I was having a bit of a head-spinning moment. Suddenly, it seemed as if everyone on the street was staring at me, as if my sunglasses no longer offered a protective shield and the eyes around me could penetrate their dark lenses and see through to the murder suspect lurking behind.

The crowded avenue and the brightly lit shops felt newly perilous, and I needed to sit down, preferably somewhere quiet and safe, in order to get the head-spinning under control. Fortunately, a quick scan of my surroundings presented a handy interim solution.

It was relatively easy to lose myself in the stream of tourists pouring into St.Patrick’s Cathedral. Given that I’d never been inside the church before, I probably should have tagged along with one of the groups, listening to what a guide had to say, but I was in no condition to fully appreciate the building’s architectural, artistic, and various other fine points. Instead, I took a seat in a pew about a third of the way down the nave and tried not to hyperventilate.

After a few minutes of determined deep breathing, I didn’t feel fully composed, but I was collected enough to take an initial inventory of the situation.

Glenn Gallagher had been murdered, and I was a suspect in his murder. I knew this was preposterous, but it wasn’t completely unreasonable that the police might see things differently. I’d definitely spent a lot of time telling people how happy I’d be to see Gallagher dead-in fact, I’d even joked about poisoning his stupid pencils, although I doubted that Jake or Mark had bothered to tell anyone about that. Still, I had a well-documented motive of sorts. While I knew I hadn’t really meant it-I’d just wanted the guy out of my life-surely the authorities were duty-bound to investigate anyone who’d been saying anything that could be construed as a threat. I’d had plenty of time to slip doctored pencils into the mug on Gallagher’s desk, so I had the opportunity, as well. As for means-cyanide couldn’t be that hard to come by, and while I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea as how to get the cyanide into the pencil, the actual murderer had figured it out, so it couldn’t be that much of a challenge.

But this all seemed too flimsy to result in the police taking the trouble to hunt me down at home when they couldn’t find me at work.

Which meant that they were likely there because of Dahlia instead of or in addition to Gallagher, as Peter had indicated. They had the unfortunate eyewitness testimony that somebody matching my description had pushed her onto the subway tracks, and there was probably footage from surveillance cameras, as well. And I’d paid for my MetroCard with a credit card, so perhaps they could even track when and where I’d gone through the subway turnstiles. I did some quick calculations-the timing would have been tight, but if I’d caught the train I’d just missed-I could have been at the 51st Street station at the right moment. I hadn’t, of course, but would anybody do the work to try and find witnesses or video placing me where I actually was when they already thought they knew? And what they thought they knew seemed to be sufficient that Peter, who under normal circumstances would be the first to suggest that I turn myself in and get things straightened out in a reasonable manner, was suggesting that it would be best to make myself scarce.

I wondered if I was missing anything. I replayed the conversation with Peter in my head, trying to glean what little information I could from his cryptic words. Was there a reason he called me Fred, for example? I didn’t know any Freds, and he’d never mentioned any to me, but was it a code of some sort? I played with the letters, rearranging them, but neither Derf, Dref, Erdf nor any of the other possible combinations meant anything to me.

Then my BlackBerry buzzed, reminding me again that I had messages waiting. And I remembered Peter’s warning about his calls being traced, and his “right back at you” response. The entire conversation had been awkward, but this comment had struck me as particularly awkward. Could he have meant that calls to and from me could be traced, too?

That, in contrast to the answers I was getting from playing with the letters in Fred, actually made sense. Dahlia had called this number the previous evening, and I’d called her back. I hadn’t managed to speak to her, but there were probably records of the calls in the computers of my wireless carrier.

And then I remembered that last night wasn’t the only time I’d called her. I’d called her this morning, too, by accident when I thought I was calling my office voice mail-less than half an hour before she was pushed off the subway platform. Some people might find that incriminating, especially if they were already disposed to incriminate me.

I wondered how it could be possible for the police to get the phone records so quickly. On TV, they usually had to get a subpoena or something like that, approved by a judge.

But then I realized that they didn’t need access to phone records. All they needed was Dahlia’s cell phone, which she’d undoubtedly had with her when she was attacked, and its log of incoming and outgoing calls.

My impersonator may have taken the trouble to make it look like I’d tried to kill Dahlia, but I’d unwittingly come to her aid, using the device to construct a web of supporting evidence.

Then I remembered a movie I’d seen, in which the good guys tracked down a bad guy by the cell phone he had on him, triangulating his location based on the signals the phone was transmitting to and from different cellular towers.

Could somebody be triangulating my own location in the same way, closing in on me, even as I sat here?

It seemed unlikely that that sort of manhunt-personhunt-could already be underway, but if I was indeed a suspect, and if they thought I’d attempted murder twice in twenty-four hours, even if I’d only succeeded once-for all they knew, I was on some sort of crazed killing spree and had to be stopped.

I pulled the BlackBerry out of my bag and stared at it in horror.

I quickly powered off the device, but it still made me nervous. Perhaps it could continue to transmit information about my whereabouts even without power.

I thought about leaving it in the church, under the seat or in a confessional or something, but that seemed like it would only hasten its discovery and the associated discovery that I wasn’t with it. And I needed to find another safe haven, too, because even if they didn’t find my phone here, the data would in some way show that I’d been in this spot. At least that’s how it had worked in the movie. I wondered how fugitives who didn’t enjoy popular culture ever managed to remain at large.

Finding a place for the phone turned out not to be so hard. An open side pocket beckoned from the backpack on the back of the tourist in front of me in the line leaving the cathedral, and I slipped the BlackBerry in unnoticed. With any luck, if it was still emitting a signal, and if that signal was indeed being tracked, it would lead its followers to Omaha or some place like that, by way of a matinee of The Lion King, a carriage ride through Central Park, and a Circle Line cruise.

But I still needed to find a place where I could sit quietly, undisturbed and with little chance of apprehension while I figured out what I was going to do next. Thinking about the Circle Line had planted the seed of an idea, and when I saw one of those red double-decker buses lumbering across Fifth Avenue, it seemed like fate was trying to tell me something.

Not only had I never been to St. Patrick’s before, I’d never taken a Gray Line tour of the city, even though the buses regularly passed in front of my office building, ferrying tourists from midtown to United Nations Plaza on the East River. Nobody would ever think to look for me on a tour, and I liked the idea of staying on the move without actually having to move.