"What do you figure he's got to hide?"

"Kirby says only his morbid fear of publicity. He thinks if Guidi can point us in some useful direction, you won't need to involve him if you wind up with someone to charge in any of these crimes. I tried calling Chapman when I couldn't reach you."

"You won't get through to him, Ellen. He's withdrawn from all of us."

"Oh? Maybe I assumed something I shouldn't have. I thought Mike would have told you about this by now. He got right back to me early this morning."

I couldn't conceal my surprise. "Mike?"

"Yeah. I mean, I understand he took off for the week, but he reached out to Scotty Taren for me. I feel so badly for him," Ellen said. "We obviously want a detective in on this meeting, so Scotty's here in my office. And I reserved the conference room down the hall. All this okay with you?"

I was still stuck on the fact that Mike had returned Ellen Gunsher's messages but wouldn't respond to any of mine.

"Alex?"

"What?"

"You ready to have another go at Gino Guidi?"

"Sure. Did you say we're doing it in your office?"

"No. He and Roy Kirby are in the conference room."

"Give me a few minutes, okay?" I asked.

Ellen walked out and I dialed Mike's home number. I left a message on the machine, telling him that if it was too difficult to discuss personal things, I wanted to give him the good news about Maswana and get some direction in dealing with Guidi. Then I beeped him and tapped in my number, followed by 911 to tell him it was urgent.

"I'll be in a meeting with Ellen," I said to Laura. "Hold everything-except Mike or the boss."

The three men got to their feet when I entered the room. Guidi and Kirby were seated together on one side of the rectangular table, facing Ellen Gunsher and Scotty Taren. I took my place at the far end and let Kirby go through the usual spiel about how forthcoming his client really wanted to be but how little he had to contribute.

"Here's a list we've prepared of some other people who were in the SABA program at the same time as Mr. Guidi," Kirby said, passing each of us a photocopy. "Mind you, Ms. Cooper, these are nicknames. There are only two with complete surnames."

"They were guys I ran into later on. The others I never saw again."

"Did you keep a journal at that time?" I asked.

"Well, not exactly a-"

"He's struggled to remember what he can," Kirby said, interrupting his client when he realized I was going to ask for the original paperwork-apparently more than Kirby wanted me to see.

Scotty was taking notes. Guidi had something in writing that his lawyer was holding back and we would angle a way to get it.

"You want to flesh out something about these people for us?"

Guidi's answers were bland and fuzzy. I'd bet that the two SABA members identified specifically led lives cleaner than hounds-teeth by now or he wouldn't have put them forward. The ones who might be more useful-and potentially more embarrassing to him-remained obscure and would be impossible to find.

"Let's go back to Washington Square. The guy from your program who sat next to you on the park bench-Monty-that time he confessed to you that he killed a girl," I said. "You told us last week you didn't know he was referring to Aurora Tait then, is that right?"

"Absolutely. I had no reason to then."

"But when, exactly when, did that occur to you?"

"Oh, I don't know, Ms. Cooper. I hadn't thought about Aurora in years, until I read the story and saw those initials in the newspaper. The approximate time of her disappearance, the fact that the building where the skeleton was found was owned by the university-and frankly, it reminded me of Monty's story-another addict, another rich boy like me who'd screwed up his life."

"You mentioned he talked about boarding school in some of your sessions. Do you remember where? What school or even what part of the country?" I asked.

Guidi shrugged and held his hands in the air, palms up. The sun gleamed off the gold on his cuff links. "Maybe New England. Either Andover or Exeter. Could have been St. Paul's. In the boonies, it was. I remember he talked about how he liked being near the woods and the peacefulness of the more remote countryside."

"He was orphaned, you told us. Do you know how or when? Any details about his family that would help us figure out who he is?"

Guidi looked at me. "That's mostly what he talked about in the meetings. Typical junkie's denial, blaming all his problems on everyone else. He never knew his father. I think his mother had a menial job, working as a servant-maybe even the housekeeper- for the scion of an old industrial family. When she died-some blood disease, it was-he was still a kid, taken in by the fat cat who'd been her employer. Richest man in town, that's who sent him off to boarding school and paid for his education."

"This man who adopted him, didn't Monty talk about him at all?"

"That was part of his resentment. He was never adopted."

Neither was Edgar Poe, I remembered. The Allans wouldn't give him their name. I had to wonder whether Monty knew the parallels between his own life and the tormented poet's.

"Was he bitter about it?" I asked.

Guidi checked with Kirby, who must have given him a green light to keep talking.

"Remember when I said that Monty told me he had killed a girl for betraying him?"

Ellen and I both said, "Yes."

"I-uh-I guess after I left the station house last week I began to think more about it. I thought of a few other things I-uh, I guess I asked him at the time. Sorry I didn't press myself a little harder that night." He tried to muster an earnest smile.

"That's all right, Mr. Guidi," Ellen said. "Anything you give us now will be helpful."

I wanted to kick her under the table to keep the pressure on him rather than try to use her short supply of charm to stroke him, but I restrained myself.

"I know I asked what he meant by betrayal, by what this girl had done to him to make him fantasize about killing her," Guidi said, focusing his attention back on me. "You must understand that at the time I heard his story, Ms. Cooper, I assumed it was a fantasy, a product of his dope-induced hallucinations. We all had them."

I looked away from his face and while he continued to talk, gesturing to me with his left hand, I noticed the thin shape of a rifle barrel forged out of gleaming eighteen-karat gold in the fold of his French cuffs.

"He knew I came from a wealthy family. For me, starting over after I screwed myself up meant getting a job in a mail room in a fancy firm, as I think I mentioned. For Monty, it was out on the street doing physical labor, some kind of construction work. Here was this guy who came to every meeting with a book of poetry jammed in his back pocket, quoting everything from the classics to Philip Larkin and James Wright-but meanwhile his hands looked like he'd been sentenced to dig ditches ten years earlier."

"But the girl," I asked, "Aurora-what did she do to him?"

"Monty's benefactor had given him one last chance. He'd flunked out of boarding school, managed to get into college from public school, but then hit the skids with drugs and booze once he got here to the city. When Aurora found out who had been supporting Monty, who had enabled his lifestyle-not knowing all the money was going down the toilet-she got on a bus and went up to his home, wherever that was, and spilled the beans."

"Why?"

"To try to shake down the old man. She'd guessed wrong, was the problem. She thought if she told him the truth about Monty's addiction, she could score enough money-pretending it would go for private rehab and readmission to school-that she could take off and leave Monty in the dust," Guidi said. "With the rest of us."

"The straw that broke the camel's back?" Ellen asked.