They were halfway down the block before Melantha spoke again. "Are we still going to your friends'

apartment?" she asked.

"Of course," Caroline said. "Why? Do you want to go somewhere else?"

"No," Melantha murmured, reaching up to push a lock of hair back up behind the scarf.

It wasn't until they had found a cab and were heading south that Caroline understood what the girl had been really asking.

Heading east on 96th, the direction they'd taken from the store, would ultimately have taken them to Central Park, and the apartment Roger had visited that morning.

The place where all the Greens lived.

It had been a long day, the paperwork at the 24th Precinct had been worse than usual, and the last thing Detective Sergeant Tom Fierenzo wanted to do was look at yet another crime scene.

"I hope this isn't going to take very long," his partner, Detective Jon Powell, commented as they showed their badges to the doorman and crossed to the elevator. "Sandy was hoping we could have the whole weekend to ourselves for a change."

"We'll be out in an hour, tops," Fierenzo promised, hoping it was true. Powell, fourteen years his junior, was still able to actually relax on his days off, and he'd been looking forward to the weekend since Wednesday morning. More to the point, so had his wife, and Fierenzo didn't particularly want to disappoint either of them with last-minute paperwork. "Nice simple robbery," he reminded the other as he punched for the sixth floor. "No homicide, no hostage situation. Easy as pie."

"Maybe," Powell grunted. "But you know Smith. If there are any complications, he'll find them."

"Point," Fierenzo conceded. Officer Jeff Smith had the detective bug as badly as Fierenzo had ever seen, and everyone from Lieutenant Cerreta on down knew it. Even routine crime scenes got the full treatment when Smith and Hill were the cops of record. "On the other hand, maybe he's got a big weekend coming up, too."

Powell snorted. "Right. Rereading the NYPD Detectives' Manual."

Fierenzo shrugged. "Somebody has to know what's in it."

Smith was standing by an open door halfway down the hall when they arrived, talking with a middleaged man wearing a khaki shirt and slacks. The older man seemed to have come down with a case of the nervous twitches, not an uncommon occurrence under circumstances like these.

What was uncommon was that Smith wasn't wearing his calm, the-policeman-is-your-friend expression. In fact, behind a rather stiff guardian-of-the-people face, he had the look of a cat with a cornered lizard in his sights.

He looked up as Fierenzo and Powell joined them, and something in his stance clued Fierenzo to play this one formally. "Officer Smith," he greeted the other. "What've we got?"

"This is Mr. Umberto," Smith said, his voice equally formal. "He's the building super."

"Mr. Umberto," Fierenzo said, nodding.

"And this is the scene of the crime," Smith continued. "The apartment of a Roger and Caroline Whittier."

"Doesn't look like forced entry," Powell commented, peering at the door.

"It wasn't," Smith confirmed. "Perps were three males, Caucasian but dark in a Mediterranean sort of way, all of medium height and slender build. One was sixty to seventy years old; the other two in their mid-twenties."

"And how exactly do we know this?" Fierenzo asked.

Smith looked sideways at Umberto. "Because Mr. Umberto is the one who let them in."

"Really," Fierenzo said. That explained the severity of the man's twitches, anyway. It was an all-toofamiliar story: some smooth-talking con man would show up, spin an impressive wall mural of smoke and mirrors, and get someone to let him past a set of deadbolts. "May I ask why, Mr.

Umberto?"

Umberto winced. "I guess... because he told me to."

Fierenzo frowned. This was usually where the defensiveness and excuses started. "What do you mean? What exactly did he say?"

The hapless super winced again. "He just... said to open the door. And I... did."

"Did he have a work order?" Fierenzo asked, moved by a desire to give the man every benefit of the doubt. "A weapon? Did he threaten you?"

"No," Umberto said, sounding more puzzled than embarrassed, as if even he wasn't sure what exactly had happened. "He just said to open the door. And I did."

"How did they get in far enough to find you?" Powell put in. "Isn't the doorman supposed to screen out people like that?"

Umberto shrugged helplessly. "He must have just let them in, too."

"What a pleasantly accommodating staff," Fierenzo said, turning to Smith. "Have the tenants been notified?"

"We tried their offices," Smith said. "Mr. Whittier, a paralegal, clocked out about ten-thirty this morning and didn't come back. Mrs. Whittier, real estate agent, never made it to work at all."

"Cell phones?"

"One," Smith said, holding out his notebook. "Mr. Umberto just gave me the number. I thought you might want to make the call yourself."

"Thanks," Fierenzo said, copying the number into his own notebook. "Let's look at the apartment first."

"Good idea," Smith said. "That part's a little strange, too."

"Oh?" Fierenzo lifted his eyebrows. "Show us. Mr. Umberto, please wait here.

Hill was waiting for them in the middle of the living room, her hands on her hips. "Detectives," she greeted them. "Interesting robbery scene, wouldn't you say?"

"Very nontraditional," Fierenzo agreed as he looked around. Not a single lamp, picture, or throw pillow seemed to be out of place. If the room had been tossed, they were talking some obsessively neat tossers. "Bedroom?"

"Same as here," Hill said. "There's a jewelry case on the dresser; doesn't look touched."

"Who called it in?" Powell asked.

"Manager of a convenience store on 96th," Smith said. "He said Mrs. Whittier told him she could see people on her balcony and to call 911. She took off right after that."

"Right after an altercation she had with her young friend," Hill added. "A young girl, ten to twelve years old."

"What kind of altercation?" Fierenzo asked, stepping over to the sliding glass door and giving the balcony a quick look. Nothing out there but a pair of potted trees.

"He was too far away to hear what they were saying," Smith said. "He did see Mrs. Whittier grab the girl by the arms, though. And after she told him to call 911 she grabbed a scarf off a rack and the two of them hit the sidewalk with it tied babushka-style around the girl's head."

"Interesting," Powell said thoughtfully. "Who wears scarves that way these days?"

"Women over eighty, and people trying to disguise themselves," Fierenzo said, slipping on a pair of latex gloves and crouching down beside the sliding door. There was an odd circular area of hairline cracks in the glass just beside the lock.

"Creditors, you think?" Powell asked. "Or stalkers?"

"Or are we talking about a kidnapping?" Smith added darkly.

"Women usually snatch babies, not ten-year-olds," Fierenzo said, running a fingertip across the crack pattern. The glass on this side was smooth. "Jon, take a look."

He moved out of the way as Powell came over and crouched down. "Looks like it was hit with a hammer or something," the younger detective suggested.

"Only the pattern doesn't seem concentrated enough to be a hammer," Fierenzo pointed out. "Not enough of a central bashed section."

"You're right," Powell agreed. "So it was hit with something softer than your basic ball-peen."

"And it was hit from the outside," Fierenzo said. Carefully, trying not to smudge any prints that might be there, he rolled the broomstick out of the track and snapped open the lock. "Hill, go back to the door and make sure Umberto stays put."