Dr. Smith took Barbara Tompkins to Le Cirque, a very chic, very expensive restaurant in midtown Manhattan. “Some women enjoy quiet little out-of-the-way places, but I suspect you enjoy the high-profile spots where one can see and be seen,” he said to the beautiful young woman.

He had picked her up at her apartment and did not miss the fact that she had been ready to leave immediately. Her coat was on a chair in the small foyer, her purse on the table beside it. She did not offer him an aperitif.

She doesn’t want to be alone with me, he had thought.

But at the restaurant, with so many people around them and the attentive maŒtre d’ hovering nearby, Barbara visibly relaxed. “It’s a lot different from Albany,” she said. “I’m still like a kid having a daily birthday.”

He was stunned for a moment by her words. So similar to Suzanne, who had compared herself to a kid with an ever-present Christmas tree and gifts always waiting to be opened. But from being an enchanted child, Suzanne had changed into an ungrateful adult. I asked so little of her, he thought. Shouldn’t an artist be allowed to take pleasure in his creation? Why should the creation be wasted among leering dregs of humanity while the artist suffers for a glimpse of it?

Warmth filled him as he noticed that in this room filled with attractive, elegant women, sidelong glances rested on Barbara. He pointed that out to her.

She shook her head slightly as though dismissing the suggestion.

“It’s true,” Smith persisted. His eyes became cold. “Don’t take it for granted, Suzanne. That would be insulting to me.”

It was only later, after the quiet meal was over and he had seen her back to her apartment, that he asked himself if he had called her Suzanne. And if so, how many times had he slipped?

He sighed and leaned back, closing his eyes. As the cab jostled downtown, Charles Smith reflected how easy it had been to drive past Suzanne’s house when he was starved for a glimpse of her. When she wasn’t out playing golf, she invariably sat in front of the television and never bothered to draw the drapes over the large picture window in her recreation room.

He would see her curled up in her favorite chair, or sometimes he would be forced to witness her sitting side by side on the couch with Skip Reardon, shoulders touching, legs stretched out on the cocktail table, in the casual intimacy he could not share.

Barbara wasn’t married. From what he could tell there wasn’t anyone special in her life. Tonight he had asked her to call him Charles. He thought about the bracelet Suzanne had been wearing when she died. Should he give it to Barbara? Would it endear him to her?

He had given Suzanne several pieces of jewelry. Fine jewelry. But then she had started accepting other pieces from other men, and demanding that he lie for her.

Smith felt the glow from being with Barbara ooze away. A moment later he realized that for the second time the cabbie’s impatient voice was saying, “Hey, mister, you asleep? You’re home.”

Geoff did not stay long after Kerry had called Kinellen. “Bob agrees with me,” she told him as she sipped the coffee.

“No other suggestions?”

“No, of course not. Sort of his usual, ‘You handle it, Kerry.

Anything you decide is fine.’”

She put down the cup. “I’m not being fair. Bob honestly did seem concerned, and I don’t know what else he could suggest.”

They were sitting in the kitchen. She had turned off the overhead light, thinking they would carry their coffee into the living room. Now the only illumination in the room came from the dim light in a wall fixture.

Geoff studied the grave face across the table from him, aware of the hint of sadness in Kerry’s hazel eyes, the determination in the set of her generous mouth and finely sculpted chin, the vulnerability in her overall posture. He wanted to put his arms around her, to tell her to lean on him.

But he knew she didn’t want that. Kerry McGrath did not expect or want to lean on anyone. He tried again to apologize for his dismissive remark to her the other night, suggesting that she was being self-serving, and for Deidre Reardon’s intrusive visit to her office. “I had a hell of a nerve,” he said. “I know that if you believed in your heart that Skip Reardon was innocent, you of all people would not hesitate in trying to help him. You’re a stand-up guy, McGrath.”

Am I? Kerry wondered. It was not the moment to share with Geoff the information she had found in the prosecutor’s file about Jimmy Weeks. She would tell him, but first she wanted to see Dr. Smith again. He had angrily denied that he had touched Suzanne surgically, but he had never said that he hadn’t sent her to someone else. That meant that technically he wasn’t a liar.

As Geoff left a few minutes later, they stood for a moment in the foyer. “I like being with you,” he told her, “and that has nothing to do with the Reardon case. How about our going out to dinner on Saturday night and bringing Robin with us?”

“She’d like that.”

As Geoff opened the door he leaned down and brushed her cheek with his lips. “I know it’s unnecessary to tell you to double lock the door and to turn on the alarm, but I will suggest you don’t do any heavy thinking about that picture after you go to bed.”

When he was gone, Kerry went upstairs to check on Robin. She was working on her science report and did not hear her mother come in. From the doorway Kerry studied her child. Robin’s back was to her, her long dark brown hair spilling over her shoulders, her head bent in concentration, her legs wrapped around the rungs of the chair.

She is the innocent victim of whoever took that picture, Kerry thought. Robin is like me. Independent. She’s going to hate having to be driven to and picked up from school, hate not being able to walk over to Cassie’s by herself.

And then in her mind she heard again Deidre Reardon’s pleading voice begging her to ask herself how she would like to see her child caged for ten years for a crime she didn’t commit.

The plea bargaining was not going well for Barney Haskell. At 7:00 P.M. on Friday morning he met attorney Mark Young in his handsome law office in Summit, half an hour and a world away from the federal courthouse in downtown Newark.

Young, head of Barney’s defense team, was about the same age he was, fifty-five, but there the resemblance ended, Barney thought sourly. Young was smoothly elegant even at this early hour, dressed in his lawyer’s pin-striped suit that seemed to fit like a second skin. But Barney knew that when the jacket came off, those impressive shoulders disappeared. Recently the Star-Ledger had done a write-up on the high-profile lawyer, including the fact that he wore one-thousand-dollar suits.

Barney bought his suits off the rack. Jimmy Weeks had never paid him enough to allow him to do otherwise. Now he was facing years in prison if he stuck with Jimmy. So far the Feds were hanging tough. They would only talk reduced sentence, not a free ride, if he handed Jimmy over to them. They thought they could convict Weeks without Barney.

Maybe. But maybe not, Barney thought. He figured they were bluffing. He had seen Jimmy’s lawyers get him off before. Kinellen and Bartlett were good, and they had always managed to get him through those past investigations without any real damage.

This time, though, judging from the U.S. attorney’s opening statement, the Feds had plenty of hard evidence. Still, they had to be scared that Jimmy would pull another rabbit out of his hat.

Barney rubbed his hand over his fleshy cheek. He knew he had the innocent look of a dumb bank clerk, an aspect that had always been helpful. People tended not to notice or remember him. Even the guys closest to Weeks never paid much attention to him. They thought of him as a gofer. None of them had realized he was the one who converted the under-the-table cash into investments and took care of bank accounts all over the world.