He was cool and removed now. Not the right moment to remind him that prepositions weren't good words with which to end sentences. I could usually tease him about grammar whenever he made an on-air slip.

"I'm going to have to pick up some things from my apartment after work tomorrow. I'll need an outfit for Joan's dinner and my travel kit."

"We're not even going to be away for twenty-four hours." Jake realized he was snapping at me and tried to bring it down a notch. "If Mike can't drive you by there after work, we can meet at my office and I'll take you over." We were both thinking about Shirley Denzig and whether she was still lurking in the neighborhood.

I reached over and put my hand on top of his, and he loosened up as we both ate and chatted. It was my fault that the fish was dry and overdone, so I finished all of it, so as not to be berated for that, too.

"Go ahead inside. I'll clean up." The job was quick and easy, and ten minutes later I joined him in the living room, where he was reading briefing papers for his next day's assignments. I sat on the far end of the sofa and entangled my legs in his while I carefully read the 1935 volume of the Lockhart diaries from cover to cover.

At 10:35 the phone rang.

"How've you been?" he asked the caller. Usually he mouthed to me the name of the person he was speaking to, if I could not recognize who it was from the context of the conversation. This time he did not.

"No, I don't remember ever meeting him. I've heard of him, of course. I think Tom did a feature piece about his firm, if I'm not mistaken."

The other party spoke.

"You're kidding." Jake sat bolt upright, both feet on the floor. "When?"

Presumably an answer.

"In Montauk? Where is he now? Where are the kids?"

Another brief reply.

"What makes you think it was murder?"

I put down the book and stared at Jake, who was looking straight ahead.

"Just hold on a minute, will you? I want to go into the den." He turned to me. "Darling, would you mind if I take this one inside?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Just hang it up for me when you hear me get on, okay?"

He walked toward the den and I held the receiver until I heard him ask if his caller was still there. She answered, "Yes."

For almost fifteen minutes while they talked, I sat in the living room and fumed. Less than a week ago Jake had invited me to move into his home. I had done so reluctantly, encouraged by the circumstances inside and outside my own apartment. The intimacies that had begun to make me savor our days and nights together were fragile enough to be shattered by one conversation he refused to have in my presence.

I got up to pour myself a drink.

"Don't I get one, too?" he asked as he came back into the living room.

"Sorry. I didn't know when you'd be off the phone." I returned to the bar and fixed him a scotch. The mood shift had been completed. Now I was cool and abrupt to Jake and he was fired up with the adrenaline rush created by an exclusive piece of breaking news.

He sensed my pout immediately. "You're not jealous, are you?"

"Of whom? I don't even know who called." He didn't offer to tell me her name.

"She's just an old friend. A paralegal at one of the big white-shoe firms."

"I wouldn't care if it was Gwyneth Paltrow or Emma Thompson. I am just stunned that there is something you can't talk about in my presence." I steered away from the sofa and sat in an armchair across the room. "You go through this whole big deal about me needing to let you more into my life and me needing to open up to you. You try to convince me that I should move in with you, and then the first time you get a serious telephone call you fly out of the room because there's a conversation that I'm not permitted to be privy to."

"There's your preposition, darling."

"I'm not amused, Jake. You can be damn sure"-I got up and walked in a circle around the chair as I talked-"damn sure that I'm not ever about to live with someone who takes private calls in a separate room. And especially when I hear the word 'murder.' Now, do you want to tell me what that was about?"

He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs, his glass in one hand. He was smiling as he looked over at me. "Am I talking to my lover, or am I talking to a prosecutor?"

"When you say 'murder' and 'kids' in the space of a few minutes, I regret to inform you-darling-that I am a prosecutor."

He sat back. "That's the problem. My sources are privileged. I got this information in confidence, so don't ask me anything I can't tell you." He was too anxious to repeat the story not to go on. "She was working-"

"She?"

"The source. My friend. She was called in to assist a partner who had a business appointment with a client. Emergency meeting on a Sunday evening because the client's a stock analyst, specializing in foreign securities. He was supposed to be off to Europe in the morning. Very well-known guy in the financial community."

"What's his name?"

Jake looked at me. "Can't do that."

He paused. "They sit through half an hour of the meeting, then the senior partner takes a break to go to the men's room. Client follows him in and, standing next to him at the urinal, tells him that he killed his wife on Saturday and-"

Mike Chapman would have had an appropriate comment about the guy's timing, but the moment and its humor were lost on me. "In Manhattan?"

"They live here, but this happened somewhere between New York City and their beach home on Long Island. Nassau or Suffolk County, Madam Prosecutor. Not your jurisdiction."

He couldn't possibly think that I would fail to be appalled about a homicide that had occurred outside the confines of the city limits of my legal responsibility. "And the kids? What's the part about children?"

Jake paused slightly before answering. "This guy actually put his wife's remains in the trunk of his car. Then he got the two kids and drove upstate to dump the body."

"Where?"

"Where what?"

"Where is that woman's body right at this very moment? And where the hell are the children?"

"They're fine. She assures me that they're perfectly okay."

"And you're not going to tell me who this victim is and whether she's lying out in the woods or dumped in a lake or-?"

"Look, my informant's in a tough position, Alex. This is their client and the information he's giving them is privileged. They're trying to do the right thing and deal with getting him surrendered before he leaves the country, but right now he's resisting that idea. When there's more that I can tell you-"

The phone rang again and Jake answered. "Hey, that's fine. No problem. You can call me any hour of the night with a story like this. In the meantime, why don't we plan on lunch tomorrow? You can give me all the details then."

His caller clearly liked the idea.

"Michael's. Fifty-fifth Street between Fifth and Sixth, at twelve-thirty. There's a great table in an alcove in the front. Very private. No overheards. I'll call in the morning and reserve it."

She had a suggestion for Jake.

"No, you're not disturbing anything. Sure, if you get something else, call right back." He hung up and turned back to me. "You can't solve all the world's problems, Alex."

"I'd like to think that even if I were not a prosecutor, this story would be so upsetting that it would make me get off my ass and do something about it. I can't understand how you can sit there and probably just think about whether you can scoop the other networks with some lurid personal detail about this woman's murder. I can't understand why calling the police isn't the first thing you do."

The phone rang again and this time, without asking my permission, Jake held up a finger as if to suggest that I wait a few minutes till he returned from the den to finish our conversation. He trotted off to the other room to take his call alone.