"Lenny is in custody," he went on, "for reasons I can't figure out. There seems to be some indication that you were right, that this Little Pete did kill Ellen, but there's still no evidence to prove it and we don't know why he would do such a thing. As it turns out, with him gone, we might never know."

The tears started to come, flowing down the tracks worn into my face from a night filled with crying. I put my head down and covered my eyes with my hand. When I heard him stand, my breath caught in my throat When I heard him move toward me, I told myself to step aside, to move away, to get out of reach before it was too late. But I felt so exposed. I felt as if my very skin had been stripped away and that even the air hurt where it touched me. I needed comfort so badly, and I knew that if I didn't turn from him right now, I might never turn away. Still, I didn't move. Couldn't. But I said the one thing I knew would make him stop. "The police have the package." Then I closed my eyes and waited.

My computer hummed quietly on my desk. A shout came up from the ramp, a man's voice muffled by the heavy glass window. Bill said nothing. I wiped my eyes and turned to face him. "Lenny tried to destroy the evidence," I said. "He had it. He took it down to the ramp last night and tried to burn it in a trash barrel."

His face was perfectly calm, placid even. When I tried to swallow, the front of my throat stuck to the back and it was hard to keep going. But I did. "The storm was so bad that he couldn't get it to burn. One of my crew chiefs caught him."

The thought of John McTavish with his big hand around Lenny's wrist while his brother Terry pried the envelope loose gave me one tiny moment of satisfaction in an ocean of pain.

"They saved the evidence, Bill. The confession, the video-the police have it all."

There was the slightest hesitation before a smile spread across his face. "That's great," he said. "So there was a package. You were right about that, too." He probably would have fooled someone else. But I heard the forced enthusiasm, felt him straining under the veneer of graciousness. I knew with a certainty that was like a knife through my heart that the warm regard in his brown eyes, focused so intently on me right now, was false. He started moving casually away, tracing the edge of the desk with his index finger as he backed toward the window. "What was in this rescued package?"

"Don't make me tell you what you already know."

He smiled uncertainly. "I don't know what you mean."

I went to my credenza, where the schedules I had printed were lying in the tray. I lifted the first one out, laid it on the desk, and pushed it across the glass-top surface, a distance that seemed like miles. "That's your travel schedule for the past twelve months." He looked down and read it, then looked at me as if to say, "So what?"

I placed a second sheet next to the first, the list of Ellen's secret destinations, and tried to still the shuddering in my chest. "This is Ellen's. You were in the same city with her fifteen times out of a possible fifteen different occasions." I pulled the wrinkled page from my back pocket and smoothed it on the desk. Spots appeared like raindrops as my tears fell onto the page, bleeding into the paper, smearing the black ink as I read Ellen's note one more time.

…I feel myself going under again, and the only thing that keeps my head above water is the motion of reaching up for him. And I can't let go. Because when I'm with him, I exist. Without him, I'm afraid I'll disappear. Disappear to a place where God can't save me and I can't save myself.

I laid it on the desk in front of him. "She wrote that about you."

He never looked at the second schedule. He never looked at Ellen's note. He looked at me. He fixed his gaze on me and wouldn't let go. "What are you trying to say, Alex?"

"I don't have to say anything, Bill." I reached across the desk to the answering machine and started the tape.

The voices had the hollow, tinny quality of a cheap answering machine, but there was no mistaking Ellen's voice with that light Southern accent, still so unexpected to me. The tape was queued up right where I'd left it, at the point where Ellen was talking, her words tumbling out in a torrent of anguish and pain.

"Crescent Consulting. I know you remember this. We paid them hundreds of thousands of dollars. I signed the invoices. Crescent Con-"

"Crescent Consulting. I get it." Bill's voice was a stark contrast-calm, rational, a little irritated underneath the clicking and popping of the static. He must have been in his car. "What about it?"

"It was a sham. Nothing more than a bank account that Lenny used for kickbacks. You knew about this, Bill. You had to have known."

"Let's not talk about this right now. I'm on a cell phone."

"We're talking about this now." She sounded panicked, almost hysterical. "Don't you dare hang up on me."

"All right, all right. Why would you say something like that?"

"Because of the special signature authority. All that garbage about how much you trusted me. You set me up. The only reason you had me request a higher limit was so that you wouldn't have to sign those invoices. Every single invoice from Crescent you forwarded to me. Every one. You knew, Bill"-she was fighting back tears-"and I can't believe you did this to me."

Finally, she couldn't hold on anymore, and her voice dissolved into sobs, mighty, rolling sobs. As soon as one stopped, another one started, and I knew that they had come from someplace deep because when I had cried with her this morning the first time I'd heard this tape, the pain had come out of my whole body, through every part of me. It sounded like-felt like- a thousand years' worth of holding in.

When she'd cried herself out, there was silence, and then Bill's voice, gentle and soothing. "I thought it was better if you didn't know."

"Do you think anyone is going to believe that I didn't know?"

"Ellen, you didn't do anything wrong. I'm the one who screwed up, and I'll protect you."

"Tell me what you did. Tell me what you've gotten me involved in."

"Back when we were working on the Nor'easter deal, Lenny came to me with this idea that we wouldn't have to wait for the vote… that he had some way of buying off the IBG-"

"He didn't just buy the contract vote, Bill. He used the money to cover up this crash, this-the real cause of an aircraft accident, for God's sake. We gave him that money, Majestic did, you and me, and my name is all over-" She stopped as if she still couldn't believe the words that were coming out of her mouth. "That Nor'easter Beechcraft that went down in 1995… I've got this surveillance tape, this… these documents that Dickie Flynn had put away in the ceiling. It wasn't the pilots. It wasn't their fault. It was Little Pete Dwyer, and Dickie Flynn, and Lenny-"

"Do you have this package?"

"It's right here in my hands, and I don't… I think I need to take it to someone. I can't-Oh, God, Bill, don't ask me-"

'Wo, you're right, we need to get it to the right people. Let me just think for a minute."

"Tell me… one thing," Ellen said, pleading. "Tell me that you didn't know about this crash, that it was only this IBG contract business that you knew about."

He didn't hesitate. "I knew absolutely nothing about it. I swear to you. And if Lenny did what you're saying he did, I'll have his ass."

"Thank God, Bill Thank God."

"We have to take this package forward. All I'm going to ask is that you hold off for a day or so until I can get out there. I want to sit down with you. I want… it's important to me that I get a chance to explain it to you. I want you to understand. And I want you to help me figure out what to do, Ellen. We can get through this together."