"But what if the person didn't do anything?" Carolyn had asked.

The contempt in Perry's eyes when he answered her had made her feel ashamed of even asking the question. "If they didn't do anything, they wouldn't have been arrested," he told her. "The police aren't fools, you know." And that had been the end of it. So now, as Perry continued glowering at the answering machine, Carolyn scuttled out of the room, closing the door behind her, anxious to be out of the line of fire.

As soon as she was gone, Perry Randall picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory.

"We've got a problem," he said. "And we need to solve it today."

Hanging up the phone, he erased the message for his daughter.

The endless night was over, but Keith felt as if he'd hardly slept. After Heather left, he'd alternated between sprawling on Jeff's Murphy bed and standing at the window, peering out into the not-quite-dark of New York City. The traffic thinned as the hour grew late, but there were always a few taxis still cruising along Broadway, and a scattering of bar-hopping night owls meandering down the sidewalk.

Twice, when the walls of the apartment seemed about to close in on him and suffocate him, he'd almost gone out himself.

Sometime around four-thirty he'd finally fallen into a fitful sleep, and now, as he rose four hours later, he knew he would get no more sleep that night.

And he knew what he was going to do.

First he rummaged around the apartment and found a phone book. He leafed through it until he found the heading for thrift shops and scribbled down the addresses of three of them that looked like they weren't far from the apartment. Then he picked up the phone and dialed Vic DiMarco.

"It's me," he said. "I need a big favor, and I don't need any questions."

"You don't even have to ask," DiMarco replied.

"I want you to go over to my house. There's a locked cabinet in my office-the key's in my desk, in the second drawer on the right, in a little box way in the back."

"Gotcha," DiMarco said. "What's in the cabinet?"

"A gun," Keith Converse said. "It's a.38 automatic. I want you to bring it to me."

Jinx glared up at the closed door, willing it to open. Curtailing her urge to give it an angry kick, she turned away and retreated back to the steps where she'd been sitting off and on for the last two hours. She would have been sitting on them the whole time if Paul Hagen hadn't kept running her off.

That was pissing her off, too. The first time the cop had come by, she'd tried to explain to him that she was just waiting for the library to open.

"Yeah, right, Jinx," Hagen had said, rolling his eyes. "So what's the game now? Gonna start lifting from the old geezers in the reading room? Give me a break!"

Jinx had kept her temper in check. The last thing she needed right now was for Paulie Hagen to start hassling her. If he really got pissed off, he could keep her at the precinct for most of the day, filling out a bunch of forms and making her talk to the welfare people. So she just shrugged his sarcasm off and walked away, heading over toward Madison Avenue. She knew Paulie couldn't follow her that far, and since she hardly ever went to the East Side, most of the cops over there didn't know her. She was mad enough at Paulie that she'd picked a mark, bumped into him, and lifted his wallet so smoothly that all the sucker had done was mouth an apology to her while he kept on talking on his cell phone. Probably wouldn't notice his wallet was gone until he tried to pay for his lunch, and by then he wouldn't even remember that someone had bumped into him. That was the great thing about cell phones-they distracted people enough so that most of the time they thought they'd bumped into her instead of the other way around.

She kept drifting back to the library at the corner of Fifth and Forty-second, hoping they might open it early this morning, but knowing it wouldn't happen. She killed some of the time watching tourists taking pictures of each other with the lions that crouched in front of the building. Then she glanced through a Daily News that someone tossed into the trash can on the corner. Twice she had to cut across the street when she saw Hagen coming down the block from Bryant Park. Why couldn't he stay over in Times Square where he belonged?

At least now she wasn't the only one waiting-half a dozen people were standing around. A white-haired guy in a suit that looked even more ancient than he did kept checking his watch, and a nerdy guy was pacing back and forth, looking nervously down the street toward Bryant Park.

Flasher, Jinx thought.

When the man bolted like a jackrabbit just as Paulie Hagen reappeared, Jinx was sure she was right.

Just as Hagen spotted her and headed over to run her off the steps again, she heard the lock behind her click and the heavy metal door finally swing open. Giving in to what she knew was a childish impulse, Jinx stuck her tongue out at Hagen, then turned and dashed into the vast lobby of the library. Off to the left two women stood behind an information desk. As Jinx started toward them, one of the women looked up. Her smile faltered as she took in the shabbiness of Jinx's clothes, and for a second Jinx wondered if she was going to get kicked out of the public library. "Where would I go if I wanted to look something up in an old copy of the New York Times‘?" she asked.

"How old?" the woman countered. "We have them back to 1897."

"Just last fall," Jinx replied. "Maybe October?"

"Room 100," the woman said. She pointed to Jinx's right. "Down there, take the first left, and it's the last room on the right. They'll be in the microfiche filing cabinets."

Not exactly certain what the woman meant, Jinx made her way down the corridor, found the room, and went in. Several large blocks of filing cabinets occupied most of the space just inside the door, and beyond them Jinx could see a lot of tables supporting machines with large screens. The white-haired man in the moldy suit was sitting down in front of one of the machines, and Jinx watched carefully as he took a roll of film out of a box, put the reel on a spindle, then fed the film under some kind of roller.

If he could do it, so could she.

She headed for the filing drawers and saw they were labeled with dates. She found the ones for the previous fall in Cabinet 41, pulled it open, and stared at the row of film boxes, each one marked with a precise span of dates. Picking up three of the boxes, she closed the drawer and headed for one of the machines.

Taking the first reel out of its box, she put it on the spindle, fumbled with the leader for a few seconds, then managed to poke it under the roller and glass. When the end came out on the right side, she threaded it into what looked like some kind of take-up reel, then started fiddling with the controls. There was a knob on the right side, and when Jinx twisted it, the reel instantly rewound, leaving the leader flapping. She swore under her breath, rethreaded the leader, then carefully twisted the knob the other way. The film spun forward and stopped, and Jinx began fiddling with a focus wheel until the print cleared enough for her to read easily. But the print was displayed on the screen sideways, so she had to twist her neck painfully to read it. Just as her neck was starting to ache really badly, a hand appeared over her left shoulder, twisted a wheel she hadn't seen, and the page on the screen flipped ninety degrees.

"Thanks!" Jinx said, turning to see the old man in the worn suit smiling at her. "I figured there had to be an easier way, but…" Her voice trailed off as she glanced toward a man behind the counter who was making no effort to hide his resentment that someone like her would even dare to come into his precious microfiche room.