Anger was beginning to warm up Anderson.

"She make you take her car to be washed? That was the rumor. She made you look like a sucking-up, moonstruck ass-kisser nobody took seriously. Sad thing is, maybe you wouldn't be such a shitty detective if she'd left you alone. You never even had a chance to find out, not with her keeping you on a leash the way she did. Let me tell you something. Bray was no more going to sleep with you than the man in the moon. People like her don't sleep with anybody. They're like snakes. They don't need nobody else to keep them warm."

"I hate her," Anderson said. "She treated me like dirt."

"Then why'd you keep coming here?" Marino asked.

Anderson fixed on me as if she hadn't heard Marino. "She'd sit right in that chair where you are. And she'd make me get her a drink and rub her shoulders and wait on her hand and foot. Sometimes she wanted me to give her massages."

"Did you?" Marino asked.

"She'd have on nothing but a robe and lie on that bed."

"Same one she was murdered on? Did she take her robe off when you massaged her?"

Anderson's eyes were blazing as they turned on him.

"She always kept herself covered just enough! I took her clothes to the dry cleaner and filled her fucking Jaguar with gas and… She was so mean to me!"

Anderson sounded like a child angry with her mother.

"She sure was," Marino said. "She was mean to a lot of people."

"But I didn't kill her, good God' I never touched her except when she wanted me to, like I already told you!"

"What happened last night?" Marino asked. "You stop by because you just had to see her?"

"She was expecting me. To drop off some pills, some money. She liked Valium, Ativan, BuSpar. Things that made her relax."

"How much money?"

"Twenty-five hundred dollars. Cash."

"Well, it ain't here now," Marino said.

"It was on the table. The table in the kitchen. I don't know. We ordered pizza. We drank a little and talked. She was in a bad mood."

"Over what?"

"She heard you'd gone to France," she said to both of us. "To Interpol."

"I wonder how she found that out?"

"Probably your office. Maybe Chuck found out. Who knows? She always got what she wanted, found out what she wanted. She thought she was the one who should have gone over there. To Interpol, I mean. That's all she would talk about. And she started blaming me for all the screwups. Like the restaurant parking lot, the e-mail, the way things happened at the Quik Cary scene. Just everything."

The clocks all chimed and gonged. It was noon.

"What time did you leave?" I asked when the concert stopped.

"Maybe nine."

"Did she ever shop бt the Quik Cary?"

"She may have dropped in there before," she replied. "But as you could probably tell from looking around her kitchen, she wasn't much into cooking or eating at home."

"And you probably brought in food all the time," Marino added.

"She never offered to pay me back. I don't make much money"

"What about that nice little allowance from prescription drugs? I'm confused," Marino said. "You saying you didn't get a fair cut?"

"Chuck and I got ten percent each. I'd bring her the rest once a week, depending on what drugs came in. Into the morgue or maybe if I got some from a scene. I never stayed 'long when I came over here. She was always in a hurry. Suddenly, she had things to do. I have car payments. That's what my ten percent's gone to. Not like her. She doesn't know what it's like to worry about a car payment."

"You ever fight with her?" Marino asked.

"Sometimes. We'd argue."

"Did you argue last night?"

"I guess so."

"Over what?"

"I didn't like her mood. Same thing."

"Then?"

"I left. Like I said. She had things to do. She always decided when a discussion or argument was over."

"You driving the rental car last night?" Marino wanted to know.

."Yes."

I imagined the killer watching her leave. He was there, somewhere in the dark. Both of them had been at the port when the Sirius had come in, when the killer arrived in Richmond using the alias of a seaman named Pascal. He probably saw her. He probably saw Bray. He.would have been interested in all of those who had come to investigate his crime, including Marino and me.

"Detective Anderson," I said. "Did you sometimes come back lure after you'd left, to try to talk to Bray some more?"

"Yes," she confessed. "It wasn't fair for her to just push me out like that."

"You.came back often?"

"When I was upset."

"What would you do, ring the bell? How did you let her know you were here?"

"What?"

"It seems the police always knock, at least when they come to my house," I said. "They don't ring the bell."

"'Cause half the rattraps we go to don't have doorbells that work," Marino remarked.

"I knocked," she said.

"And how would you do it?" I asked as Marino lit a cigarette and let me talk.

"Well..:' "Twice; three times? Hard, soft?" I kept going.

"Three times. Loud."

"And she would always let you in?"

"Sometimes she wouldn't. Sometimes she'd just open the door and tell me to go home."

"Did she ask who was there, anything? Or did she just open the door."

"If she knew it was me;" she said, "she just opened it."

"If she thought it was you, you mean," Marino said.

Anderson picked her way along our train of thought and then she stopped. She could go no further. She couldn't bear it.

"But you didn't come back last night, did you?" I said.

Her silence was her answer. She hadn't come back. She hadn't knocked three times, hard. The killer had, and Bray opened the door without pause. She probably was already saying something, resuming the argument when suddenly the monster was pushing his way into her house.

"I didn't do anything to her, I swear," Anderson said. "It's not my fault," she said again and again because it wasn't her nature to assume responsibility about anything.

"Just a damn good thing you didn't come back last night;' Marino told her. "Assuming you're telling the truth:"

"I am. I swear to God!"

"If you'd showed up, you might have been next."

"I had nothing to do with it!"

"Well, in a way you did. She wouldn't have opened the door…"

"That's not fair!" Anderson said, and she was right. Whatever she had with Bray, it wasn't the fault of either of them that the killer had been stalking and waiting.

"So you go home," Marino said. "You try to call her later? See if you could patch things up?"

"Yes. She didn't answer her phone."

"This was how long after you left?"

"Maybe twenty minutes. I called several more times, just thinking she didn't want to talk to me. Then I started getting worried when I tried several times after midnight and kept getting her machine."

"You leave messages?"

"Well, a lot of times I didn't." She paused, swallowing hard. "And this morning I came to check on her, around six-thirty. I knocked and there was no answer. The door was unlocked and I went in."

She started trembling again, her eyes wide with horror.

"And I went back there…" Her voice went up and stopped. "And I ran. I was so scared."

"Scared?"

"Of whoever… I could almost feel him, this horrible presence in that room, and I didn't know if he was still somewhere… I had my gun in my hand and ran and drove away as fast as I could and stopped at a pay phone and called nine-one-one."

"Well, I'll give you this much credit," Marino said in a tired voice. "At least you identified yourself and didn't try none of this anonymous-call shit."

"What if he comes after me now?" she asked, and she looked so small and ruined. "I've been in the Quik Cary before. I stop in there sometimes. I used to talk to Kim Luong."

"Nice of you to tell us now," Marino said, and I realized how Kim Luong might be linked to all this.