"Sure, I know," Lucas said. "I'm mostly here for the publicity thing. Take some heat off."

"That doesn't seem quite right either," Fell said. She studied him. "I don't know about you. You hang out with O'Dell. You're not Internal Affairs?"

"What?" He pulled back, surprised. "Jesus, Barbara. No. I'm not Internal Affairs."

"You're sure?"

"Hey. You know what happened to me in Minneapolis?"

"You supposedly beat up somebody. A kid."

"A pimp. He'd cut up a woman with a church key, one of my snitches. Everybody on the street knew about it and I had to do something. So I did. He turned out to be a juvenile-I guess I knew that-and I got hammered by Internal Affairs. There was nothing particularly fair about it. I was just doing what I had to do, and everybody knew it. I got fucked because fucking me was safer than not fucking me. But I'm not Internal Affairs. You can check, easy enough."

"No, no."

She went back to her papers, and Lucas to his, but a minute later he said, "Jesus, Internal Affairs."

"I'm sorry."

"Well…"

They took a break, walked two blocks down, bumping hips, and got a booth in a Slice-o'-Pie pizza joint, with gallon-sized paper cups of Diet Pepsi. She liked him: Lucas knew it and let the talk drift toward the personal. He told her about his onetime long-distance relationship with Lily; about the ambiguity now. About his kid.

"I wouldn't mind having a kid," Fell said. "My fuckin' biological alarm clock is banging like Big Ben."

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Thirty-six."

"Any fatherhood prospects on the horizon?"

"Not at the moment," she said. "All I meet are cops and crooks, and I don't want a cop or a crook."

"Hard to meet people?"

"Meeting them isn't the problem. The problem is, the guys I like, don't like me. Eventually. Like five years ago, I was going out with this lawyer dude. Not a big-time lawyer, just a guy. Divorced. Long hair, did a lot of pro bono. And pretty hip. You know."

"Yeah. Exactly. Nice neckties."

"Yeah. He was looking around to get remarried. I mighta. But then one day I was out decoying and this big asshole comes onto me really hard, gets me on a wall, whacks me-he's getting off on whacking me. And I go down and I've got this little hideout piece on my leg, this.25 auto, and he's just bending over to pick me up and I stick the piece in his teeth and his eyes get about the size of dishpans and I back him off, he's saying, 'Hold it, hold it…' "

"Where's your backup?"

"They're just running up. They put the guy on the wall and one of them says, 'Jesus, Fell, you're gonna have a mouse bigger'n Mickey'-the asshole'd whacked me right under the eye, right on the eye-socket bone, you know?" She rubbed her eye socket, and Lucas nodded. "Hurt like hell. And I say, 'Yeah?' And they got the guy leaning on the wall with his legs apart, and I say, 'Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag,' and I punted the sonofabitch so hard his balls had to take a train back from Ohio."

"Yeah?" Lucas laughed. Cop stories were the best stories, and Fell looked positively merry.

"So I tell this story to my lawyer friend and he freaks out. And he's not worried about my eye," she said wryly.

"He's worried about the guy on the wall?"

"No, no. He knew that happened. He didn't mind if somebody did it, he just didn't want me to do it. And I think what really bothered him was my quote: 'Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag.' I shouldn't have told him that. It really bothered him. I think he wanted to join a country club somewhere, and he could see me sitting out on the flagstone terrace with a mint julep or some fuckin' thing, telling the other country club ladies this, 'Say good-bye to your nuts, shitbag.' "

Lucas shrugged. "You ever tried a cop?"

"Yeah, yeah." She nodded, with a small smile, eyes unfocusing. "A trouser snake. We were hot for a while, but… You want a little peace and quiet when you're home. He wanted to go out cruising for dopers."

Lucas took a bite out of a slice of pepperoni, chewed a minute and then said, "A couple of years ago, Lily and I were involved. This is between you and me?"

"Sure." The curiosity was wide on her face, unhidden.

"We were getting intense, this was back in Minneapolis, her marriage was falling apart," Lucas said. "Then this Indian dude shot her right in the chest. Goddamn near killed her."

"I know about that."

"I freaked out. Man. So then we saw each other a few times, but I'm afraid to fly, and she was busy…"

"Yeah, yeah…"

"Then last year…"

"The actress," Fell said. "The one that Bekker killed."

"I'm like a curse," Lucas said, staring past Fell's head, eyes and voice gone dark. "If I'd been a little smarter, a little quicker… Shit."

After lunch, they went back to the paper, working through it, finding nothing. Fell, restless, wandered down to the team room as Lucas continued to read. Kennett brought her back a half-hour later.

"Bellevue," she said, plopping down in the chair across from Lucas.

"What?" Lucas looked at Kennett, leaning in the door.

"Bellevue lost some monitoring equipment from one of its repair shops. We never found out because it wasn't too obvious-everything was accounted for, on paper. But when the stuff didn't come back from repair, somebody checked, and it was gone. The repair people have receipts, they thought it was back on the floor. Anyway, it's been gone for more than a month, and probably more like six or seven weeks. From before the time Bekker killed the first one," Kennett said.

"They lost exactly what Bekker's been using in his papers," Fell said.

"He could've gotten the halothane there, too, and probably any amount of drugs," Lucas said. "All from one source, if it's a staffer."

"Sounds like him," Fell said.

"I'd bet on it," Kennett said. He ran a hand through his hair, straightened his tie. Pissed. "God damn it, we were slow pulling this in."

"What're you going to do?"

"Move very quietly: we don't want to scare anybody off," Kennett said. "We'll start processing Bellevue staffers against criminal records. And we'll touch all the dopers we know, see who knows who on the inside. Then we do interviews. It'll take a few days. Maybe you guys could get back to your fences? See if you could find somebody who handles Bellevue."

"Yeah." Lucas looked at his watch. Almost three. "Let's get back to Jackie Smith," he said to Fell.

Smith met them in Washington Square. The afternoon was oppressively hot, but Smith was cool: he arrived in a gray Mercedes, which he parked by a hydrant.

"I don't want to talk to you. You want to talk to somebody, talk to my lawyer," Smith said as Lucas and Fell walked up. They stood just off the boccie ball courts, under a gingko tree, hiding from the sun.

"Come on, Jackie," Lucas said. "I'm sorry about the goddamn putting green. I got a little overheated."

"Overheated, my ass," Smith snarled. "You know how long it'll take to fix it?"

"Jackie, we really need to make an arrangement, okay?" Lucas said. "Something new came up on this Bekker guy, and you're in a position to help. Like I said last night, it's personal with me. No bullshit. I just need a little information."

"I don't know fuckin' Bekker from any other asshole," Smith said impatiently.

"Hey, we believe you," Lucas said. "And I had to do the green. I had to get your attention-you were blowing us off. Isn't that right?"

Smith stared at him for a long beat, then said, "So what do you want? Exactly?"

"We need the names of guys who can get stuff out of Bellevue."

"That's all you want? Then you'll get off my back?"

"We can't promise," Lucas said. "I can't talk for Barbara-but I'd be a hell of a lot friendlier."