"That guy Riker, he's a heavy drinker, isn't he? Yeah," said Argus. "Couldn't help but notice. You can tell by the eyes, all those red veins." He was still pressing what he believed was his advantage over her. A few seconds of silence dragged by before he realized that she was not at all threatened, and neither was she inclined to banal conversation. The man looked up at the sky, unwilling to meet her steady gaze anymore.

"He tried to grill me on your background." The old familiar pomposity was back in his voice. "I could tell Riker was an ex-cop by his interrogation style. They never lose that, do they? On or off the job, they can never have just a normal conversation. I figure he doesn't know the first thing about you, Johanna. That or you fed him some fairy tale – and he knows it." Argus smiled, awaiting praise for this insight. Failing in that, he flicked imaginary lint from the sleeve of his coat. "Of course, I didn't tell him anything. Not who I was or what I – "

"So you lied to him. You think Riker didn't pick up on that?" She swung her body up into the driver's seat and slouched deep into worn upholstery that received the hump on her back like a cupped hand. She faced the windshield.

Marvin Argus rushed his words. "Does your boss know – "

"I told Riker my history was none of his damn business." She slammed the door and put the van in gear.

Argus reached up and gripped the door handle, as if that could prevent her from driving away. He yelled to be heard through the rolled-up window. "Johanna! About Timothy! Did you believe him – while he was still alive? "

If the man had held on to the van another moment, he would have lost his hand when she pulled into the street. Johanna pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor and sped toward the broad avenue at the end of the street. She passed through a red light amid the screech and squeal of braking cars and a cabdriver's hollered obscenities.

Marvin Argus had grown smaller in her rearview mirror, only insect high when she rounded the corner.

The young detective slouched down behind the wheel of her tan car and watched the black van speed away. Her eavesdropping device was picking up a clear conversation between the van's driver and the radio dispatcher for Ned's Crime Scene Cleaners. The vehicle was heading for the company parking lot in Greenwich Village.

Mallory reached out for the small silver camera on her dashboard. It contained a photographic record of the hunchback's meeting with the driver of the white Lincoln. After downloading the new images into her laptop computer, she admired the array on the glowing screen. No public record had such clear likenesses of Johanna Apollo. The blurry portrait on a Chicago driver's license had been, in Mallory's view, deliberately sabotaged by the subject, who had moved in the moment the picture was taken. A perusal of prep school and college yearbooks had been of no help either, for the camera-shy hunchback had always been absent on the days when school photographs were taken.

The last photograph was the best of the lot, for the wind had swept the hair away from Apollo's body. With one red fingernail, Mallory traced the outline of the hump that rode the woman's back, bending her spine and bowing her head. This was the soft spot.

Mallory smiled.

With a tap of keys, her computer returned to another file and an official portrait of the man in the double-parked Lincoln. Not content with running the rental plate and billing for his car, she had spent the past hour acquiring a dossier on the renter, Marvin Argus from Chicago, who now smiled at her from the glowing screen. His brow was fringed with ludicrous bangs, but she did approve of the double-breasted blazer and the tie.

Argus was the solid connection that she had been waiting for – living proof.

The detective closed her laptop and set it on the passenger seat where her partner used to ride. Riker had been a constant fixture in her life since she was ten years old, but now he would not return her phone calls. And he was never home to her when she came knocking on his door, looking for a word with him alone. But that would change when he read her report on the hunchback. It mattered nothing to Kathy Mallory that this case belonged to federal investigators, that it was well outside the purview of a New York City cop. This was a national contest, and anyone with the stomach for it could play the game on the radio five nights a week.

Marvin Argus slid behind the wheel of the white rental car and drove off. Detective Mallory's vehicle eased up the street at a discreet distance, then crept into the southbound stream of traffic on Central Park West, following the man from the FBI.

Riker's gray eyes were hooded, always had been, and his constant squint gave him the air of a man who was damn suspicious all the time. Mixed with this message was the attitude and posture of an easygoing soul, and the total effect said to everyone, I know you're lying, but what the hell.

The man who ran Ned's Crime Scene Cleaners was not named Ned. Ned was his brother. Riker did have a first name and even a middle name – Detective Sergeant, though no one had called him by that moniker for the past six months, not since acquiring the scars of four gunshot wounds. He had spent most of his medical leave in charge of a glorified janitorial service. His brother, niece and sister-in-law were away on an extended visit to the fatherland. They had not intended to stay away so long, but distant relations had held the small family hostage, dragging them up and down the Rhine, in and out of German castles and other tourist traps – poor Ned. Riker had been placed in charge of the business and left to consider his brother's offer of a partnership.

He could not picture himself filling out the forms for his separation from NYPD, though this was common enough for cops at the age of fifty-five. His younger brother had left the force three years ago, and maybe it was time to follow suit. True or not, he believed his hair had gone grayer since leaving the hospital. And there was one more hint that the good years were gone; his wounds hurt him each time it rained – just like Dad's arthritis.

Riker planted his elbows in the mess of papers that littered the desk, causing the top layer to avalanche to the floor. The office window gave him a view of gray bricks, a sliver of sky and a parking lot enclosed by a chain-link fence – a view of the future? Could he really do this job for a living?

At least he had been liberated from suits and ties. That was something.

He wore the jeans and flannel shirt of a working man, though he never traveled with the cleaning crews anymore. His last time out with a new trainee, he had nearly wrecked a van. That was the day he had discovered his one remaining infirmity, a sorry little secret that he had chosen not to share with his doctors.

Most of his time was spent in the office, where he was daily nibbled to death by forms, federal, state and local, for the management of hazardous waste, quarterly taxes, payroll deductions and other mind-numbing bits of paper. And all the while, he listened to a police scanner on the pretext of noting addresses for sudden deaths and potential customers. At midday he followed his brother's custom of buying lunch for homicide cops, the real source of new business. He had eaten two lunches today, one in a Brooklyn precinct and one in the Bronx, so he had missed the hunchback when she had reported for work. And, in another sense, he simply missed Jo when she was not around.

He walked to the front window, called there by the sound of a dying muffler on the worst vehicle in the small fleet of three. He leaned both hands on the sill and winced as the van limped into the parking lot on one soft tire – more money out the window.

The woman he knew as Josephine Richards cut the engine and climbed out.