"Show me the money."

"Payday's next Friday. You guessing, Mercer?"

He pointed at the screen. Two of the contestants had left blank spaces where the question should have been. "I'm no further along than they are."

"I'm sorry to say you're wrong, Josh," Trebek told the dog obedience school owner from Wichita.

"You must be one lousy poker player, Coop. You got that shit-eating-I-majored-in-literature-at-Wellesley grin on your face," Mike said, walking to the door. "Subtlety will never be your strong suit. So, what was-?"

" Pamela.By Samuel Richardson. Published in England in 1740 and reprinted by Franklin. It was subtitled Virtue Rewarded, 'cause it's about a young woman who eludes the lecherous advances of the man she works for," I said, folding and pocketing Mercer's money.

"C'mon. Add the twenty to my tab and let's go find out more about Emily Upshaw. If you spent a little less time with your nose in your books and a little more effort practicing your social skills, you might be able to hold on to a guy once he makes it into your bedroom and under the sheets."

"Is that where you think I lose my men?"

"Gotta be, blondie. You're doing something wrong there."

Mercer put his arm around me as Mike walked ahead of us down the dark hallway.

"I guess what I really need is an expert like you to teach me, Mike. Hands-on. How come it never occurred to me before now? You up for a lesson tonight?"

Mike stopped in his tracks. He turned around to face us and began to comb his fingers through the lock of dark hair that framed his forehead. The overhead lights were dim but I could swear he was blushing.

"Mercer, did you hear what I think I just heard?"

"Yeah, and it sounds as though my lawyer is calling your bluff."

"Just like you, Coop. You wait until I get a girl of my own. Then she leaves town and in a heartbeat you try to throw temptation in my path. It won't work this time."

"Why are you doing that stroking thing with your hair? Am I making you nervous?"

He put his hands in his pants pocket and started walking to the elevator. "The way I figure it is I've got the best of both worlds. There isn't anyone in either of our jobs who doesn't think we've slept together already-which may be great for my reputation or really bad, depending on what they think of you. But it means I don't actually have to risk finding out whether you really do have a set of razor-sharp teeth in the lining of your-"

"You're a dog, Chapman," Mercer said.

"Unhand that woman, Mercer. Here she is, propositioning me-and you're trying to hold her back."

"As far as I'm concerned, you either come home with me tonight or you stop yapping about my sex life."

"I told you I'm just worried about Valentine's Day. You're gonna be cold and lonely."

"I'm booked. You can relax."

"Who? What unwitting sucker stepped into the batter's box this time?"

The elevator doors opened and we got on. "Tell him nothing, Alex," Mercer said.

Mike teased me all the way down to the lobby and out to his car. By the time we reached the morgue, I had gotten him off the subject and back to the sobering topic of Emily Upshaw's death.

Dr. Chet Kirschner, the chief medical examiner, left instructions for us to use his office for our meeting with Emily's sister. The attendant admitted us, and we found the woman sitting alone, her head bowed with eyes closed and her fingers twisting an already crumpled handkerchief.

We introduced ourselves and explained our roles in the investigation. Sally Brandon appeared to be close to fifty, taller and slimmer than her younger sister. She had just viewed the body and was trying to compose herself as she spoke to us.

Mike and Mercer answered most of the questions Brandon asked about her sister's murder. Mercer took the lead; his firm but compassionate manner, practiced with great frequency in the Special Victims Unit, was usually comforting to victims and survivors. Mike's preference for working homicides was in no small measure based on his aversion to the emotional hand-holding that always slowed down an investigation that he was eager to solve.

When the two of them ran out of answers for Sally Brandon, they started to ask her about Emily.

"She was the youngest, Mr. Wallace. I'm seven years older, and our other sister was right in between. We were a close family growing up, but when I went off to college at eighteen, Emily was only eleven."

"What was your relationship like, as adults?"

Sally fumbled with the handkerchief. "We didn't have one, I'm afraid. I married right after college and had children of my own. She moved to New York, and that's when Emily really began to make my parents' lives miserable."

"In what way?"

She sighed before answering. "I'm still so resentful of all the trouble she caused back then. It sounds pretty rough, I guess, now that she's dead."

"Tell us about it."

"Betsy and I-she's the middle sister-were a tough pair for Emily to follow. Our parents were very serious, churchgoing Presbyterians, and we were the two daughters who never caused them to lose a minute's sleep. Emily was a rebel from the moment she hit adolescence. She hung out with a fast crowd of older kids and started drinking by the time she was in middle school."

"Drugs, too?" Mercer asked.

"Nobody knew at the time. Just because no one in the family imagined anything like that. I was away at college and don't even know what symptoms Emily was presenting to them. Mother was in complete denial, and my father thought that the power of prayer would solve all his concerns. Nobody talked about it."

"Did she stay in school?"

"That was the only thing that grounded her. Emily loved school, enjoyed everything that had to do with books. She'd always been able to escape through her writing." Sally Brandon stopping wrapping her handkerchief around her finger and looked up at me. "Don't ask me how she did it, but she managed to get high grades and test well, even when she was in the middle of a binge."

"Was she ever in treatment back home?"

She shook her head. "That wasn't a concept my parents understood. It would have meant admitting that Emily had a problem."

"They ignored everything?"

"Not everything, Mr. Wallace. It was hard to look the other way when she was six months pregnant."

"When was that, Mrs. Brandon?"

"During Emily's senior year of high school. Not that it should have come as a great surprise to any of us, but it certainly shocked my parents. They couldn't-" She stopped to compose herself before going on. "In their little town of eighteen hundred people, it was unacceptable at the time. So they sent her to live with me."

"And she had her baby?"

Sally Brandon nodded and the tears started again. "A little girl. Yes."

"What became of the baby? Did she give her up for adoption?"

"No, Miss Cooper. I agreed to raise the child as my own. I had two boys at the time. I took her into my family on one condition: that Emily never have anything to do with her daughter or with me again. Ever."

That seemed like an awfully harsh resolution to the situation. "She agreed to that?"

"It seemed to suit her just fine," Brandon said, sitting bolt upright and looking me in the eye. "A month before she delivered, we left Emily at home babysitting our two boys while we went to a neighbor's house for dinner. She was into her second bottle of wine, asleep on the sofa, when her cigarette dropped out of her hand and set fire to the slipcovers. She and my sons escaped unhurt, by the grace of God, but if I ever saw her again it would be too soon for me."

"I understand," Mercer said, refilling her water glass from the sink behind her.

"So she graduated from high school and got a scholarship to go to New York University, pleased to leave me with her baby. Emily resented all of us with our happy little families and thought the big city would be the place to live her life unencumbered by the conventions of small-town mores."