Mark wasn't listed in the Chicago directory. There were five Mark Jameses and three M Jameses, and after I got home I tried each number and either got a woman or some unfamiliar man on the line. I was so bewildered I couldn't sleep.

It didn't occur to me until the next morning to call Diesner, the chief medical examiner in Chicago whom Mark had claimed to run into.

Deciding being direct was my best recourse, I said to Diesner after the usual pleasantries, "I'm trying to track down Mark James, a Chicago lawyer I believe you might know."

"James…" Diesner repeated thoughtfully. "Afraid the name's not familiar, Kay. You say he's a lawyer here in Chicago?"

"Yes." My heart sank. "With Orndorff amp; Berger."

"Now, I know Orndorff amp; Berger. A very well respected firm. But I can't recall, uh, a Mark James…"

I heard a drawer opening and pages flipping. After a long moment, Diesner was saying, "Nope. Don't see him listed in the Yellow Pages either."

After I hung up, I poured myself another cup of black coffee and stared out the kitchen window at the empty bird feeder. The gray morning threatened rain. I had a desk downtown requiring a bulldozer. It was Saturday. Monday was a state holiday. The office would be deserted, my staff already enjoying the three-day weekend. I should go in and take advantage of the peace and quiet. But I didn't care. I couldn't think of anything but Mark. It was as if he didn't exist, as if the man was imaginary, a dream. The more I tried to sort through it, the more tangled my thoughts became. What the hell was going on?

To the point of desperation, I tried to get Robert Sparacino's home number from Directory Assistance and was secretly relieved to find it was unlisted. It would be suicidal for me to call him. Mark had lied to me. He told me he worked for Orndorff amp; Berger, told me he lived in Chicago and knew Diesner. None of it was true! I kept hoping the phone would ring, hoping Mark would call. I straightened up the house, did the laundry and ironing, put on a pot of tomato sauce, made meatballs, and went through the mail.

The phone didn't ring until five P.M.

"Yo, Doc? Marino here," the familiar voice greeted me. "Don't mean to be bothering you on the weekend, but been trying to find you for two damn days. Wanted to make sure you was all right."

Marino was playing guardian angel again.

"Got a videotape I want you to see," he said. "Thought if you was going to be in, I'd just drop it by your house. You got a VCR?"

He knew I did. He had "dropped by" videotapes before. "What sort of videotape?"

I asked.

"This drone I spent the entire morning with. Interviewing him about Beryl Madison."

He paused. I could tell he was pleased with himself.

The longer I knew Marino, the more he had begun subjecting me to show-and-tell. In part I attributed this phenomenon to his saving my life, a horrific event that had served to bond us into an unlikely pair.

"You on duty?" I asked.

"Hell, I'm always on duty," he grumbled.

"Seriously."

"Not officially, okay? Knocked off at four, but the wife's off in Jersey visiting her mother and I got more loose ends to tie up than a damn rug maker."

His wife was gone. His kids were grown. It was a gray, raw Saturday. Marino didn't want to go home to an empty house. I wasn't exactly feeling contented and cheery inside my empty house, either. I stared at the pot of sauce simmering on the stove.

"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "Drop by with your videotape and we'll watch it together. You like spaghetti?"

He hesitated. "Well…"

"With meatballs. And I'm getting ready to make the pasta now. You'll eat with me?"

"Yeah," he said. "I guess I can do that."

When Beryl Madison wanted a clean car, it was her habit to visit Masterwash on Southside.

Marino had found this out by hitting every high-class car wash in the city. There weren't that many, a dozen at most that offered to roll your driverless car automatically through an assembly line of "hula skirts" gyrating over sudsy paint as spray jets fired needle streams of water. Following a quick hot-air drying, the car was manned by a human being and driven to a bay where attendants vacuumed, waxed, buffed, dressed the bumpers, and all the rest of it. A Masterwash "Super Deluxe," Marino informed me, was fifteen dollars.

"I was lucky as hell," Marino said as he guided spaghetti onto his fork with a soup spoon. "How do you track down something like that, huh? The drones wipe off, what, seventy, a hundred rides a day? And you think they're gonna notice a black Honda? Hell, no."

He was the happy hunter. He had bagged the big one. I knew when I had given him the preliminary fiber report last week he would start hitting every car wash and body shop in the city. One thing about Marino, if there was one bush in the desert, he had to look behind it.

"Hit pay dirt yesterday," he went on. "Buzzed by Mas terwash. Was close to last on my list because of its location. Me, I figured Beryl would take her Honda to some West Endy joint. But she didn't, took it Southside, and the only reason I can figure for that is the place has a body and detail shop. Turns out she took her car in shortly after she bought it last December and had one of those hundred-buck jobs done to seal the undercoating and paint. Next thing, she's opened an account there, made herself a member so she could get two bucks knocked off each wash and the perk of the week thrown in free."

"That's how you found out about it?" I asked. "Because of this membership deal?"

"Oh, yeah," he said. "They don't have a computer. Had to look through all their damn receipts. But I found a copy of when she paid for her membership, and based on the condition of her car when we found it in her garage, I was guessing she had it washed not long before she ran off to Key West. Been rooting through her paperwork, too, looking at her charge-card bills. Only one listing for Mas-terwash, and that's the hundred-buck job I told you about. Apparently she paid cash when she had her ride cleaned after that."

"The car wash attendants," I said. "What do they wear?"

"Nothing orange that might fit with that oddball fiber you found. Most of 'em wear jeans, running shoes-all of 'em have on these blue shirts with 'Masterwash' embroidered in white on the pocket. I looked over everything while I was there. Nothing hit me. Only other fabric-type shit I saw was the barrels of white towels they use to wipe down the cars."

"Doesn't sound very promising," I remarked, pushing away my plate. At least Marino had an appetite. My stomach was still knotted from New York, and I was debating whether to tell him what had happened.

"Maybe not," he said. "But one guy I talked to made my antenna go up."

I waited.

"Name's Al Hunt, twenty-eight, white. Zeroed in on him right away. Saw him standing out there supervising the busy beavers. Something clicked. He looked out of place. Clean-cut, smart, like he ought have been wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a briefcase. I start asking myself, 'What's a guy like him doing in a dead end like this?' "He paused to sop his plate with garlic bread. "So I wander his way and start shooting the breeze. I ask him about Beryl, show him her picture from her driver's license. Ask if maybe he remembers seeing her there, and boom! He starts getting antsy."

I couldn't help but think I would start getting antsy, too, if Marino "wandered" my way. He probably ran over the poor man like a Mack truck.

"Then what?" I asked.

"Then we go inside, get coffee, and get down to serious business,' Marino replied. This Al Hunt's a first-class squirrel. To start with, the guy's been to graduate school. Gets a master's degree in psychology, then goes to work as a male nurse at Metropolitan for a couple years, if you can friggin' believe that. And when I ask him why he left the hospital for Masterwash, I find out his old man owns the damn place. Old man Hunt's got his fingers in pies all over the city. Masterwash is just one of his investments. He also owns a number of parking lots and is a slumlord for half of Northside. I'm supposed to automatically assume young Al's being groomed to move into his daddy's shoes, right?"

I was getting interested.

"Thing is, though, Al ain't wearing a suit even if he looks like he should be, right? Translated, Al's a loser. The old man don't trust him in pinstripes and sitting behind a desk. I mean, the guy's standing out there in the lot telling drones how to wax cars and dress the bumpers. Tells me right away something's off up here."

He pointed a greasy finger at his head.

"Maybe you should ask his father that," I said.

"Right. He's going to tell me his great white hope's a dumb ass."

"How do you plan to follow up?"

"Already did," he answered. "Witness the videotape I brought, Doc. Spent the entire morning with Al Hunt down at HQ. This guy will talk the wood off a door, and he's overly curious about what happened to Beryl, said he read about it in the papers-"

"How did he know who Beryl was?" I interrupted. "The papers and television stations didn't have any photographs of her. Did he recognize her name?"

"Said he didn't, had no idea it was the blond lady he'd seen at the car wash until I showed him the picture on her driver's license. Then he put on the big act of being shocked, real tore up about it. He was hanging on my every word, wanted to talk about her, was real intense for someone who supposedly didn't know her from Adam's house cat."

He placed his rumpled napkin on the table. "Best thing's for you to hear it yourself."

I put on a pot of coffee, gathered the dirty dishes, and we went into the living room and started the tape. The setting was familiar. I had seen it numerous times before. The police department's interrogation room was a small, paneled cubicle with nothing but a bare table in the middle of the carpeted floor. Near the door was a light switch, and only an expert or the initiated would notice the top screw was missing. On the other side of the tiny black hole was a video room equipped with a special wide-angle camera.

At a glance, Al Hunt didn't look frightening. He was fair, with receding light blond hair and a pasty complexion. He wouldn't have been unattractive were it not for a weak chin that caused his face to disappear into his neck. He was wearing a maroon leather jacket and jeans, his tapered fingers nervously fidgeting with a can of 7-Up as he watched Marino, who was sitting directly across from him.