vinnie had gone home. I was willing to risk an ambush by the Death Dragons in exchange for a little solitude. I was sick of being guarded. I was also sick of not knowing what I was doing. It was a common condition for me, but I never got used to it. I sipped my whisky.

Around me in the other offices in the building briefcases were snapping shut, papers were being filed, drawers were being closed, computers were turning off, copy machines were shutting down.

The twenty-three-year-old women who filled the building were restoring makeup, reorganizing hair, reapplying lipstick. The young guys that worked with them were in the men's room checking the haircut, washing up, straightening ties, spraying a little Binaca. Daisy Buchanan's. The Ritz Bar. The Lounge at the Four Seasons. Thank God it's Friday. Children still, most of them, everything ahead of them. Career, sex, love, disaster. All of it still to come, all of it waiting for them while they straightened their ties and smoothed their pantyhose and thought about the first cocktail, and who knew what beyond that. The light dwindled. The street lights along Boylston Street came on. The interior lights of the new building gleamed in repetitious squares across Boylston Street.

Once, a while ago, through another window when a different building was there, I used to watch a woman named Linda Thomas lean across her drawing board in the advertising agency that used to be housed there. I swallowed a little more whisky.

It bothered me that whoever had Jocelyn had sent me the tape and nothing else. Why? What did he want? No ransom demand.

No threat to do something if I didn't do something. Just a kind of notification. See, I've got her. Maybe it was an orchestrated effort.

Let me sweat the picture for a day or so, then send me a letter. Give me a million dollars if you wish to see her alive. Why me? Would I ransom her? The kidnapper had no reason to think I would or that I could. Why kidnap her at all? I had no reason to think she was wealthy. There was nothing in her apartment to make me think that she was wealthy.