"I've been working on this all afternoon, going over and over every detail. I went through it all again-the box we brought down from her house, her letters, her files, her documents. I watched that dating video about a dozen times, and I went through a whole pile of her mail that had been forwarded to the airport-"

"What did you expect to find?"

"Some kind of a clue as to her motives. Why she was involved in all this."

"She was involved because that cocksucker Dickie Flynn got her involved when he sent her that package."

"I think she was involved before she got that package. Think about it. She could have turned that package over to the feds, or Corporate Security. She didn't tell anyone what she was doing. She was sneaking around on other airlines. And I found something in her files. She requested and received extraordinary signature authority while she was on the task force."

"So what?"

"Under her normal authority, she couldn't have signed those Crescent invoices. They were too big. She made special arrangements so that she could."

"Can't you just believe that she wouldn't have done something like that?"

"But she did. I found the request and the approval in her files."

"I'm talking about the whole scam. I'm telling you she wasn't that kind of person."

I leaned back against the passenger door. "Dan-"

"I say she was clean, that she was trying to do the right thing, and you won't take my word on that. So what it comes down to is, you don't believe me. You don't trust me." He ran a nervous hand through his hair and stared through the wet windshield into the red blur of taillights. The combativeness in his voice had gone. He sounded almost plaintive. "You don't trust me."

The only sounds in the car were the blasting heater and the sluicing of the wet windshield wipers, steady as a metronome. I turned around to face front and wished like hell that we weren't stuck in traffic, that we could put some distance between us and this place we were in.

"Listen to what I've found, then you can decide for yourself. Six days before she died, Ellen made a trip to Denver. I don't know if you remember her list of secret trips, but it was on there. It was the last destination."

He didn't respond, but I knew he remembered.

"She flew out and back the same day, and it looks as if it was a special trip to visit the archives. The archivist remembers her. She asked to see the pre-purchase adjustment schedule. When Matt went looking for the same documents a few days ago, they were gone. The original invoices with the signatures are also missing."

"That doesn't mean she took them."

"Come on, Dan-"

"Or if she took them, and I'm not saying she did, she took them to build the case against Lenny. That's what we've been saying all along. She took them to keep them safe."

"Then where are they? Where is the evidence?"

"We'll find it."

"Think about this. If she was on the inside working the scam with Lenny, then her signature would be on those invoices. Destroying them would be one way to cover up her own involvement."

"Give me one good reason why she would be involved in something like this."

"She was sleeping with Lenny."

He swung his entire upper body around to face me. If we'd been going any faster than four miles an hour, we might have swerved off the road into a ditch. "Bullshit, Shanahan, bullshit. I told you before that's crap."

"Molly pulled up Lenny's travel schedule from the past eighteen months. When we checked it against Ellen's list, ten of the fifteen cities matched. Ten. And one of the five that didn't was the last trip to Denver. She was in the same city with him ten different times. In secret."

His head canted to one side, slowly, almost like a door opening. The traffic was picking up and spreading out, and he had to pay more attention to the road. Maybe that explained why he didn't say another word for almost three miles-a long, slow three miles.

He finally broke his silence. "Was Lenny in Boston the night she died?"

"There's no record that he flew into Boston," I said, "but I think he was here. He could have driven."

"Why do you think that?"

I reached into my back pocket, pulled out an envelope, and opened it up. "I found this letter in her mail. It just came this week."

"What is it?"

I pulled it from the envelope. It was too dark to read, but I didn't have to. "This is a letter from a place called Maitre d' Express. It's a dinner-delivery service."

"Like Domino's Pizza?"

"No. They only do the delivery part. You can order from lots of different restaurants around town, and they bring it to your house. Inside is a credit card receipt and a letter saying that Ellen still has to pay for her last order even though she never took delivery."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"It was for the night she died."

He looked over at me but didn't say a word.

"The receipt was for one hundred fifteen dollars. Twenty-five was for the delivery from Boston to Marble-head. That leaves ninety dollars, which even by Boston standards is a lot for one meal. So I called Maitre d' Express and they had a record of the order in their computer. One appetizer, two salads, and two entrees from Hamersley's. At eight o'clock she called and cancelled, but it was too late. The order had already been made up, so she was charged anyway."

Shadows moved in and out of the car with the steady flow of headlights streaming toward us. I watched his face. He was working his jaw, but I saw no other sign that he was listening.

"Here's what I think happened that day. Ellen spoke to Lenny on the phone sometime during the morning. I don't know what was going on between them, but he must have talked her into seeing him that night at her house. Before she left work, she cancelled her trainer's appointment for that night at the gym, but according to her running log, she went running that afternoon along the Charles, so she wanted to get a workout in, but didn't want to keep the appointment that night. She got home around four and called this place to order dinner for the evening."

"And when Lenny showed up he killed her."

"One thing's for sure. Whoever killed her knew her. He had access to the house, probably a key, and the code for the security system. Or she let him in. No forced entry. He knew about her mother, knew enough about her and her life to make the murder look like a plausible suicide."

"Why would he kill her?"

"Could be that Dickie's package triggered something. Maybe there was some kind of blow-up between the two of them and they stopped trusting each other. Maybe she was accumulating the evidence to use against him. It's clear that Ellen had the evidence, not Lenny, and he's still looking for it, he and his pals the Dwyers."

At the end of our exit ramp, he took a right turn that put us on a poorly lit spur. I looked out the window at an industrial area of aluminum-sided warehouses and vast parking lots filled with eighteen-wheelers backed up to raised concrete loading docks. It was lonely and cold and desolate.

"The thing I don't get," I said, "is why she cancelled the dinner. What happened to her between four in the afternoon when she ordered and eight o'clock when she cancelled?"

He had nothing to say to that. Neither one of us said another word for the rest of the drive out.

Angelo DiBiasi's white stubble crept down the soft roll of flab at his throat. His worn cotton T-shirt covered a narrow chest, which ballooned into a big, hanging gut that kept him from pushing in close to the table. With one eye almost shut, he cocked the other at me as he spoke to Dan. "Why'd you go and bring her for?"

"Don't start with me, Angie. I told you I might bring her."

"And I told you not to-"