uesday I slept late, and Elaine was gone when I woke up. A note on the kitchen table told me to stay as long as I wanted. I helped myself to breakfast and watched CNN for a while. Then I went out and walked around for an hour or so, winding up at the Citicorp Building in time for the noon meeting. Afterward I went to a movie on Third Avenue, walked to the Frick and looked at the paintings, then took a bus down Lexington and caught a five-thirty meeting a block from Grand Central, commuters bracing themselves to pass up the club car.

The meeting was on the Eleventh Step, the one about seeking to know God's will through prayer and meditation, and most of the discussion was relentlessly spiritual. When I got out I decided to treat myself to a cab. Two sailed past me, and when a third one pulled up a woman in a tailored suit and flowing bow tie elbowed me out of the way and beat me to it. I hadn't done any praying or meditating, but I didn't have a whole lot of trouble figuring out God's will in the matter. He wanted me to go home by subway.

There were messages to call John Kelly, Drew Kaplan, and Kenan Khoury. That struck me as an awful lot of people with the same last initial, and I hadn't even heard from the Kongs yet. There was a fourth message from someone who hadn't left a name, just a number; perversely, that was the call I returned first.

I dialed the number, and instead of ringing it responded with a tone. I decided I'd been disconnected and hung up, and then I got it and dialed again, and when the tone sounded I punched in my phone number and hung up.

Within five minutes my phone rang. I picked it up and TJ said, "Hey, Matt, my man. What's happenin'?"

"You got a beeper."

"Surprised you, huh? Man, I had five hundred dollars all at once. What you 'spect me to do, buy a savings bond? They was havin' a special, you got the beeper and the first three months' service for a hundred an' ninety-nine dollars. You want one, I'll go to the store with you, make sure they treat you right."

"I'll wait awhile. What happens after three months? They take the beeper back?"

"No, I own it, man. I just got to pay so much a month to keep it on-line. I stop payin', I still own it, but you call it an' nothin' happens."

"Not much point in owning it then."

"Lotta dudes got 'em, though. Wear 'em all the time an' you never hear 'em beep because they ain't paid to stay on-line."

"What's the monthly charge?"

"They told me but I forget. Don't matter. Way I figure, by the time the three months is up you'll be pickin' up the monthly tab for me just to have me at your beck an' call."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because I indispensable, man. I a key asset to your operation."

"Because you're resourceful."

"See? You're getting it."

I TRIED Drew but he wasn't at his office and I didn't want to bother him at home. I didn't call Kenan Khoury or John Kelly, figuring they could wait. I stopped around the corner for a slice of pizza and a Coke and went to St. Paul's for my third meeting of the day. I couldn't recall the last time I'd gone to that many, but it had certainly been a while.

It wasn't because I felt in danger of drinking. The thought of a drink had never been further from my mind. Nor did I feel beset by problems, or unable to reach a decision.

What I did feel, I realized, was a sense of depletion, of exhaustion. The all-nighter at the Frontenac had taken its toll, but its effects had been pretty much offset by a couple of good meals and nine hours of uninterrupted sleep. But I was still very much at the effect of the case itself. I had worked hard on it, letting it absorb me entirely, and now it was finished.

Except, of course, that it wasn't. The killers had not even been identified, let alone apprehended. I had done what I recognized as excellent detective work and it had produced significant results, but the case itself had not been brought to anything like a conclusion. So the exhaustion I felt wasn't part of a glorious feeling of completion. Tired or not, I had promises to keep. And miles to go.

So I was at another meeting, a safe and restful place. I talked with Jim Faber during the break, and walked out with him at the end of the meeting. He didn't have time to get a cup of coffee but I walked him most of the way to his apartment and we wound up standing on a street corner and talking for a few minutes. Then I went home and once again I didn't call Kenan Khoury, but I did call his brother. His name had come up in my conversation with Jim, and neither of us could remember having seen him in the past week. So I dialed Peter's number but there was no answer. I called Elaine and we talked for a few minutes. She mentioned that Pam Cassidy had called to say she wouldn't be calling— i.e., Drew had told her not to be in touch with me or Elaine for the time being, and she wanted to let Elaine know so she wouldn't worry.

I called Drew first thing the next morning and he said everything had gone well enough and he'd found Kelly hardnosed but not unreasonable. "If you want to wish for something," he suggested, "wish that the guy turns out to be rich."

"Kelly? You don't get rich in Homicide. There's no graft in it."

"Not Kelly, for God's sake. Ray."

"Who?"

"The killer," he said. "The one with the wire, for God's sake. Don't you listen to your own client?"

She wasn't my client, but he didn't know that. I asked him why on earth we would want Ray to turn out to be rich.

"So we can sue his ass off."

"I was hoping to see it locked up for the rest of his life."

"Yeah, I have the same hope," he said, "but we both know what can happen in criminal court. But one thing I damn well know is that if they so much as indict the son of a bitch I can get a civil judgment for every dime he's got. But that's only worth something if he's got a few bucks."

"You never know," I said. What I did know was that there weren't too many millionaires living in Sunset Park, but I didn't want to mention Sunset Park to Kaplan, and anyway I had no reason to assume that both of them, or all three of them if we were dealing with three, actually lived there. For all I knew, Ray had a suite at the Pierre.

"I know I'd like to find somebody to sue," he said. "Maybe the bastards used a company truck. I'd like to find some collateral defendant somewhere down the line so that I can at least get her a decent settlement. She deserves it after what she went through."

"And that way your pro bono work would turn out to be cost-effective, wouldn't it?"

"So? There's nothing wrong with that, but I've got to tell you that my end of it isn't my chief concern. Seriously."

"Okay."

"She's a damn good kid," he said. "Tough and gutsy, but there's a core of innocence about her, do you know what I mean?"

"I know."

"And those bastards really put her through it. Did she show you what they did to her?"

"She told me."

"She told me, too, but she also showed me. You think the knowledge prepares you, but believe me, the visual impact is staggering."

"No kidding," I said. "Did she also show you what she's got left, so you could appreciate the extent of her loss?"

"You've got a dirty mind, you know that?"

"I know," I said. "At least that's what everybody tells me."

I CALLED John Kelly's office and was told he was in court. When I gave my name the cop I was talking to said, "Oh, he'll want to talk to you. Give me your number, I'll beep him for you." A little while later Kelly got back to me and we arranged to meet at a place called The Docket around the corner from Borough Hall. The place was new to me, but it felt just like places I knew in downtown Manhattan, bar-restaurants with a clientele that ran to cops and lawyers and a decor that featured a lot of brass and leather and dark wood.

Kelly and I had never met, a point we both overlooked when we set up the meeting, but as it turned out I had no trouble recognizing him. He looked just like his father.

"I been hearing that all my life," he said.

He picked up his beer from the bar and we took a table in back. Our waitress had a snub nose and infectious good humor, and she knew my companion. When he asked her about the pastrami she said, "It's not lean enough for you, Kelly. Take the roast beef." We had roast beef sandwiches on rye, the meat sliced thin and piled high, accompanied by crisp french fries and a horseradish sauce that would bring tears to the eyes of a statue.

"Good place," I said.

"Can't beat it. I eat here all the time."

He had a second bottle of Molson's with his sandwich. I ordered a cream soda, and when that got a headshake from the waitress I said I'd have a Coke. I saw this register with Kelly, although he didn't comment at the time. When she brought our drinks, though, he said, "You used to drink."

"Your father mentioned that? I wasn't hitting it all that heavy when I knew him."

"I didn't get it from him. I made a few calls, asked around. I hear you had your troubles with it and then you stopped."

"You could say that."

"AA, I heard. Great organization, everything I hear of it."

"It has its good points. But it's no place to be if you want a decent drink."

It took him a second to realize I was joking. He laughed, then said, "That where you know him from? The mysterious boyfriend?"

"I'm not going to answer that."

"You're not prepared to tell me anything about him."

"No."

"That's okay, I'm not about to give you a lot of grief on the subject. You got her to come in, I have to give you that. I don't exactly love it when a witness shows up holding hands with her lawyer, but under the circumstances I got to admit it's the right move for her. And Kaplan's not too much of a sleaze. He'll make you look like a monkey in court if he can, but what the hell, that's his job, and they're all like that. What are you going to do, hang the whole profession?"

"There are people who wouldn't think it was such a bad idea."

"You're talking about half the people in this room," he said, "and the other half are attorneys themselves. But what the hell. Kaplan and I agreed to keep this dark as far as the press is concerned. He said he was sure you'd go along."

"Of course."

"If we had a good sketch of the two perps it'd be different, but I put her together with an artist and the best we could come up with is they each got two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. She's not too sure about ears, thinks they had two apiece but doesn't want to commit herself. Be like running a picture of a smile button on page five of the Daily News: 'Have You Seen This Man?' What we got is linkage of three cases which we're now officially treating as serial homicide, but do you see any advantage in making it public? Besides scaring the shit out of people, what do you accomplish?"

oOo

WE didn't linger over lunch. He had to be back by two to testify in the trial of a drug-related homicide, which was the sort of thing that kept him from ever getting his desk clear. "And it's hard to keep on giving a shit if they kill each other," he said, "or to break your back trying to nail them for it. I wish to hell they'd legalize all that shit, and I honest to Christ never thought I'd hear myself say that."

"I never thought I'd hear any cop say it."

"You hear it all the time now. Cops, DAs, everybody. There's still DEA guys playing the same old tune. 'We're winning the war on drugs. Give us the tools and we can do the job.' I don't know, maybe they believe it, but you're better off believing in the Tooth Fairy. Least that way you might wind up with a quarter under your pillow."

"How can you rationalize making crack legal?"

"I know, it's a pisser. My all-time favorite is angel dust. An ordinary peaceable guy'll go get himself dusted, and he goes straight into a blackout and acts out violently. Then he wakes up hours later and somebody's dead and he doesn't remember a thing, he can't even tell you if he enjoyed the high. Would I like to see them selling dust at the corner candy store? Jesus, I can't say I would, but would they move any more of it that way than they do right now, selling it on the street in front of the candy store?"

"I don't know."

"Neither does anybody else. As a matter of fact they're not selling that much angel dust these days, but it's not because people are going away for it. Crack's taking a lot of the dust market. So there's good news from the world of drugs, sports fans. Crack is helping us win that war."

We split the check, and on the sidewalk we shook hands. I agreed to get in touch if I thought of anything he ought to know about, and he said he'd keep me posted if they got any kind of a break in the case. "I can tell you there'll be some manpower on it," he said. "These are guys we really want to take off the street."

I HAD told Kenan Khoury I'd be out later that afternoon, so I headed in that direction. The Docket is on Joralemon Street, where Brooklyn Heights butts up against Cobble Hill. I walked east to Court Street and down Court to Atlantic, passing Drew Kaplan's law office and the Syrian place I'd gone to with Peter Khoury. I turned on Atlantic so that I could pass Ayoub's and visualize the kidnapping in situ, which was another Latin phrase Drew could put in the basket with pro bono. I thought I'd take a bus south, but when I got to Fourth Avenue a bus was just pulling away from the curb, and it was a beautiful spring day anyway and I was enjoying the walk.

I walked for a couple of hours. I never consciously planned on walking all the way to Bay Ridge, but that's what I wound up doing. At first I just thought I'd walk eight or ten blocks and then catch the first bus that came along. By the time I got to the first of the numbered streets I realized I was only about a mile from Green-Wood Cemetery. I cut over to Fifth Avenue and walked to the cemetery and went in, strolling for ten or fifteen minutes among the graves. The grass was bright the way it never is except in early spring, and there were a lot of spring bulbs in bloom around the headstones, along with other flowers that had been placed in urns.

The cemetery covers a vast expanse of ground and I had no idea in what section of it Leila Alvarez had been lost and found, although there may well have been some indication in the news story. If so I had long since forgotten, and what difference did it make, anyway? I wasn't going to psych out anything by tuning in to the vibrations emanating from the patch of grass on which she'd lain. I'm willing to believe that some people can operate that way, that they can use willow twigs to find lost objects and missing children, even that they can see auras that escape my vision (although I wasn't sure I'd grant such powers to Danny Boy's latest girlfriend). But I couldn't.

Still, just being in a place might jog a thought loose, allow a mental connection that might otherwise never be made. Who knows how the process works?

Maybe I went there looking for some kind of connection to the Alvarez girl. Maybe I just wanted to spend a few minutes walking on green grass, and looking at the flowers.

I ENTERED the cemetery at Twenty-fifth Street and left it half a mile south at Thirty-fourth. By this point I had made my way through all of Park Slope and was on the northern edge of the Sunset Park section, and just a couple of blocks from the small park that gave the neighborhood its name.

I walked to the park, and across it. Then, one by one, I made my way to all six of the pay phones that had been used to call the Khoury house, starting with the one on New Utrecht Avenue at Forty-first Street. The one I was most interested in was on Fifth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth. That was the phone they had used twice, the one that thus figured to be closest to their base of operations. Unlike the other phones, it was not located on the street but just inside the entrance of a twenty-four-hour laundromat.

There were two women in the place, both of them fat. One was folding laundry while the other sat in a chair tipped back against the concrete-block wall and read a copy of People magazine with Sandra Dee's picture on the cover. Neither of them paid any attention to the other, or to me. I dropped a quarter in the phone and called Elaine. When she picked up I said, "Do all laundromats have telephones? Is it a regular thing, are you always going to find a pay phone in a laundromat?"

"Do you have any idea how many years I've been waiting for you to ask me that?"

"Well?"

"It's flattering that you think I know everything, but I have to tell you something. I haven't set foot inside a laundromat in years. In fact I'm not sure I've ever been in one. We have machines in the basement. So I can't answer your question, but I can ask you one. Why?"

"Two of the calls to Khoury the night of the kidnapping came from a laundromat pay phone in Sunset Park."

"And you're there right now. You're calling me from that very phone."

"Right."

"And? Why does it matter if other laundromats have phones? Don't tell me, I'll figure it out for myself. I can't figure it out for myself. Why?"

"I was thinking they'd have to live very close for it to occur to them to use this phone. You can't see it from the street, so unless you lived within a block or two of it you wouldn't think of it when you needed to make a phone call. Unless every laundromat in the world has a phone."

"Well, I don't know about laundromats. There's no phone in our basement. What do you do about laundry?"

"Me? There's a laundry around the corner."

"They have a phone?"

"I don't know. I drop it off in the morning and pick it up at night, if I remember. They do everything. I give it to them dirty and it comes back clean."

"I bet they don't separate colors."

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

I left the laundromat and had a café con leche at the Cuban lunch counter at the corner. They'd talked on that phone, the sons of bitches. I was that close to them.

They had to live in the neighborhood. And not just in the general area, but almost certainly within a block or two of the laundromat. It wasn't hard for me to start believing I could feel their presence somewhere within a few hundred yards of where I was sitting. But that was a lot of crap. I didn't have to pick up vibrations, all I had to do was figure out what must have happened.

They picked her up when she left the house, tailed her to D'Agostino's, laid off when the bag boy walked her to her car, then tailed her again to Atlantic Avenue. They made the snatch when she came out of Ayoub's and drove off with her in the back of the truck. And headed where?

Any of dozens of places. Some side street in Red Hook. An alleyway behind a warehouse. A garage.

There was a gap of several hours between the kidnapping and the first phone call, and I figured they had spent a good portion of those hours doing to her what they had done to Pam Cassidy. After she was dead they'd have headed for home, parked in their own parking space if they weren't there already. The truck, which had borne lettering identifying it as the vehicle of a TV outfit in Queens, would get some cosmetic attention. They'd paint over the lettering— or just wash it off, if they'd applied washable paint to begin with. If they had the right setup in their garage, the truck might get a whole change of color.

Then what? A quick course in Meat-cutting for Beginners? They could have done that then, could have waited until afterward. It didn't matter.

Then, at 3:38, the first call. At 4:01, the second call— Ray's first call— from the laundromat. More calls, until at 8:01 the sixth call sent the Khourys off to deliver the money. Having made that call, Ray or another man would get in position to watch the pay phone at Flatbush and Farragut, dialing its number when Kenan approached.

Or was that necessary? They'd told Kenan to be there at eight-thirty. They could have called the phone at one-minute intervals starting a few minutes before the appointed hour; whenever Khoury arrived and answered the phone, he'd have the impression that they'd called when he and his brother drove up.

Immaterial. However they did it, they made the call and Kenan answered it and they went next to Veterans Avenue, where one or more of the kidnappers was probably already in place. Another call came in, probably coordinated with the Khourys' arrival because the kidnappers would in this instance want to be in position to watch the Khourys walk away from the money.

Once they did, once they were out of the way, once it was quite clear no one had hung back to watch the car, then Ray and his friend or friends grabbed the money and took off.

No.

At least one of them lingered in the area and watched the Khourys look in the car and fail to find Francine. Then a call to the pay phone telling them to go home, that she'd be back there before they were. And then, while the Khourys did in fact return to Colonial Road, the kidnappers returned to home base. Parked the truck, and—

No. No, the truck had stayed in the garage. They hadn't completely disguised it yet, and Francine Khoury's body was probably still in the back. They had used another vehicle to drive out to Veterans Avenue.

The Ford Tempo, stolen for the occasion? That was possible. Or a third car, with the Tempo stolen and stashed, to be used for one purpose only, the delivery of the remains.

So many possibilities…

One way or another, though, they tricked the Tempo out now with Francine's butchered body. Cut up the corpse, wrapped each segment in plastic, secured each parcel with tape. Broke the lock of the trunk, filled it up like a meat locker, drove in two cars to Colonial Road and around the corner to a parking spot. Parked the Tempo, and whoever drove it joined his buddy in the other car, and they went home.

To $400,000 and the satisfaction of having had their crime go off flawlessly.

Only one thing left to do. A phone call to send Khoury around the corner to the parked Ford. The job's all done, you're flushed with triumph, but you have to rub his nose in it. What a temptation to use your own phone, the one right there on the table. Khoury hadn't called the cops, he hadn't used any backup, he'd parted readily with the money, so how was he ever going to know where this last call was coming from?

What the hell…

But no, wait a minute, you've done everything right so far, you've been strictly professional about this, so why fuck it up now? What's the sense in that?

On the other hand, you don't have to be a fanatic. Up to now you've used a different phone for every call and made sure every phone you used was a minimum of half a dozen blocks from every other phone. Just in case there was a trace, just in case they staked out one of those phones.

But they didn't. That's clear now, they didn't do anything of the sort, so there's no need now to use more caution than the circumstances require. Use a pay phone, yes, do that much, but use the most convenient one around, the one that was your first choice, that's why you made your own first call from it.

While you're at it, do your laundry. You've been doing bloody work, you got your clothes filthy, so why not throw a load of wash in the machine?

No, hardly that. Not with four hundred large sitting on the kitchen table. You wouldn't wash those clothes. You'd get rid of them and buy new.

I WALKED up and down every street within two blocks of the laundromat, working within the rectangle formed by Fourth and Sixth avenues and Forty-eighth and Fifty-second streets. I don't know that I was hunting for anything in particular, although I probably would have looked twice at blue panel trucks with homemade lettering on their sides. What I most wanted was to get a feel for the neighborhood and see if anything caught my eye.

The neighborhood was economically and ethnically diverse, with scattered houses crumbling from neglect and others being spruced up and converted for single-family occupancy by their new upscale owners. There were blocks of row houses, some still clad in a crazy quilt of aluminum and asphalt siding, others stripped of this improvement and their bricks repointed. There were blocks, too, of detached frame houses with little patches of lawn. Some of the lawns were used for parking, while some of the houses had driveways and garages. I saw a lot of street life throughout, a lot of mothers with small children, a lot of furiously energetic kids, a lot of men working on their cars or sitting on stoops, drinking from cans in brown paper bags.

By the time I finished tracing the lines of the grid, I didn't know that I'd accomplished anything. But I was reasonably certain I'd walked past the house where it happened.

A LITTLE later I was standing in front of another house where a murder had taken place.

After a visit to the southernmost pay phone at Sixtieth and Fifth, I went over to Fourth Avenue and walked past the D'Agostino's and into Bay Ridge. When I got to Senator Street it struck me that I was only a couple of blocks from where Tommy Tillary had murdered his wife. I wondered if I could find it after all these years, and at first I had trouble, looking for it on the wrong block. Once I realized my mistake I spotted it right away.

It was a little smaller than my memory had it, like the classrooms in your old grammar school, but otherwise it was as I remembered it to be. I stood out in front and looked up at the third-floor attic window. Tillary had stowed his wife up there, then brought her downstairs and killed her, making it look as though she'd been slain by burglars.

Margaret, that was her name. It had come back to me. Margaret, but Tommy called her Peg.

He killed her for money. That has always struck me as a poor reason to kill, but perhaps I hold money too cheaply, and life too dear. It is, I'll warrant you, a better motive than killing for the fun of it.

I'd met Drew Kaplan in the course of that case. He was Tommy Tillary's lawyer on the first murder charge. Later, after they'd cut him loose and picked him up again for killing his girlfriend, Kaplan encouraged him to get other representation.

The house looked in good shape. I wondered who owned it, and what he knew of its history. If it had changed hands a few times over the years, the present owner might have missed the story. But this was a pretty settled neighborhood. People tended to stay put.

I stood there for a few minutes, thinking about those drinking days. The people I'd known, the life I'd led.

Long time ago. Or not so long, depending how you counted.