Dark hair was a stringy fringe beneath his cap, and he did not look me in the eye as he said, "If you'll just si-sign this, ma'am."

He handed me the clipboard as voices played madly in my mind.

"They were late coming in from the airport because the airline lost Mr. Harper's bag."

"Is your hair naturally blond, Kay, or do you bleach it?"

"It was after the boy delivered the luggage…"

"All of them gone, now."

"Last year we got in a fiber identical to this orange one in every respect when Roy was asked to examine trace recovered from a Boeing seven forty-seven…"

"It was after the boy delivered the luggage!"

Slowly I took the offered pen and clipboard from the outstretched brown leather-gloved hand.

In a voice I did not recognize, I instructed, "Would you please be so kind as to open my suitcase. I can't possibly sign anything until I make sure my belongings are present and accounted for."

For an instant his hard pale face registered confusion. His eyes widened a little as they dropped down to my upright bag, and I struck so fast he didn't have time to raise his hands to ward off the blow. The edge of the clipboard caught him in the throat, then I bolted like a wild animal.

I got as far as my dining room before I heard his footsteps coming after me. My heart was hammering against my ribs as I raced into the kitchen, my feet nearly going out from under me on the smooth linoleum as I wheeled around the butcher block and jerked the fire extinguisher off the wall near the refrigerator. The instant he burst into the kitchen I blasted him in the face with a choking storm of dry powder. A long-bladed knife clattered dully to the floor as he clutched his face with his hands and gasped. Snatching a cast-iron skillet off the stove, I swung it like a tennis racket, hitting him solidly in the belly. Struggling for breath, he doubled over and I swung again, this time at his head. My aim was off. I felt cartilage crunch beneath the flat iron bottom. I knew I had broken his nose and probably knocked out several teeth. It barely slowed him down. Dropping to his knees, coughing and partially blinded by the powder, he grabbed at my ankles with one hand, his other hand groping for the knife. Throwing the skillet at him, I kicked the knife out of the way and fled from the kitchen, slamming my hip into the sharp edge of the table and knocking my shoulder against the doorframe.

Disoriented and sobbing, I somehow managed to dig my Ruger out of my suitcase and jam two cartridges into the cylinder. By then he was almost on top of me. I was aware of the sound of the rain and his wheezing breath. The knife was inches from my throat when the third squeeze of the trigger finally struck firing pin against primer. In a deafening explosion of gas and flame, a Silvertip ripped through his abdomen, knocking him back several feet and down to the floor. He fought to sit up, glassy eyes staring at me, his face a gory mass of blood. He tried to say something as he feebly raised the knife. My ears were ringing. Steadying the gun in my shaking hands, I put the second bullet through his chest. I smelled acrid gunpowder tainted by the sweet odor of blood as I watched the light fade from Frankie Aims's eyes.

Then I fell apart, wailing as the wind and rain bore down hard against the house and Frankie's blood seeped over polished oak. My body shook as I wept, and I did not move until the telephone rang a fifth time.

All I could say was "Marino. Oh God, Marino!"

I did not return to my office until Frankie Aims's body had been released from the morgue, his blood rinsed off the stainless-steel table, washed out pipes, and diffused into the fetid waters of the city's sewers. I was not sorry I had killed him. I was sorry he had ever been born.

"The way it's looking," Marino said as he regarded me over the depressing mountain of paperwork on top of my office desk, "is Frankie hit Richmond a year ago October. Least, that's how long he'd been renting his crib on Redd Street. A couple weeks later he got himself a job delivering lost bags. Omega's got a contract with the airport."

I said nothing, my letter opener slitting through another item of mail destined for my wastepaper basket.

"The guys who work for Omega drive their personal cars. And that's the problem Frankie run into long about last January. His 'eighty-one Mercury Lynx blew the transmission, and he didn't have the dough to fix it. No car, no job. That's when he asked Al Hunt for a favor, I think."

"Had the two of them been in contact before this?" I asked, feeling, and I'm sure sounding, burned out and distracted.

"Oh, yeah," Marino answered. "No doubt in my mind, or Benton's, either."

"What are you basing your assumptions on?"

"For starters," he said, "Frankie, it turns out, was living in Butler, Pennsylvania, a year and a half ago. We been going through Old Man Hunt's phone bills for the past five years-saves all the shit in case he gets audited, right? Turns out that during the time Frankie was in Pennsylvania, the Hunts received five collect calls from Butler. The year before that it was collect calls from Dover, Delaware, the year before that there was half a dozen or so from Hagerstown, Maryland."

"The calls were from Frankie?" I asked.

"We're still running it down. But me, I got a strong suspicion Frankie was calling Al Hunt from time to time, probably told him all about what he done to his mother. That's how Al knew so much when he talked to you. Hell, he wasn't no mind reader. He was reciting what he knew from conversations with his sicko pal. It's like the crazier Frankie got, the closer he moved to Richmond. Then, boom! A year ago he hits our lovely city and the rest's history."

"What about Hunt's car wash?" I asked. "Was Frankie a regular visitor?"

"According to a couple of guys working there," Marino said, "someone fitting Frankie's description was down there from time to time, apparently going back to last January. The first week in February, based on receipts we found in his house, he had the engine in his Mercury overhauled to the tune of five hundred bucks, which he probably got from Al Hunt."

"Do you know if Frankie happened to be at the car wash on a day when Beryl might have brought her car in?"

"I'm guessing that's what happened. You know, he spots her for the first time when he delivers Harper's bags to the McTigues' house last January. Then what? He spots her again maybe a couple weeks later when he's hanging out at Al Hunt's car wash begging for a loan. Bingo. It's like a message to him. Then maybe he spots her again at the airport-he was in and out all the time picking up lost bags, doing who knows what. Maybe he sees Beryl this third time when she's at the airport catching a plane for Baltimore, where she's going to meet Miss Harper."

"Do you think Frankie talked to Hunt about Beryl, too?"

"No way to know. But I wouldn't be surprised. It would sure help explain why Hunt hung himself. He saw it coming-what his squirrelly pal finally did to Beryl. Then, next thing, Harper gets whacked. Hunt probably felt guilty as shit."

I shifted painfully in my chair as I shoved paper around in search of the date stamp I'd had in hand but a second ago. I ached all over and was seriously contemplating having my right shoulder X-rayed. As for my psyche, I wasn't sure what anyone could do about that. I didn't feel like myself. I wasn't sure what I felt except that it was very hard for me to sit still. It was impossible for me to relax.

I commented, "Part of Frankie's delusional thinking would be to personalize his encounters with Beryl and ascribe profound significance to them. He sees Beryl at the McTigues' house. He sees her at the car wash. He sees her in the airport. It would really set him off."

"Yeah. Now the schizo knows God's talking to him, telling him he has some connection with this pretty blond lady."

Just then Rose walked in. Taking the pink telephone message she offered to me, I added it to the pile.

"What color was his car?"

I slit open another envelope. Frankie's car had been parked in my drive. I had seen it when the police arrived, when my property was pulsing with red strobe lights. But nothing had penetrated. I remembered very few details.

"Dark blue."

"And no one remembers seeing a blue Mercury Lynx in Beryl's neighborhood?"

Marino shook his head. "After dark, if he had his headlights off, the car wouldn't exactly be conspicuous."

"True."

"As for when he hit Harper, he probably pulled his ride off the road somewhere and went the rest of the way on foot."

He paused. "The upholstery of the driver's seat was rotted out."

"I beg your pardon?" I asked, looking up from the letter I was glancing over.

"He had it covered with a blanket he must have swiped from one of the planes."

"The source of the orange fiber?" I inquired.

"They got to run some tests. But we're thinking that's the case. The blanket's got orangish-red pinstripes running through it, and Frankie would have been sitting on it when he drove to Beryl's house. Probably explains the terrorist shit. Some passenger was using a blanket like Frankie's during an overseas flight. The guy changes planes and it just so happens an orange fiber ends up on the one that gets hijacked in Greece. Bingo! Some poor Marine ends up with this same type of fiber stuck to his blood after he's whacked. Got any idea how many fibers must get transferred from plane to plane?"

"It's hard to imagine," I agreed, wondering why I merited being on every junk mailer's list in the United States. "And it probably also explains why Frankie carried so many fibers on his clothes. He was working in the baggage area. He was all over the airport and may even have gone inside the planes. Who knows what he did or what debris he picked up on his clothes?"

"Omega wears uniform shirts," Marino remarked. "Tan. They're made of Dynel."

"That's interesting."

"You should know that, Doc," he said, watching me closely. "He was wearing one when you shot him."

I didn't remember. I remembered only his dark rain slicker, and his face bloody and covered with the white powder from my fire extinguisher.

"Okay," I said. "So far I'm following you, Marino. But what I don't understand is how Frankie got Beryl's telephone number. It was unlisted. And how did he know she was flying in from Key West the night of October twenty-ninth, the night she returned to Richmond? And how the hell did he know when I flew in, too?"