‘Good evening, Charles.’

Her voice might be borrowed from Mallory, but in Amanda’s throat, the words were gentled. And gentle were her eyes.

‘Amanda, when I saw you this morning, standing over the little boy – ’

‘He was in pain,’ she said, looking down at the soft white hands folded in her lap. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’

‘You only wanted to comfort him.’

‘Yes. Such a troubled little boy. I love children.’

‘I know. It’s difficult for me to understand why you changed your mind about the child you were carrying.’

She looked down to the floor for words, and not finding them there, she looked up with tears that were all too real to him. Her hands raised in a gesture of helplessness.

‘You wanted that baby very much, didn’t you?’

‘Oh, yes. I planned my life around that child. The baby was the world to me, all that meant anything at all.’

‘Then why? Why did you do it? You asked the doctor to cut the child out of you. What was it about this man that was so horrible it made you abort his child?’

She rose gracefully and walked away from him, back into the shadows. Her gait was listless, tired. It had been hard work cutting a much-wanted baby from her womb, her life, her future – when she had one. Too hard on her.

Angel Kipling scanned the bulletin board, her bright eyes rocketing across the scrolling lines, seeking out the evidence of fresh lies and wondering how much it would cost her this time. Perhaps it would cost her one husband in addition to the fees for keeping her name out of the press.

Each time he kissed her cheek, she recoiled, wondering where he might have been, wondering what he might have done, had to wonder, couldn’t stop herself. His lies were unnerving, and her logic was relentless in puzzling out each one.

Early morning sun obscured only a few of the lines which repeated endlessly. Angel glared, but the lines would not go away.

‘Don’t panic,’ she whispered. ‘You always panic.’

It was probably a shakedown. If it wasn’t a shakedown, it would have exploded all over the media.

So, nothing’s going to happen for a while. We wait for a connection.

She looked to her reflection in the glass of the monitor. ‘See how simple things can be, if you only let them be?’

She wished sometimes that he would die. As long as he lived he would be within harming distance. Would that he might die, and she could be done with him instead of always listening to his lies and his excuses and his endless apologies. He had apologized very nicely for illegally putting up the condo as loan collateral. But then he apologized for clearing his throat. He apologized to the dog, and then he apologized to her in the same tone.

The concierge surveyed his world, the lobby of the Coventry Arms, and found nothing amiss. Perfectly attired people went to and fro in their designer dresses, tailored suits and handmade shoes. He paid more attention to the clothes than to the faces, and the faces of the occasional children registered not at all.

His toe tapped to the quick, bright notes of a Vivaldi mandolin concerto which played throughout the lobby at a tasteful level of background music.

Less tuneful, downright disruptive music of high-pitched barks and guttural growls was coming from the elevator in its descent to the ground floor. The doors opened and the dog fight overflowed from the elevator and into the lobby.

The concierge waved his hands at the porter, but the porter was hanging back a safe distance from the fray. Of course, no job description required the man to be torn to shreds by a pit bull and a mastiff. The owners were displaying the same common sense. And now the doorman had abandoned his post and entered the lobby to cheer on the mastiff. The porter displayed a five dollar bill and placed a silent bet with the doorman, his money on the pit bull.

Well, something had to be done.

The concierge, who had never been invited to a dog fight before and didn’t understand the rules, found himself standing too close, and now he was wincing with a bite from the mastiff, his own scream chiming in with the barks.

All comings and goings had stopped, and twelve people gathered to watch. Between the blood flow and the betting, not one of them noticed the key being taken from the rack behind the desk, and then being replaced with a key similar to Mallory’s.

‘Did you like the CD player?’

‘Yes, thank you. And the recording of Louisa’s Concerto was a nice touch.’

‘You have to change to CDs, Charles. You might be able to transfer most of your records. They’re in good shape.’

‘For artifacts, you mean? I like the records. I like the turntable.’ He did not want any more technology invading the house.

‘Your record collection can’t grow with obsolete technology. And you can’t replace worn out records any more. I noticed you didn’t have a copy of Louisa’s Concerto in your collection.’

‘I wore it out ages ago. There was another one in Max’s collection downstairs, but I’m afraid I ruined that one. The timing of your gift was perfect.’

‘Whatever happened to Max’s friend, crazy Malakhai?’

‘Oh, he’s living a quieter life these days.’

‘I suppose he is pretty old.’

‘Yes, he’s getting on in years.’ Since when did Mallory make small talk?

‘And Louisa? She’s really still with him?’

‘Oh, yes. But Louisa would still be young, just nineteen, forever.’

Charles watched her pinning more printouts to the cork board which spanned the wall of her private office. ‘Are you quite sure you’re on to something with the business of the lie?’

Mallory tapped the printout from the real estate agency computer, and he did not ask if the real estate agency had donated this material by consent or by a hijack on the midnight rail of the electronic superhighway.

‘Four days before the abortion, she made an offer on a small house upstate. According to her agency file, she was concerned with local school systems and area playgrounds. During the next four days, according to the doctor, she hardly ate or slept. I’m guessing this is where he told her the lie. So it worked on her and then she had it out with him.’

‘The outburst at the keyboard was just before her death, wasn’t it? Could we have this wrong? Might that be the day she caught him in the lie?’

‘No. The lie made her abort the child. It worked on her. Maybe she just couldn’t take it any more. She snapped late.’

‘There’s a flaw in the logic here.’

‘You can’t always go by logic. You have to get into the perp’s skin. When you know him, you know how and why. All I’m missing now is who.’ She turned to him. ‘How well do you think you know Amanda?’

There was only a subtle shadow across his mind. She couldn’t know what he was doing with Malakhai’s magic madness. But the timing of her gift of music was entirely too perfect. Had she made a trip to the basement and seen the ruined record? No, of course not. That was paranoid.

‘Based on the manuscript, I might know Amanda well enough to guess her reactions to events, but not the events themselves, not the lie that was told to her. I can only tell you it had to be something monstrous. She had a gentle personality, a wry sense of the ridiculous. I rather liked – ’

‘Nothing in the monster category in the background checks. But she had to turn it up with the usual research avenues. If she found it, I can find it.’

‘Not necessarily. And you have to consider that this might not have been his first kill, that he’s done it before and gotten away with it. That might be what she uncovered. It’s better logic – ’