"Well, I don't know how Battaglia continues to attract the best and the brightest. My father used to say, 'Pay people peanuts, you get monkeys to work for you.'"

I swallowed the urge to respond to his backhanded compliment. The young lawyers with whom I worked shoulder to shoulder every day had chosen public service as a career path, as I had, out of a desire to give back to society. Their starting salaries were less than one-quarter of the money that associates going to corporate law firms were paid, and the only bonus they received was the psychic satisfaction of their work. They didn't need yachts or art collections to make them happy.

I stopped beneath the oil painting of a tall black-skinned man in a loincloth, carrying a long staff with the flag of the New York Yacht Club aloft. I doubted he was a member.

"The Nubian?" Hoyt asked.

"It's a curious sight."

"It was James Gordon Bennett-you know, the publisher of the New York Herald -who paid for one of his reporters, Henry Stanley, to go to Africa and find the great Dr. Livingstone, who'd been missing for months. Bennett was our commodore, of course, back then, in the 1870s. When Stanley rode out of the jungle on the back of a mule, this fellow emerged first, carrying our club burgee. Quite a crew of intrepid sportsmen."

"A lot of history in here," I said, scanning the portraits and plaques stretching from floor to ceiling. "Thanks for suggesting we meet. Do I have to worry about Peter Robelon being indicted before I finish my case? The last thing I need, after all this, is a mistrial because we lost the defense attorney."

"Not a chance. They're just in the early stages of gathering all the information and building a case."

"Is there anything I can offer to Paul Battaglia as an olive branch? He'd love me to get rid of the Tripping case," I said.

"You mean something that his own Jack Kliger doesn't know about Peter Robelon yet?" Hoyt asked.

"That would be a good place to start."

He put both hands in his pants pockets and shuffled his coins. I smiled at him and assured him that anything he told me could only help soften Battaglia to back me on any decisions that had to be made.

"Remember what happened with ImClone a few years back? Sam Waksal started dumping the stock when he got word that the FDA was not going to approve the drug the company was testing."

"Sure. Classic insider trading. Even his father and daughter were involved, not to mention catching up Martha Stewart in the whole thing."

"Tell your boss that Robelon's been drawn in by the same kind of net. The SEC's computerized alert system picked up his brother's company on the radar screen. Small business that normally traded five hundred thousand shares was spiking to three million a day. Peter's cell phone was more active than the One Hundred and First Airborne during a shock-and-awe campaign."

"And Jack Kliger knows…?"

"He's only aware of the tip of the iceberg, Alex," Hoyt said, cutting me off as he sensed my instinct to press further. "I'll call you Monday morning, before you head up to court."

I turned left on Forty-fourth Street and walked up Fifth Avenue. It was a spectacular fall afternoon, but despite the clear skies and mild temperature, I made a mental note to call my Vineyard caretaker and remind him to batten down the house. If the prediction of approaching hurricanes Hoyt had mentioned was accurate, I'd be glad I did it.

By four-thirty I was comfortably settled into the chair at my hair salon, so that my friend Elsa could refresh my blonde highlights and Nana could give me an elegant "do" for tonight's theater date.

There were no messages on the machine when I got home at half past six, no update from anyone. Jake came in from a late-afternoon run in the park shortly after I arrived.

"Is there a plan?" he asked.

"We're meeting Joan and Jim at the theater, just before eight. Would you be sure to take the tickets?" I said, pointing to the dresser, as I pulled a black silk sheath out of my closet and began to dress. "Dinner after the play, at '21.' Can you hold out?"

"Yeah. I went into the office to research a story. Grabbed some lunch while I was there."

We took a cab to the Barrymore Theater, where our friends were waiting below the marquee. Ralph Fiennes was starring in Othello, and the reviews from London's West End had been smashing. We settled into our seats, and Joan and I caught up on gossip until the lights dimmed and the curtain rose. I had turned my beeper to the vibrate mode and put it in my evening bag on my lap so that I could slip out of my aisle seat in case anyone tried to communicate with me about Dulles in the next few hours.

At the intermission after the second act, the four of us stretched our legs and went to the lobby for a drink. When we reached the bar, I saw Mike Chapman standing against one of the pillars, cocktail in hand, flipping through the Playbill.

There had been so much tension with Jake lately that I hoped Mike had only chosen to interrupt one of our few social evenings for good news about the missing child. Jake followed me over to where Mike was standing, and I tried not to show my disappointment at his arrival.

"'To be, or not to be: that is the question.'"

"Wrong play," I said. "Look, is there-"

"'There's the rub-that sleep of death-the shuffling off of this mortal coil,'" Mike said, doing his Hamlet with a vodka gimlet in one hand. "Hate to do this to you, Jake, but the next dance is mine. It's the kills again. Always the kills."

"What? Make sense for a change, Mike. Stop joking with me," I said.

"There's been another homicide."

He downed his drink and stepped to the bar to replace his glass.

"Not Dulles?" I covered my hand with my mouth, relieved to see Mike shaking his head as he swallowed.

"This one's going to hit you hard, Coop. C'mon with me-I'm on my way to the First Precinct," he said, reaching out and taking me by the hand. "Paige Vallis has been murdered."

16

I couldn't grasp the fact that Paige Vallis was dead. And I couldn't stop thinking that Andrew Tripping had the best reason to kill her.

Mike led me up the two flights of stairs to the squad room. I assumed from the somber-faced team of detectives who greeted me that they knew how personally shattered I would be by the death of my own witness.

Over and over again, I played in my mind the words that Judge Moffett had said at the start of Andrew Tripping's trial: "Murder. You should have charged the defendant with murder."

He hasn't killed anyone, I had thought. Not that I could prove.

The questions I had thrown at Mike on the long ride down to the southernmost station house on the island of Manhattan, none of which he could answer, were the things we started with now.

"Do we have a time of death on this?" I asked, after saying hello to some of the guys I recognized and had worked with before. No one answered.

"Who's in charge here?" Mike asked.

We were out of his territory now, on the turf of the Manhattan South Homicide Squad. There wasn't a man in the room who took pleasure in being second-guessed by a colleague from the north, or a prosecutor in a black couture dress and peau-de-soie shoes with three-inch heels.

"Yo, Squeeks. You the man?" Mike said, pointing to a guy who was hanging up a phone on a desk in the rear of the room.

Will Squeekist had been a detective in Narcotics for five years before a recent promotion to Homicide. The nickname that Mike had given him when they were in the academy years earlier had stuck, and fit the small-framed man with a high-pitched voice.

"Come on back here. Let's get started," Squeeks called out to us. "Hey, Alex, how you been?"