"Give it a rest, Lauren." He added, "My first thought is that Tanjy is playing another game with us."

"Why? Because last time she made a fool of you?"

"The woman fabricated a rape charge. She had the whole city in a panic."

Lauren sighed. "I don't claim to understand what goes on in her sick little brain. I'm just the messenger."

"I hope to hell she's not wasting our time again," Stride said. "The only reason we didn't file charges was because Dan and K-2 didn't want us to look like we were beating up on a woman with psychological problems."

"My fault," Lauren admitted. "I asked them to go easy on her."

"You? I'm surprised you didn't fire her."

"I only go after people who get in my way, Jonathan. You should know that."

"Meaning you didn't want an ugly employment lawsuit."

"Meaning I felt sorry for her."

Stride didn't believe that Lauren had ever felt sorry for anyone, but it didn't matter either way. "I'll check it out," he said.

"There's something else," Lauren added.

"What?"

"Tanjy called our home on Monday night."

"After she left the shop that day? Why?"

"She wanted to talk to Dan, but he was in Saint Paul."

"What did she want?" Stride asked.

"I don't know. I called Dan from Washington on Tuesday afternoon, but he said there was no answer when he tried to call her back. Neither one of us gave it another thought until today. I took a flight back early this morning, and Sonnie told me that Tanjy was missing."

"Did Tanjy leave a message when you talked to her?"

"Yes, she gave me a message for Dan, but he didn't know what it meant."

"What was it?"

Lauren shrugged. "She simply said to tell him, 'I know who it is.' "

Abel Teitscher arrived home early Thursday afternoon, having spent ten hours supervising the crime scene where Eric Sorenson was killed. He sprinkled flakes of food into the large saltwater tank in his living room, which was stocked with a rainbow assortment of angels, puffers, dragonets, tetras, and gobies. On the rare evenings when he wasn't working, he would pour himself a glass of brandy, turn off the lights, and sit quietly watching his fish while they traveled the illuminated aquarium. Abel was more comfortable with fish than with people.

He lived alone in a modest house on Ninth Street north of downtown. He had been married for twenty-seven years, until he arrived home unexpectedly on a Tuesday afternoon and found his fifty-two-year-old wife being serviced by the twenty-four-year-old unemployed son of their next-door neighbor. She had been watching too many Desperate Housewives episodes. They divorced six months later, and she was now living in a rented apartment in Minneapolis. The one good thing to come out of his marriage was his daughter, Anne, but she was away at graduate school in San Diego. She was studying marine biology, which Abel was happy to attribute to years as a child sitting with her father in front of the fish tank.

A few years ago, an all-nighter like the Sorenson murder would have taken a toll on him for days, but he was in better shape now than he had been in decades. Since the divorce, he had taken up running, putting on miles on the track at UMD during the warmer seasons and using a treadmill crammed in his bedroom during the winter. He had lost thirty pounds and was in training now for the marathon. At City Hall, they called him gaunt and skeletal, which infuriated him, because no one appreciated how hard he had worked to hone his body.

Abel stretched out on the sofa near the fish tank and slept for thirty minutes, which was enough to refresh him. He then spent an hour running on the treadmill. The rumble of the motor and the pounding of his feet served to clear his mind. Stride accused him of not seeing the big picture on a case, but that was crap. Abel took time early in every investigation just to think. The difference was that Stride tried to rise above the facts and get inside the heads of the victim and the killer. For Abel, the big picture was about nothing except putting the pieces of the puzzle together from what was left behind. Evidence and witnesses. Things you could touch, see, and smell.

The big picture in this case led him in only one direction-to Maggie.

He knew that having no evidence of a third party in the house didn't mean that no one had been there, but he also knew that the logical, obvious answer at most crime scenes was usually the right one. Forget the conspiracy theories, and leave them to the defense attorneys. The fact was that Oswald killed Kennedy. Alone. Deal with it.

Abel was prepared to turn over every rock. He had nothing against Maggie and no desire to pin the crime on her, but common sense told him that she was almost certainly the one who had pulled the trigger. That was how it always worked in these cases.

Like Nicole. Abel had learned with Nicole that anyone is capable of anything. Even a good cop. He hadn't wanted to believe that his partner was capable of murder, so he ignored the evidence even as it piled up. Nicole was psychologically fragile; she had just come back from paid leave after killing a mentally deranged man on the Blatnik Bridge. Nicole's husband was having an affair, and she had threatened him with violence if he didn't break it off. Two of Nicole's hairs were discovered in the apartment where her husband and his girlfriend were found naked, shot to death with her husband's gun. It was more than enough evidence to convict her.

When the jury found her guilty, Abel finally accepted the fact that Nicole had done what every other suspect did-lie to him in order to save her neck. Stride would have to learn the same lesson.

Stride probably thought that Abel was still angry about getting booted out of the lieutenant's chair. Abel was upset about that, but the truth was that he didn't miss it. K-2 was right. Abel hated supervising people and handing out assignments. He wasn't prepared to waste his time motivating cops, who were a tough breed to motivate. They hated administration on principle. They were hemmed in by paperwork and procedure and second-guessed every time they had to make a split-second judgment. He knew all that. He was that way, too, but he had a short fuse and his own way of doing things, and if he was going to be the boss, they were going to do things his way. Except no one did.

He was happier without the headaches. The only thing that bothered him was that the other cops loved Stride, and they barely tolerated Abel. He knew he was a loner and a hard case. He was crusty and closed-off, but no one made an effort with him the way they did with Stride.

Stride was human. He made mistakes. He was making a mistake this time, because Stride simply didn't understand betrayal. He had never walked in on his wife doing a reverse cowgirl on a man half her age. Hell, Abel didn't even know what the position was called until his lawyer explained it in the divorce papers. His wife had certainly never used it on him during their years of married life.

When he found his wife in bed with another man, Abel finally understood how an ordinary person could go over the edge. Like Nicole. Like Maggie. He had pulled his gun on the two of them and was ready to fire. The only thing that saved them was that, in the shocked silence as they all stared at one another, he could hear the gurgle of his fish tank coming from the living room. Something about the sound soothed him. Losing his fish would be worse than losing his wife, so he put the gun down and found a lawyer instead.

Maggie should have owned fish.

Abel shaved and showered after he was done on the treadmill and slapped cologne on his face. That was another thing the cops teased him about, that he smelled like a dapper gigolo. It wasn't a crime. He dressed in an old brown suit and shrugged on his trench coat. The coat wasn't warm enough for January, but since he had begun jogging regularly, he found he didn't mind the cold.