My ex-fiancé looked back at me with lovely, normal brown eyes. Don’t eat all of those Mint Milanos in one sitting, they seemed to say.

I awoke with a start, amid cookie crumbs and with Amphibians and You: A Layman’s Guide to Creatures of the Air and Water facedown on my stomach. I jumped up, driven by the idea that had wakened me.

Annika, like Maizie’s husband, Gene, used both sides of sheets of paper.

All the stray paper in my life was stuffed into file boxes on the floor of Hubie’s bedroom closet. I switched on the light and rummaged through sketches, greeting card ideas, tax receipts, and photocopied frogs, searching for math homework.

Annika didn’t like textbooks. “These books are stupid, Wollie. They tell you facts or equations that connect to nothing. We will make our own equations.” She’d done these on her computer, decorating them with flowers and frogs, bringing them to our tutorials each week to illustrate the philosophies, practical applications, and mathematicians she loved to talk about. The equations themselves were of no interest to me now, of course. What I cared about were the backs of my math work sheets.

I found them. Half of the flip sides were printed-out e-mails, the end pages with all the incomprehensible-to me, anyway-data. I set these aside. Maybe there was a way to e-mail these people, but the data looked German, and wouldn’t her mother have contacted Annika’s German friends already?

There were pages that weren’t e-mail: four in German, a recipe in English, a sheet with the words “Emma, EMMA, emma, Emma, Emma, EmmMzzzapso,” Annika’s work schedule, forty-five hours over the course of a five-day week, and a downloaded bank statement showing $165.38 for the month of September.

And there was a fragment of an e-mail. In English.

“because this is life in Hollywood. So my host father says. But me, I think it is not fair your life is horrible because of one person! It is better you quit, but then, no Biological Uhr (sorry! spell?) in Munich? So I think you will stay. BE CAREFUL. Can R.R. not help, if it is dangerous? Okay, we are Friday in Tahiti on holiday, so no e-mail but good news, no snow! (I share room with the baby but at least, maid service!) Ciao! Marie-Thérèse

I read it again. I ate four Mint Milano cookies and kept reading. Marie-Thérèse must be another au pair. The job in Munich would be Biologische Uhr, which Annika planned to coproduce. Despite Biological Clock’s dismal ratings in America, a German company wanted to try their own version. A nineteen-year-old girl without connections or education getting to coproduce would be a small miracle, but that’s what Bing had promised. His sponsorship and her experience on our show would put it within reach.

“How lucky am I?” she’d said just weeks ago. “To work in TV! In Munich. My mother will move, to be near me. This job is the best of anything I can imagine.”

So what had happened? The Annika I’d known until that last, disturbing night on the set had been incorrigibly cheerful. Maizie, though, had noticed a change, and so had Paul. Marie-Thérèse implied that the problem lay in the show itself, a problem serious enough to warrant quitting. But to suggest that R.R. help? That must be Rico Rodriguez, but the Rico I’d met was not likely to drive four miles out of his way to help Annika Glück.

Except that Rico had been disturbed to hear she wanted a gun.

The return-path line at the bottom of the page, I realized, would be the e-mail address for Marie-Thérèse. The whole thing could be cleared up in a few short sentences.

I danced out to the kitchen to start up my computer. This was it. I knew the key was finding Annika’s friends. Girlfriends. Rico might be cavalier about her fate. Marie-Thérèse was clearly not.

I carefully composed the e-mail, explaining my relationship to Annika and the situation. I encouraged Marie-Thérèse to call me anytime, collect, or to e-mail me. I sent it off, ate six more Mint Milanos, and went to bed.

I didn’t sleep well, tossing on Hubie’s California king-sized feather-top mattress, kicking at the sheets assaulting me. In my dreams I fled from a man, my feet turning to concrete as I ran. When I turned to him he smiled from behind the wheel of his big car, one eye brown and one blue. “Are you Richard Feynman?” I asked.

“Forget her,” he said.

“Ruby?” I said. “How can I forget Ruby? She’s just a little girl.”

But he drove away, and I saw a face in the back of his car, its nose pressed against the window. A little blond girl. Not even three. Two and three-quarters.

When I woke the next morning, my computer informed me that my e-mail to Marie-Thérèse had been returned, undeliverable.

Sunday morning found Fredreeq and me at the Beverly Center.

“Shouldn’t you be with your family today?” I asked. “Or church?”

“The mall is my church, and Francis took the kids to paintball. Now listen,” she said, pulling me along level six, past the frogs in Pet Love. “This Marie changed her e-mail-maybe she got DSL or switched ISPs, people do it all the time. None of this matters. Go back to Mulholland Man. The radar part. You showed up Monday on his radar, he said?”

“Yes. And it was Monday I got the call from Mrs. Glück and started asking questions around the set. Tuesday I met everyone else, Maizie Quinn and Glenda, the au pair volunteer, and then on Wednesday creepy Marty at the agency, so this isn’t about them, it’s about the show. Someone on the show doesn’t want me looking for Annika.”

Fredreeq steered me past Bloomingdale’s. “No, no, no, forget Annika. It’s Savannah. Savannah’s now the odds-on favorite in Vegas. I saw this on the Internet. My theory is, Kim’s getting stalked too, but she mistook us for the enemy, which explains the thugs at Westside Pavilion. That part we’re going to take care of today.”

I followed Fredreeq through the busy mall, searching the crowd. I wasn’t even sure who I was searching for. “Why is Savannah the favorite?”

“The crowd loves her,” Fredreeq said. “She’s got that perky Paula Abdul thing going, and she’s into some kind of boxing, she’s got style. You were a stiff the first two weeks. But you’re coming to life now, and that’s a threat to Savannah’s people.”

“I gotta tell you, I don’t think this tall guy is some Biological Clock fan.”

“Not a fan,” Fredreeq said, “a professional saboteur. Big difference. But he watches the show, and I can prove it. When did his radar kick in? Monday. Monday was the episode where you wore Joey’s peasant blouse that was a little small and you talked about wanting your baby to have a father in its life because your own father walked out when you were six. The waitress in the background actually cried.”

“My God, how embarrassing-Bing was filming that? I didn’t realize we-”

“That was your finest moment. You left Savannah in the dust. Get it? Monday night.” Fredreeq took a good look at me. “Let’s hit Bebe.”

“Oh, please God, not Bebe, Fredreeq. It’s been a bad week, but I’d rather go back to the morgue than stuff myself into-”

“A celebrity dresses like a celebrity. You dress like a Home Depot clerk. Look at yourself. Here’s your New Year’s resolution a month early: No more fleece.”

“This is my good fleece-”

“Ever since Doc dumped you, you’re as sexy as cold oatmeal. Come to the party, girl. Who got press this week? Savannah Brook. You know who else? Raquel Welch. Yes, it’s a tacky story, it’s tabloid fodder, they went through her garbage. The point is, she’s older than God but she stays in the news because she is a star down to her toenails. She works it. She dresses up for 7-Eleven. She’s your role model from now on. No one’s going through your garbage, and doesn’t that bother you?”

“Look,” I said, “even if you’re right about the tall-guy stalker watching B.C.-”