“Until…” Geoff prompted.

“Until someone she met became important,” Reardon continued. “That was when I noticed jewelry I hadn’t seen before. Some pieces were antiques, others very modern. She claimed her father gave them to her, but I could tell she was lying. Her father has all her jewelry now, including everything I gave her.”

When the guard indicated their time was up, Reardon stood and looked squarely at Kerry. “Ms. McGrath, I shouldn’t be here. Somewhere out there the guy who killed Suzanne is walking around.

And somewhere there has to be something that will prove it.”

Geoff and Kerry walked to the parking lot together. “I bet you didn’t have time for any lunch,” he said. “Why don’t we grab something fast?”

“I can’t, I’ve got to get back. Geoff, I have to tell you that from what I heard today, I can’t see a single reason for Dr. Smith to lie about Skip Reardon. Reardon says that they had what amounts to a reasonably cordial relationship. You heard him say that he didn’t believe Suzanne when she told him that her father had given her some pieces of jewelry. If he started getting jealous about those pieces, well…” She did not finish the sentence.

On Sunday morning, Robin served at the ten o’clock mass. When Kerry watched the processional move down the aisle from the vestry, she always was reminded of how, as a child, she had wanted to be a server and was told it wasn’t possible, that only boys were allowed.

Things change, she mused. I never thought I’d see my daughter on the altar, I never thought I’d be divorced, I never thought that someday I’d be a judge. Might be a judge, she corrected herself. She knew Jonathan was right. Embarrassing Frank Green right now was tantamount to embarrassing the governor. It could be a fatal blow to her appointment. Yesterday’s visit to Skip Reardon might have been a serious mistake. Why mess up her life again? She had done it once.

She knew that she had worked her way through the emotional gamut with Bob Kinellen, first loving him, then being heartbroken when he left her, then angry at him and contemptuous of herself that she had not seen him for the opportunist he was. Now her chief reaction to him was indifference, except where Robin was concerned. Even so, observing couples in church, whether her own age, younger, older-it didn’t matter-seeing them always caused a pang of sadness. If only Bob had been the person I believed he was, she thought. If only he were the person he thinks he is. By now they would have been married eleven years. By now surely she would have had other children. She’d always wanted three.

As she watched Robin carry the ewer of water and the lavabo bowl to the altar in preparation for the consecration, her daughter looked up and met Kerry’s gaze. Her brief smile caught at Kerry’s heart. What am I complaining about? she asked herself. No matter what happens, I have her. And as unions go, it may have been far from perfect, but at least something good came of it. No one else except Bob Kinellen and I could have had exactly this wonderful child, she reasoned.

As she watched, her mind jumped back to another parent and child, to Dr. Smith and Suzanne. She had been the unique result of his and his former wife’s genes. In his testimony, Dr. Smith had stated that after their divorce his wife moved to California and remarried, and he had permitted Suzanne to be adopted by the second husband, thinking that was in her best interests.

“But after her mother died, she came to me,” he had said. “She needed me.”

Skip Reardon had said that Dr. Smith’s attitude toward his daughter bordered on reverence. When she heard that, a question that took Kerry’s breath away had raced through her mind. Dr. Smith had transformed other women to look like his daughter. But no one had ever asked whether or not he had ever operated on Suzanne.

Kerry and Robin had just finished lunch when Bob called, suggesting he take Robin out to dinner that night. He explained that Alice had taken the children to Florida for a week, and he was driving to the Catskills to look at a ski lodge they might buy. Would Robin want to accompany him? he asked. “I still owe her dinner, and I promise I’ll have her back by nine.”

Robin’s enthusiastically affirmative response resulted in Bob picking her up an hour later.

The unexpected free afternoon gave Kerry a chance to spend more time going over the Reardon trial transcript. Just reading the testimony gave her a certain amount of insight, but she knew that there was a big difference between reading a cold transcript and watching the witnesses as they testified. She hadn’t seen their faces, heard their voices or watched their physical reactions to questions. She knew that the jury’s evaluation of the demeanor of the witnesses had undoubtedly played a big part in reaching their verdict. That jury had watched and evaluated Dr. Smith. And it was obvious that they had believed him.

Geoff Dorso loved football and was an ardent Giants fan. It was not the reason he had bought a condominium in the Meadowlands, but as he admitted, it certainly was convenient. Nevertheless, on Sunday afternoon, sitting in Giant Stadium, his mind was less on today’s very close game with the Dallas Cowboys than on yesterday’s visit to Skip Reardon, and Kerry McGrath’s reaction to both Skip and the trial transcript.

He had given the transcript to her on Thursday. Had she read it yet? he wondered. He had hoped that she would bring it up while they were waiting to see Skip, but she hadn’t mentioned it. He tried to tell himself that it was her training to be skeptical, that her seemingly negative attitude after the visit to Skip didn’t have to mean that she was washing her hands of the case.

When the Giants squeaked through with a last-second field goal as the fourth quarter of the game ended, Geoff shared in the lusty cheering but declined the suggestion of his friends that he join them for a couple of beers. Instead he went home and called Kerry.

He was elated when she admitted that she had read the transcript and that she had a number of questions. “I’d like to get together again,” he said. Then a thought struck him. She can only say no, he reasoned, as he asked, “By any chance would you be free for dinner tonight?”

Dolly Bowles had been sixty when she moved in with her daughter in Alpine. That had been twelve years ago, when she was first widowed. She had not wanted to impose, but the truth was she had always been nervous about being alone and really didn’t think she could go on living in the big house she and her husband had shared.

And, in fact, there was a basis, psychological at least, for her nervousness. Years ago, when she was still a child, she had opened the door for a deliveryman who turned out to be a burglar. She still had nightmares about the way he had tied up both her and her mother and had ransacked the house. As a result, she now tended to be suspicious of any and all strangers, and several times had irritated her son-in-law by pushing the panic button on the alarm system when she had been alone in the house and had heard strange noises or seen a man on the street she didn’t recognize.

Her daughter Dorothy and her son-in-law Lou traveled frequently. Their children had still been at home when Dolly moved in with them, and she had been a help in taking care of them. But for the last several years they had been off on their own, and Dolly had had almost nothing to do. She had tried to pitch in around the house, but the live-in housekeeper wanted no part of her help.

Left with so much time on her hands, Dolly had become the neighborhood baby-sitter, a situation that worked out wonderfully. She genuinely enjoyed young children and would happily read to them or play games by the hour. She was beloved by just about everyone. The only time people got annoyed was when she made one of her all-too-frequent calls to the police to report suspicious-looking persons. And she hadn’t done that in the last ten years, not since she was a witness at the Reardon murder trial. She shuddered every time she thought of that. The prosecutor had made such a fool of her. Dorothy and Lou had been mortified. “Mother, I begged you not to talk to the police,” Dorothy had snapped at the time.