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4:20 P.M.

"You're spending an awful lot of time on this jumper, Harris."

Rob had been expecting this. He was surprised he'd been allowed to carry it this far. But the time had come and now he was sitting across the desk from Detective Lieutenant James Mooney, chief of Midtown North's detective squad, readying an explanation. Mooney's office was a walled-off cubicle furnished with a standard issue green metal desk. He had a window, but like all the other windows in the precinct house, it was covered with steel mesh. Late afternoon sunlight strained through the mesh.

Mooney himself was a balding, jowly, overweight bulldog who usually had half a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth. He seemed tough until he began speaking—he had a tendency to whine. But he did manage to keep the precinct's detective squad under tight control and yet remain approachable.

Rob had pulled the weekend along with Mooney. The lieutenant liked to use his Saturdays on duty to close up all the open files that he could.

Rob said, "There's a possibility she didn't go out that window on her own. She may have had a push."

"Forensics doesn't think so."

"Forensics has been wrong before."

Mooney removed the cigar to sip from his coffee mug, the contents of which had come from the bottle in his bottom drawer. Specks of ash fell from the cigar's cold tip onto the manila folder that held the paperwork of Kelly's case.

"I read your report, Harris. You've got one very disturbed girl here, under psychiatric care, on schnozz, who jumps naked through a twelfth floor window from a room where Forensics says there's no sign of a struggle. The M.E. says her body shows no signs of a fight, except for one love bite on her shoulder. We've got people with their heads blown off waiting for their perps to be found. Don't waste your time with this one. Close it!"

That was precisely what Rob was trying to avoid.

"I think we're missing something here, lieu," he said. "I've got a gut feeling that this psychiatrist is involved somehow."

"Anything concrete?"

"No, but—"

"Then close it."

"One more week, lieu. That's all I want. I'll squeeze it in between the DiGilio and Stern cases."

Mooney's eyes narrowed as he looked at Rob.

"You got something personal in this?"

"Nah," Rob said, leaning back in his chair and hoping he was convincing. Mooney didn't like his cops getting into cases where they were personally involved. "It just interests me, you know? Ever have a case that got under your skin and made you itch?"

Mooney's eyes got even narrower. His whine became more pronounced.

"You ain't thinking of writing a book or any shit like that, are you?"

Rob laughed. "Hey, lieu, you've read my reports! What do you think?"

Mooney stuck the cigar back in his mouth and smiled.

"Yeah. You've got a point there. But Christ, every other guy in the department seems to be writing a book!"

Rob nodded. Ever since Bill Caunitz, a former detective with Mooney's rank and position, began hitting the best-seller lists and appearing on Good Morning America, a lot of guys were trying their hand at fiction, but not with much success.

"Give me another week, lieu. If I can't prove foul play by then I'll close it myself."

"You'd better. And don't come back next week with some sky blue theory. I want hard stuff or we close. Got it?"

"Got it."

Rob knew Mooney was hoping he'd find nothing. The lieutenant liked grounders—open and shut cases. If Kelly Wade's case remained a suicide it would be closed and forgotten. But if it became reclassified as a murder it stayed open until solved. Unsolved murders were never closed, and that could mean filing semiannual DD5 Supplementary Complaint Reports into eternity.

Rob took the file and returned to his own desk in the squad room. It was the same color and style as Mooney's, only older and more dented. A few phone message slips on his blotter. None from Connie. He wondered why he felt relieved. Another love affair down the tubes. It was getting to be a habit.

He picked up the sheet with the notes he'd made on that lawyer yesterday and tossed it out. Ed Bannion checked out okay: a tax attorney with no record. Still… one nervous guy. Rob uncrumpled the sheet and slipped it into the back of Kelly's file, then went over the new information he'd dug up on Dr. Gates—or rather, Lazlo Gati.

It hadn't been easy. Little Lazlo's immigration papers said he was seven years old when he arrived in the United States. He took the oath of citizenship at age 21 and had his name changed to Lawrence Gates that same year. Beyond that, Rob had come up blank. Then he'd remembered Doc Winters' passing remark about an older brother and sister who'd died in West Virginia a while back. A department contact at a Wheeling newspaper faxed him a couple of articles. The first to come through was three years old and concerned Marta Gati's death in a fire that gutted her house. The circumstances were deemed suspicious, especially since the young handyman and the maid had disappeared. Interesting, but it told Rob nothing about Dr. Gates. Then another article came through, a few years older than the first, concerning the death of the senior Gati sibling, Karl, an independent mine owner who suffered a fatal heart attack.

Rob hit paydirt in the second article. It contained an interview with Karl's sister, Marta, wherein she chronicled the family history. A fascinating story.

The Gati family had run one of Hungary's major mining concerns since the turn of the century. Somehow, through bribery and political influence, they managed to survive the Nazi occupation with all six members alive and the family fortune hidden away nearly intact. When the communists took over, however, they decided to flee. They gathered up all the gold and jewels they had squirreled away before the war and headed for the border. Mama and Papa Gati sent the kids across first. They were supposed to follow soon after but they never showed up. The children later learned that they had been captured and shot. Karl, the oldest of the three brothers at twenty, took over as head of the family. There was no opposition. Lazlo was just a boy at the time, and Marta and the other brother, Gabor, both suffered from unspecified but apparently disabling birth defects. The article mentioned that Marta was confined to a wheelchair.)

Karl turned the gold and jewels into cash and brought the family to the United States. He settled them in West Virginia where he invested their money in the familiar business of mining. He did very well, moving from comfortably well-off to extremely wealthy. Lazlo was accepted at NYU premed and moved to New York, taking the sickly Gabor with him. They all felt Gabor could get the best care in the various New York medical centers when the need arose, but apparently he died anyway. Marta was proud of her younger brother, Lazlo—she never referred to him by his American name—who was now a respected new York psychiatrist. And now that Karl was dead, Marta was all alone in the big house he had built for her, but she was not afraid. She had a loyal staff to take care of the place for her.

Rob shook his head as he folded the glossy fax sheets and slipped them back into the folder. Some loyal staff! The place burned to the ground a few years later, taking her with it.

He had one more slip of paper on the Gati family: a copy of Gabor Gati's death certificate, dated eight years ago.

Immediate cause of death: cardiopulmonary collapse;

secondary to: overwhelming infection;

secondary to: multiple congenital defects.

So, Dr. Lawrence Gates' older sister and both his brothers had all died suddenly a few years apart, leaving Gates as the only heir to a considerable fortune. How convenient.

This was all a sidebar, though. There might or might not be something fishy there, but it had no bearing on the Kelly Wade case, at least none that Rob could see.