In the blink of an eye and a few agonizing thrusts of the gearshift, Francesca had it rocketing up that alley.

Billy turned, shielding his eyes from the glare of the headlights. She braced her arms against the big, faux-wood steering wheel. Billy was directly in front of her. There was a split-second flash of what might have been a smile, and she hit him. On impact, his shoes exploded off his feet, his legs buckled, his torso whipped forward, and his head slammed into the hood as hard as if he’d dove from ten stories above. The car fishtailed but kept going. She slowed down but did not slam on the brakes. Billy stayed on the hood as if he were imbedded there.

Francesca grabbed the folder and jumped out of the car. She closed the door as if nothing unusual had just happened and, without hesitating, walked away from the car.

She wasn’t hurt. No one seemed to have seen her. The only thing she felt was awe. She wasn’t screaming or crying. She’d had the mental strength to go through with this and the physical strength to brace herself against the wheel, even with a badly injured hand. The hand was killing her now, but on impact she hadn’t felt a thing.

About fifty yards from the wreck she saw one of his shoes but didn’t even break stride.

She told herself not to look. But as she was about to turn onto M Street, she couldn’t help but look back.

From the top of the hill, the damage to the car didn’t look bad at all. Billy was still on the hood, motionless. A pool of blood was spreading across the cobblestones. At first she couldn’t tell where all that blood was coming from, until she realized that his legs were not crumpled underneath the front bumper. Far behind the car, under the alley’s lone streetlight, lay the severed bottom half of his body.

She felt no remorse whatsoever.

The walk home might have taken her a minute or a day, Francesca couldn’t have said. All the way home, enduring the pain in her hand and the almost as severe pain from the lurches her heart made every time she heard a siren, she didn’t look behind her, not once.

Kathy was at the table, lost in her writing, and Sonny was asleep in his room.

Francesca sat heavily down on the sofa.

“Did Billy call?”

“I don’t know,” Kathy said, not looking up. “I unplugged the phone to work. I hope you weren’t worried. Sonny was a blast. A doll. Everything went great. How’s your hand?”

“Remember when I found out Billy was cheating on me, and you said I should kill him? Well, I did it.”

Kathy started to laugh, then looked closer at her sister and, eyes wide, stifled it. She rushed over to the sofa. “Oh, my God, you-”

“Look at this,” Francesca said, extending the folder to her sister.

“Tell me everything,” Kathy said. “Tell me everything fast.”

The police showed up about an hour after Francesca did, maybe five minutes after Kathy got on the bus that would take her to Union Station and the night’s last train back to New York. There was no trace of her in Francesca’s apartment. Kathy hadn’t even told her mother and her mother’s fiancé, Stan the Liquor Man, that she’d gone to Washington for fear Sandra would immediately start laying on the guilt about how long it had been since Kathy had come to see them in Florida.

When the police gave Francesca the news, she ran down the hall to her bedroom, screaming in not-quite-mock hysteria. She hit the wall with the palm of her left hand-hard but of course not hard enough to hurt anything. Still, the noise it made was convincing. When they caught up to her, there was a hole in the wall and Francesca’s hand was, in their opinion, broken and starting to swell. The ice that had in fact just brought the swelling down dramatically had been flushed down the toilet.

Miraculously, Sonny slept through all of this. After the police left, and after the doctor sent over by Danny Shea’s secretary left, too, Francesca unplugged the telephone and stood over her son’s bed and watched him sleep, his golden football helmet on the pillow beside him.

She would have to tell him. She would call Kathy in New York, and Kathy would call everyone else: their mother, even Billy’s brother and his parents. But Francesca would, somehow, have to shoulder the burden of telling Sonny.

She went back out to the kitchen and took the file out from behind her pots and pans, where she’d hidden it. She paged through it again, marveling that anyone would betray his own family like this. And for what? His career? He was rich. Francesca’s family had connections. Her family could have been Billy’s insurance.

Francesca knew what it was to grow up without a father. She did not know what it was like to grow up with a father who was willing to destroy his own family.

She still felt no remorse.

For now, she’d tell Sonny that Daddy had had an accident and was in Heaven with baby Carmela. But someday, she vowed, she’d tell the boy the truth.

She plugged the phone back in and called Kathy to tell her what had happened. As part of the plan she’d worked out a few hours before, Kathy had told Francesca to betray nothing on the phone, in case Billy had had them bugged. Kathy and Francesca had a fake conversation about what happened and a real one about who Kathy should call.

It was getting close to dawn. It would be late in Nevada now, too. Even so, Francesca called. He’d want to know.

“Sorry to wake you, Uncle Mike. It’s just… there’s been an accident.”

The next day-as Kathy had predicted-the secretary at Billy’s office mentioned that Francesca had come by to get a file for Billy. There was nothing incriminating or unusual about this. She hadn’t left the office angry or distraught. Billy had several different files at home, and Francesca produced them. The one marked Insurance was a personal file of Billy’s. No one outside her immediate family ever asked to see it.

Francesca’s whereabouts after the trip to the Justice Department were easy to prove. The counter people at Eastern Market Lunch said that of course they’d seen Francesca and little Sonny there the night before.

The people in the apartment upstairs said they’d seen Francesca and Sonny come home not long after dark. For at least two hours after that there had been typing coming steadily from below.

Francesca confirmed this. She said that she’d been writing a letter to her sister in New York, which she’d mailed not long before the police arrived. She said this in the presence of the best criminal defense lawyer in New York (an arrangement quietly made by Tom Hagen). A few days later, Kathy (by now ably represented by the same lawyer) said she’d received the letter but had thrown it away. As several friends and relatives (including their mother, Sandra) could and did attest, the twins had grown apart in recent years. One happy consequence of this unhappy story would be the way it served to bring the twins together again, as close as they’d ever been.

The steering wheel and gearshift of the Dual-Ghia seemed to have been wiped of fingerprints (the effect of Francesca’s Ace bandage, actually). Still, detectives identified four sets of prints. Three came from the members of the family for which this was the only car-Billy, Francesca, and Sonny Van Arsdale (Kathy had both kept her gloves on for the short drive from Union Station to her sister’s apartment and remembered that she’d kept them on). The fourth set-found in both the front seat and back-came from a woman with whom Billy Van Arsdale had had an ongoing affair.

The police were able to find several people who’d seen this woman on the very afternoon of Billy’s death, checking into a hotel on Dupont Circle and leaving in tears approximately ninety minutes later. The woman had confessed to several people in her office that Billy had ended his relationship with her that day. Several months before, she’d confessed to many of these same friends that Billy had impregnated her and coerced her into having an abortion.