MARDI LEFT THE OFFICE with an extra set of keys for the front door. I had no more distractions to keep me from opening Rinaldo's briefcase. I tapped the coal-gray leather and winced, placed my thumbs on the latches, and was about to flip them when my cell phone made the sound of migrating geese.

"Have you spoken to them?" was Katrina's response to my hello.

"No," I lied, "but Twill left a message on my voicemail half an hour ago. He said that he was up at school with D and that they were going to some kind of party tonight. I think he's afraid to talk to either one of us."

"But he sounded okay?"

"Oh yeah. They're just boys on the prowl, honey."

The ensuing silence was her relief.

"I got some business I have to take care of, Katrina."

"Tell me when you've spoken to either one of them," she said. "And tell Dimitri to call me."

I PHONED THE ATTENDANCE office at Twill's school to report that he had an intestinal flu. After that I told his social worker the same lie.

"How is he doing?" I asked Melinda Tarris, assistant subagent in the Juvenile Offenders office.

"I've never met anyone like your son, Mr. McGill. He could become the president of the United States if we got his record expunged."

Her full name was Angelique Tara Lear. She'd turned twenty-seven on October 7th. The address Rinaldo's briefcase had for her was different from the one where the murders occurred. Tara lived on Twelfth Street, on the East Side, at the edge of the Alphabet Jungle. There was a photograph of her sitting at an outdoor cafe. It was probably taken with a telephoto lens without her knowledge. I say this because she seemed to be in the middle of a conversation.

She was a raven-haired wild-eyed thing in spite of her pedestrian, almost reserved, attire. She wore a white blouse that buttoned up like a man's dress shirt. I imagined that she had a navy skirt that came down below the knees to go with that blouse. But no matter how much she tried to be normal and reserved there was an abandon to her expression and also the kind of carelessness that drives the male animal, of all ages, wild.

I looked at the picture for a long while. She was leaning forward, laughing. There was mischievousness in her gaze and a tilt to her head that was saying, Am I hearing something else behind your words? After a while I came to believe that the wildness wasn't that of a party girl-she would have been wearing makeup and something more provocative if that were the case. No. Angelique was just happy-almost, and hopefully, unsinkably so.

There was another picture that caught my attention. She was all in black, at a funeral, crying. She stood next to a fair-sized headstone that read IRIS LINDSAY. True sorrow is hard to gauge, but I believed her pain.

The young woman, however, was less interesting than the fact of the photographs. Someone had followed Angelique and taken many dozens of pictures-these being only a few. And if those two shots were representative of the whole roll, or memory card, then the surveillance wasn't about who she was with but the woman herself. Someone seemed to be studying her.

Was that Rinaldo? Had he hired a private detective to take pictures of her on the street, at work… in the shower? Was he her protector or her stalker?

She had an undergraduate degree from Hunter College and an MBA from NYU. The latter diploma would have cost a hundred thousand dollars, minimum. There was no credit report on her. Was that left out on purpose or didn't it matter? I could get a credit report on my own, of course, but I wanted to tread softly around Tara until I knew why Wanda got half her face shot off.

Tara had been recently hired as a "fellow," whatever that meant, at Laughton and Price, an advertising firm on Lexington, not Madison. Her mother lived, at least at the time of the report, in Alphabet City proper, east of the East Village. Her brother, named Donald Thompson, was only a name with no address, or even an age.

Under the neatly typed pages was a layer of cash wrapped into bundles. Twenties, fifties, and hundreds that stacked up to thirty thousand dollars-money for my expenses. This told me that Mr. Rinaldo would spare no resource in finding the woman with whom he claimed to have no relationship.

I went through the pages again. There was no criminal record included.

It wasn't much but it was enough to go on.

When the buzzer sounded I was no longer surprised.

"Yes, Mardi?"

"A Miss Aura Ullman?"

"Uh… send her in." I wanted to stay focused, to keep my mind in the world of Tara Lear, but just the mention of Aura's name and I was at sea, in a fog, with no sense of direction.

"Aura." I managed to get some lightness into my greeting.

She frowned a bit. Every other time she had come into the office I stood up and, if we were alone, kissed her.

Now, however, those lips would have tasted of George Toller.

Aura was a woman of the New World. Golden-brown skin, natural and wavy dark-blond hair, and pale eyes that Nazi scientists tried to create in what they called the inferior races. She was forty and beautiful to me; of African and European lineage, she was completely American.

Aura lowered into the closest chair, giving a wan smile.

"How are you?" she asked.

"Thankfully busy," I said.

"A case?"

"A whole shipload."

She smiled. Aura liked my jokes.

"Who's that at the front desk?"

"Mardi Bitterman."

"The child who was raped by her father?"

"Yes." In the days when we were passionate lovers, and then platonic lovers, I told Aura everything.

"I thought she moved to Ireland with her sister."

"Where there's heat," I said, "there's motion."

"I came to see how you're doing."

"I'm fine."

"You didn't look fine yesterday when I, I told you."

"Listen, honey," I said. "You're a gorgeous woman and you deserve to have real love in your life."

"I wanted you."

I tried to start counting my breaths but got lost after one.

"Leonid."

"Yes?"

"Will you forget me now?"

"No."

"Will you ever talk to me again?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"You can give me a week, right?" I asked, once again managing a jaunty attitude.

She looked into my eyes and, after a moment or two, nodded. Then she stood up and went out the door.

If my father had been there I would have asked him how that particular moment was a product of the Economic Infrastructure unfurling through history.

I COULD SWITCH OFF the pain of Aura's departure by turning back to Angelique. She was a mystery and missing, the object of attention of a man who was as dangerous as any terrorist or government- trained assassin.

I honestly believed that Alphonse Rinaldo could bring down a president if he set his mind to it.

And now he had set his sights on this young woman. Whether he meant her harm or not was a question for later. Right then I had no choice but to follow my nose.

I decided that I was going to do my best to save Angelique. After all, she was the one in trouble. I'd call her Angie and believe in her innocence until proven otherwise. She was my client, and Rinaldo was the devil I had to deal with.

History guides all men's hands, my father's voice whispered from any of a dozen possible graves.

"Bullshit," I said aloud in my seventy-second-floor office.

And then the office phone rang.

Instead of answering I remembered reading a line in an article where a man somewhere in Africa had said, "In the lowlands, where I make my home, it never rains, but the floods come annually."