After checking out of the hotel, she bought new clothes and a traveling case, changed in the restroom of a coffee shop that served her a peculiarly Filipino version of an American breakfast, bacon and eggs Luzonized, and showed up late for work to find that no one had missed her.

She spent half the day writing scripts for Briana Hall and the other half dealing with emails from brokerage houses. She had a midafternoon meal of vaguely Thai noodles-chicken, chiles, and cilantro-from the coffee shop on the ground floor and was walking across Finnish porphyry to the elevator when “Harlem Nocturne” began to sound from her handheld. She looked at the display and saw it was BJ.

She felt a prickle of heat across her skin, and her knees seemed briefly to buckle. She took a breath of air and it felt like her first breath in hours.

She sat down on the polished granite ledge that separated the elevator area from the atrium. Her heart beat in her ribs like a prisoner throwing herself headfirst against the bars.

BJ had been unable to restrain his curiosity, she told herself. He’d been staking out her apartment last night and he hadn’t seen her come home. He didn’t know about her reaction to Siyed’s death or to Charlie’s.

Dagmar told herself that he was going to try to get information from her so that he could kill her. She admonished herself to keep this surmise in the forefront of her mind.

She put the phone to her ear. “This is Dagmar.”

“Hey,” said BJ. “How’s it going?”

“Life sucks,” Dagmar said with perfect truth.

“Yeah,” BJ said. “I’m sorry if what happened to Charlie is causing you grief.”

“That’s two of my best friends murdered,” Dagmar said. Fury rose in her as she spoke. One of her fists punched the granite ledge on which she sat. Gratifying pain crackled from her knuckles.

“Well, you know,” BJ said, “I won’t pretend that I’m in mourning over Charlie, but I care about you. Do you want to get together and talk?”

“I can’t,” Dagmar said. “I’ve got too fucking much to do.”

“I could get Chinese takeout and bring it to your apartment,” he said.

“I’m not at my apartment anymore. I’m hiding out at a hotel.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Why?” he asked.

“Two reasons,” Dagmar said. “First, I think I might be next on the killer’s agenda.”

“I thought the killer was caught,” BJ said.

“One of them was,” Dagmar said.

“But…” He hesitated while he tried to decide which of several possible scripts to follow. “Why would the Russian Maffya be after you?” he said finally.

“I can’t tell you. But I have another reason-which is that the police have pretty much told me that I’m a suspect in three murders. So if I meet with you and I’m being followed, it might lead the cops to you.”

Chew on that, she thought.

Maybe it would keep him from following her.

“I can bring Chinese to your hotel,” he said.

What he should have said, Dagmar told herself, was Three murders? Because he wasn’t supposed to know about Siyed.

That, Dagmar thought, was a misstep.

“Maybe some other time,” she said. “I’ve really got to run right now.”

“See you tomorrow,” BJ said.

An alarm jolted through her nerves. “Tomorrow?” she said.

“The update.”

“Oh. Right. Bye.”

After the call ended, she stared at the phone’s display until it went dark.

Tomorrow, she thought.

She would have to meet BJ face-to-face and hope that he couldn’t guess what she knew.

This Is Not a Dinner

“You have a cut on your face,” Dagmar said.

The cut was just below BJ’s left eye, a thin little half circle of red. Probably made by Siyed’s fingernail as he tried to push BJ away while BJ pounded the life out of him.

“Kitchen accident,” BJ said.

“With what?” She was feeling reckless and wanted to torment him or at least make him improvise.

“Oh,” he said. He scratched a sideburn with one blunt finger. “I have this sort of magnet thingy over the sink where I stick my knives, and I bumped into the counter and knocked one of the knives off, and it hit me.”

“You could have lost your eye,” Dagmar said.

BJ shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.

He had progressed another step toward acquiring tycoon wear, with a soft cream-colored shirt, a sumptuous tie, and an Italian summer-weight jacket of pastel-colored linen. The fine clothing, rather than embellish his appearance, seemed rather to accent his thick neck and steelworker’s shoulders and long arms.

“I’ve got to show you my new car,” he said. “I’ve finally got rid of the Chevy.”

“We’ve got an update to do,” Dagmar said.

“I meant later.”

Around them, Helmuth and the technical staff were monitoring the progress of the players as they sampled one body of water after another-thousands altogether, on five continents. A running count was kept of the number of times the Tapping the Source units detected phenolphthalein, which Dagmar’s agents had added to streams, fountains, creeks, and ponds earlier in the day. The chemical itself was harmless, its chief property being to turn purple in an acid environment.

Every time six of the contaminated water sources were detected, another page was loaded to the Briana Hall site. Each led to other pages filled with clues to puzzles that would keep the players busy, it was hoped, for at least a few hours.

This played out over the latter half of the morning and most of the afternoon. Early in the day, eating a tasteless cruller from the box she’d brought in, Dagmar had announced that everyone was invited to dine at a nearby Italian restaurant that night, courtesy of the company. She had already called and made the arrangements; she only needed a head count.

No one was immune to the attractions of free food. She called the restaurant and finalized the number.

“Twelve people,” she said.

“Thirteen,” said BJ, “counting you.”

“Thirteen,” Dagmar said.

Food and soft drinks were free, she explained to her guests, but she knew Helmuth and a few of the others too well to offer free alcohol.

The restaurant was a decoy. She had no intention of being the thirteenth person at that meal, but intended to call in sick. She wouldn’t stiff the restaurant, which already had her business card number.

It was all a way of getting away from BJ so he wouldn’t follow her home.

At some point, civility required that she view BJ’s new car. Dagmar followed BJ to the elevator and rode with him in silence. He seemed aware that something was wrong, and she sensed wariness beneath the casual, pleasant pose. She looked at his hands and saw that a knuckle had been cut, but a cut could appear on a knuckle for all sorts of innocent reasons. There was a cut on one of Dagmar’s knuckles at that very moment, and she had no idea how it got there.

The killer might have used a club or a pipe or something.

Right. The thought of an angry BJ coming after her with a baseball bat sent a quaver along her nerves.

She turned her mind from nightmare imagination to analysis, a welcome shift. If, she considered, Siyed had cut BJ under the eye with a fingernail, would scrapings of that nail provide the DNA that could send him to prison?

Maybe. Maybe not.

The last thing she wanted was BJ investigated and then let go on grounds of insufficient evidence. That would be a triumph for him: that would be BJ killing Charlie and then rubbing her face in it.

The car was a Ford Phalanx, slightly used, with a locust-green low-slung monocoque body and a hard top that disappeared, on command, into what proved a surprisingly large trunk.

“Good lord,” Dagmar said.

“V-eight, turbocharged.” BJ was smiling as the wind tossed his fair hair. “The original owner put thirty-five hundred miles on it, and then his boss gave him a company car-a Bentley coupé, believe it or not, and this became redundant. Those thirty-five hundred miles cut the original price nearly in half.”