AT ALMOST 4:00 A.M., Coltrane’s street was quiet, his Westwood town house in darkness. His headlights reflected off puddles. Reluctant to be closed in by the garage, he parked at the curb and climbed the wet steps to his concrete patio. The air was cool enough to make him shiver. He kept telling himself that Ilkovic was really dead, that the police had checked his town house for explosives, that he had nothing to be afraid of. All the same, as he inserted his key in the front door, he felt uneasy.

He reached inside and flicked a light switch, illuminating the living room before he entered. The furniture was in disarray from the bomb squad’s search, but the disorder that troubled him was the empty bottle of chardonnay on the coffee table, as well as three wineglasses, two of them half-full, on the counter next to the telephone. They were from Saturday afternoon, when he had celebrated with Jennifer and Daniel, showing them his photographs – just before Ilkovic’s phone call had forced them to set down their glasses. Saturday afternoon. It seemed impossible that Daniel had been killed since then.

Coltrane locked the door and stepped hesitantly toward one of the wineglasses, the one that was empty, remembering that Daniel had finished his before he and Jennifer finished theirs. The once-sparkly glass had a film of dried liquid. Reverentially, Coltrane picked it up, careful not to touch Daniel’s faintly visible fingerprints. He stared at them for the longest time. At last, he set down the glass, went to a cupboard in the kitchen, pulled out a bottle of Wild Turkey, and drank three long swallows straight from the bottle’s mouth. Gasping, he set it down, the fire in his throat and stomach not strong enough to distract him from his emotions.

He climbed the stairs to his bedroom, which was also in disarray because of the bomb squad. After stripping off the coveralls, he went into the bathroom and took the longest shower he could ever recall, repeatedly soaping his hair and body, rinsing, soaping, scouring himself, trying to rid himself of the lingering feel of death. Despite the bruises on his legs, chest, and arms, he toweled himself roughly until his skin was raw. He had come here to get extra clothes and other things he would need for Packard’s house. But all of a sudden he felt too exhausted to go there. He stripped the covers from the bed, intensely aware that Ilkovic had been in this room and touched them. He dragged a sheet and blanket from a hallway closet and spread them over the bare mattress. He programmed his bedside clock to wake him at 9:00 A.M., turned off the lights, crawled wearily between the sheet and the blanket, and tried to sleep.

THE JANGLE OF THE TELEPHONE ROUSED HIM FROM A RESTLESS, anxious semi-consciousness in which arms seemed to squeeze his chest and rain had the color of blood. Dazed, he directed his bleary vision toward the bedside clock. A little after six. He decided it must be Jennifer or Nolan or the state police.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Coltrane?”

Coltrane didn’t recognize the voice. “Who wants to know?”

“I’m a reporter for the L.A. Times. I’d like to-”

No sooner had Coltrane hung up than the phone rang again.

The next reporter was from the Associated Press. Coltrane unplugged the phone in the bedroom, but the phone downstairs rang almost immediately, and by the time Coltrane got downstairs to unplug that one, he heard a man’s voice on the answering machine identifying himself as a reporter for Newsweek, asking him to describe details about -

Coltrane pulled the plug.

He knew what was coming. Fighting his cramped muscles and his exhaustion, he hurried upstairs, put on a navy blazer and gray slacks, packed two suitcases with clothes, slung a camera bag over his shoulder, and managed to get outside, to drive away a few seconds before a TV news truck sped past him. In his rearview mirror, he saw it pull up in front of his town house.

There were three TV news trucks at the church in Burbank when he got there a little before one. Keeping a distance from each other, identical-looking, attractive, stern-eyed women wearing business suits spoke into microphones, their backs to the church while cameramen recorded the mourners filing in. Coltrane couldn’t help wondering if any photographs he had taken had ever interfered with someone’s grief. Now he knew what it felt like to be on the other side. After parking his car in a lot behind the church, he debated whether to risk going in, then decided that the TV news team couldn’t know what he looked like – to the best of his knowledge, no photograph of him had ever been published.

So he took the chance. Jennifer was already in the church when he entered. She wore a black dress and veil. The latter didn’t quite conceal how weary her features were. Sitting next to her, apparently surprising her, Coltrane nodded. She nodded somberly back, looked as if she was about to say something, then turned toward the pallbearers carrying Daniel’s coffin down the center aisle toward the altar. Daniel’s ex-wife, supported by an elderly man who might have been her father, sobbed and followed the coffin, her footsteps unsteady. After the coffin was set on a bier and Daniel’s ex-wife took her place in a front pew, a priest accompanied by altar boys came out to begin the Mass for the Dead. Coltrane couldn’t help remembering the mournful classical music that Ilkovic had repeatedly left on his answering machine: Verdi’s Requiem.

Well, Ilkovic, damn you, you’re the one being judged now.

The priest gave a eulogy in which he alluded to Milton’s Paradise Lost and how one of the hardest acts of faith was to justify God’s ways to human beings. “When something this incomprehensible occurs, we find ourselves powerless and adrift. What kind of God would permit such savagery? What kind of universe presents the conditions in which something this horrid can happen? We are tested to our utmost limits. Tested,” the priest emphasized. “If we are to persevere, we must not turn our backs on God. We must not turn our backs on the world. What we must hate and turn our backs on is the evil that we were put on earth to overcome.”

Turn our backs? Coltrane thought. I don’t think so. Daniel, I got even for you.

After the service, Coltrane accompanied Jennifer from the church. “Can you wait here a minute?” He went over to Daniel’s ex-wife, embraced her, and explained how sorry he was. Perhaps on medication, she didn’t seem to hear. Nolan, who evidently had been in the back of the church, watched from the side of the steps. After exchanging glances with him, Coltrane made his way back through the mourners, most of whom he recognized from various times when he had visited Daniel at the hospital.

“Are you okay?” he asked Jennifer.

“No.”

“I’m sorry,” Coltrane said.

“For what? You didn’t kill Daniel.”

“For what you had to go through.”

“What I’m sorry about,” Jennifer said, “is that you didn’t tell me what you were planning to do. You shut me out.”

“I didn’t want to put you in danger.”

“You still shut me out. You didn’t trust me enough to tell me what you were doing. You treated me like a stranger. But you’re a stranger. I would never have believed you were capable of…”

Coltrane glanced away, self-conscious.

“I’m a stranger to myself,” Jennifer said.

“What do you mean?”