“Absolutely not,” David said.

“When Goldman got out of jail, there was an order of protection still in effect by the court. She was not allowed to have contact with either of the Segals. And she was otherwise sane enough to avoid them at first, knowing that would land her back in jail.

“So she didn’t bother Jed when she first got to New York last month. At least, not directly not that he knew about.

There was enough publicity about his move to find his office at CommPlex, after the Senate race. But I’d have to guess that she spent more of her energy finding out about you, once she learned you were dating him. Was that fact ever in the newspapers?“

”Yeah, Liz Smith did an item in her column,“ Mike added, ”“SEX CRIMES CRUSADER DOES SENATE LOSER,” Something like that. That’s how she knew about you. We figure she found out about Isabella by intercepting some of Jed’s messages on his voice mail at CommPlex. He said she did that all the time when he was in California.“

“She had her eye on you, Alex,” David continued, ‘trying to figure how long you would last with him. Then along came the ultimate antagonist, in the form of a Hollywood goddess: Isabella Lascar. You were a mere mortal, but Isabella was serious competition.“

Ellen and I apparently had that much in common.

“But I thought Jed and Isabella had discussed their stalkers with each other?” I queried aloud, remembering that snippet of conversation with him.

“Yes, that’s true, in general,” David told us.

“But it had never occurred to either one of them that they were being harassed by the same person. Isabella was a celebrity and had been exposed to a lot of unwanted attention, as you know, Alex. When she started to get hang-up calls at the hotel she didn’t know what their source was, and the letters from Cordelia Jeffers were a complete mystery to her. She never divulged their exact contents to him and Jed thinks that’s because she knew how guilty he felt about betraying you.”

“When David called me tonight after he finished his meeting with Segal, he asked me to come over to his apartment to talk to him about the interview. I got there about nine, with Joe Duffy, one of the other guys who worked the squad with Mike.

“Up to that minute, I was still convinced Segal was the killer.

“But David said Segal could prove his alibi that his lawyer had the Cape Air ticket receipt that would show he was already on the plane off the Vineyard by the time Iz was blown to bits. Just that his lawyer is playing hardball ‘cause we haven’t released the exact time of her death yet.

He doesn’t want to show us the plane ticket till we tell him time of death.“

David was nodding his head in support of Mike’s information.

“The reason Jed was leaving messages for you all over, Alex, was that Goldman finally began to dare to get closer to him. Finding Isabella’s Filofax was a gold mine for her, and made it much too easy. It had loads of information about access to Jed, as well as to you. Not only was she erasing the messages he left you,” David explained, ‘but she waited for him outside his office these last few mornings not to make contact, but just to see him. That’s typical of the disorder.“

“So who figured out that Ellen was the killer?” I looked from David to Mike, but both shook their heads.

“We didn’t exactly figure it out,” Chapman said.

“When David told me about the reappearance of Jed’s stalker, I asked him to make a call and get her description.

Jed told us what she looked like, even mentioned the accent, and told us she was driving a white Celica, with rental plates.

“I gotta say, Alex, my thinking was like yours. It never occurred to me a woman was the killer. I was so sure it was Jed or some other jilted lover boy.

“But by the time David and I had gone over all the stuff about erotomania, and how the person most in danger is the one in the middle, and Jed’s insistence that he was leaving messages that you weren’t getting we just assumed you were in danger, whether or not it had anything to do with Isabella Lascar.”

“So why did you call me back at the precinct, you know, the last call?”

Both David and Mike hesitated, before David answered.

“Actually, it was Jed’s idea.”

I was stone faced but David went on.

“When Mike told me to call him and get the description of the woman, Jed pleaded with me to make you understand how dangerous he was afraid she could be. Once he saw her here in New York knowing how she had plagued his wife he was afraid she’d start to harass you next. He didn’t think murder, but just an embarrassment you didn’t need, with the public nature of your work.”

“I called them to tell you not to go home alone,” Mike said, ‘and to make sure Mercer got a patrol car to get you to your apartment and then down to your office in the morning, just until we could find this woman and identify her. But I couldn’t get Mercer on the phone. And it didn’t become urgent till the guy on the desk told me you were fine you had just gotten into a car with some woman up at the corner. A white car.“

“Dammit, nothing like this ever happens to me,” Joan said.

Mike went on to describe that he had called his office for a backup car to meet him at Fifth Avenue and Seventysecond Street. He planned to go over to the West Side, near the Special Victims Squad, and see if people on the street had seen or heard anything that would give him a lead. He requested that headquarters put out an alert in Manhattan North for a white Celica with two women traveling in it. Then he and Duffy started out of David’s apartment and David insisted on going along.

Chapman and the backup team met eight minutes later at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the park and started on the cross-drive to the West.

“Like Mercer always says, detective work is ninety-nine percent genius and one percent luck,” Mike reminded me.

“I’m whipping through the park like a tornado on the Seventy-second Street crossroad, then Doc in the backseat screams out that there’s a white Celica pulled in under a tree on our right side. I braked, made a U-turn and parked across the way, in front of the Bandshell. We all fanned out, and David offered to do the ruse about the dog figured you’d either make his voice or the dog’s name.

Best thing you did was warn us about the gun. I knew we had a whack job but I still didn’t guess that she was the shooter.“

”Talk about blindsided, I’m the one who got right in the car with her,“ I said quietly, wondering how an intelligent human mind like Ellen Goldman’s could go so singularly off-track.

“What hurts more, Coop,” Mike questioned me, ‘your feelings or your neck?“

“At this point it’s about even,” I told him, smiling for the first time in hours.

“She’ll stay with me for as long as her doctor wants her in town, and then, I’m taking her away for some tropical sunshine,” Joan announced.

“This isn’t a great time for me to go-‘ ”Hey, you think there won’t be any perverts left in town for you to handle two weeks from now? You think they’re gonna go out of business while you take a break, Cooper?

Give it a rest you’re the only person I know who isn’t gonna be outta work in the foreseeable future.“

I wanted to keep my three friends around me and talking to me for hours more, despite my exhaustion, until the daylight poured in through the windows over the river.

I wanted to put off my dreams for as long as possible dreams that would inevitably be haunted by delusion and betrayal, murder and death.

Keep talking, I said to myself, keep talking. It had worked with Ellen Goldman, maybe it would hold off my nightmares as well.

“Did Alex ever tell you about the first case we had together?” Mike asked Joan and David, as I shifted my body in the comfortable chair and rested my head against the pillows, watching for the sunrise.