His body settled down. His breathing slowed.

Now he dribbled once again, set, and lobbed the ball in a high-arcing shot. It swished through the net, and he let it bounce its way off his court and away to a far corner.

It was 4:22 by the industrial clock over the backboard. He went back to his computer, turned it on again, and waited in a kind of suspension while it booted up. When the screen came on, he got back into his e-mail, brought up Mickey's photos of the Manions' house, and sat in front of the terminal for a very long time, trying to make sense of what his eyes were telling him, resisting the impulse to theorize ahead of facts this time.

Marginally satisfied, leaving the computer turned on, he stood up and walked as though in a trance inside to his living area. In his bedroom, he crossed to his closet, where he'd hung up his suit. In the jacket pocket, he grabbed his portable tape recorder and rewound it through the interview he'd had with Betsy Sobo that morning, then started playing it back from the beginning.

When he'd heard it twice, he went back to the bed and stood over it for a long moment. Finally, sitting down, he reached for the telephone.

Wu must have been working at her desk. She picked up on the first ring. "This is Amy."

Without preamble, Hunt said, "What time did Carol Manion call Andrea's office to ask if she was coming to her meeting or not? After she'd missed it."

"Run that by me again, Wyatt, would you?"

"Carla said she got the message from Carol Manion on the answering machine the next morning. Isn't that right?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Okay, that means she must have called after Carla had gone home. Correct?"

"Unless Andrea had a direct line, and she called that. Are you getting somewhere, Wyatt? Tamara said you'd gone up to San Quentin…"

"No. That was a dead end. Now I'm trying to avoid another one. Carla will still be at work now, won't she?"

"Probably."

"I've got to go, then."

He hung up, Wu's absolutely logical objection echoing in his mind: "Unless Andrea had a direct line, and she called that." Hunt, as Juhle had earlier in the day, was beginning to wonder if he was still capable of rational thought. If Andrea had a direct line and Carol Manion had left her message on it between, say, three and five o'clock on Wednesday, then that would end this most remote line of inquiry, too.

But he had no choice. He watched as if from far above as his fingers punched in the Piersall-Morton number.

Then he was talking with Carla.

"No," she said as his heart sank yet again. "Mrs. Manion had Andrea's number, and it was on her machine, not mine."

"Do you know how she got Andrea's personal number?"

"I don't know. And it wasn't personal. It was just her direct line at the office. But a million ways. It was on her card. Or she met her somewhere and gave it to her. Anything."

"So you have no way of knowing what time she called?"

"Well, no, of course I do. It'll still be on the machine. I haven't erased anything this whole week, and it gives the time and date."

Hunt struggled to keep the urgency out of his voice. "Could I trouble you to run in and check that for me, Carla?"

She was gone for an eternity. Hunt, leaving his fingerprints on the receiver, could stand it no more and put her on speaker so he could pace.

Finally, finally: "Wyatt."

"I'm here."

"Seven seventeen, Wednesday, June first, except we already knew the date, didn't we?"

But Hunt had heard what he was hoping to hear. "Seven seventeen?"

"Right. I listened twice to make sure."

"And what time was their appointment scheduled for?"

"Three thirty. She mentioned it in the message."

"What else did she say? Would you mind calling me back from Andrea's office and playing it back for me?"

"Now?"

"Right now. I'll give you my number."

A minute later, Carla was back with him, and Hunt was listening to Carol Manion's voice on Andrea's answering machine. "Ms. Parisi, hello. This is Carol Manion. I was just wondering if you'd forgotten our three thirty appointment this afternoon or if perhaps I had the day wrong in my calendar. Would you give me a call back, please, and let me know? And maybe we can reschedule? Thank you."

"That's it," Carla said. "It sounds like a pretty normal call."

"You're right, it does." Hunt wasn't thinking about what the call sounded like. He was thinking about when it was made. "But listen, Carla. Would you mind not mentioning this discussion to anybody for a little while? Nobody at all."

"No, of course. If you say-"

"I do. Please. Now, is there any way you can connect me to Mike Eubanks? I think he's one of the partners. He's Betsy Sobo's group."

"Yes, he is. Sure. You want to hold a second?"

"I will. And Carla?"

"Yes."

"Between us, right? Nobody else."

"Nobody else," she said. "Okay, here goes. Hold on."

Mike Eubanks wasn't in.

Mr. Eubanks often went home early on Fridays. No, his secretary couldn't give Mr. Hunt his cell or home number, but she could try to reach him and have him get back to Mr. Hunt if it was important.

Hunt told her it was and took the phone with him out to the computer again, where he sat and stared at Mickey's JPEG picture of Carol Manion and her son Todd walking toward the limo parked in front of their house. He focused on the picture, on the slight anomaly that had at long last registered and struck him.

He'd seen Carol Manion in the flesh that morning, walking with her husband outside Saint Mary's Cathedral, on her way in to Judge Palmer's funeral. In that brief near encounter, he'd only had the time to form one impression, and that was of age. Not of debilitating old age, certainly, but not of anything resembling youth, either. Now the clear picture he was looking at confirmed that she appeared to be at least in her sixties.

He shifted his gaze to the boy. Could he be the link with Staci Rosalier that had always been missing in any consideration of Carol Manion in connection with the other two victims? He stared at Todd's face, nearly half in profile from this angle, and wearing a petulant frown. The salient feature of the fuzzy portrait that Staci had framed in her apartment was the boy's beaming smile, and so the similarity, if any, remained obscure. Aside from the coloring, stare and study as he might, Hunt could not say it was the same child or even if Todd Manion had any resemblance to Staci's brother at all.

But the question that had first grabbed Hunt's attention was not the boy's identity per se. It was the apparent age of the mother. Even if Hunt was ten years off on Carol Manion's age and she was only, say, in her mid-fifties (which he doubted), it was highly unlikely that she had borne a child eight years before.

Which meant that Todd was adopted.

This was Hunt's area of experience if not expertise, and he knew that if this were the case, it was decidedly unusual. It was relatively normal for a previously childless couple to adopt, and then go on to have natural children of their own. That had been the case in Hunt's own family-his mother apparently barren before they had adopted him, then giving birth to his four siblings in the next eight years.

But he knew that it was much more rare for a couple with a first or second natural child to want to add an adoptive brother or sister to the mix. Especially with an age gap of greater than ten years. Which is not to say it never happened. But when it did, the circumstances invited inquiry.

To say nothing of the reality that at this point, anything out of the ordinary that had even a tangential reference to Andrea was going to grab Hunt's attention and not let go until he'd wrung an explanation from it.