I strode through Rockefeller Center at a brisk but, I hoped, inconspicuous pace. The attendant in the box office at Radio City Music Hall sold me a ticket without even looking up from the paperback he was reading, but I still kept my sunglasses on as I made my purchase. A bus pulled up a few minutes after I pocketed the change.

Given the chill to the air, most of the passengers had opted for the enclosed lower deck. I had my new hat to keep me warm, and I preferred privacy, so I took the stairs to the upper deck, doing my best not to look furtive as I went. I had a wide selection of seats from which to choose.

I slid down an empty row and set about formulating a plan.

I t was dark by the time I climbed up to the pedestrian walkway over Hudson Street. I could smell the exhaust from the commuters’cars below, their engines idling as traffic moved slowly through the Holland Tunnel and into New Jersey.

Concrete stairs led down to the cobblestones of Laight Street and its string of converted warehouses and factories. I ventured along the sidewalk with careful steps, alert to any danger that might be lurking in the shadows.

But I reached the familiar door without encountering any lurking dangers. With a sigh of relief I pressed the button for the fifth floor.

“Yes?” The voice over the intercom was wary.

“It’s me.”

Caution gave way to impatience. “It’s about time.” The buzzer buzzed and I pushed the door open.

The hike up the four steep flights of stairs actually felt good after the several hours I’d spent on the bus. Its route had looped through midtown, over to the U.N. and then down to the South Street Seaport and the office towers of Wall Street before heading back up to Times Square and midtown. The narrative that came over the speakers had been interesting at the beginning, but it grew dull with repetition-even the same jokes were repeated. Fortunately, I felt I had enough of a plan to disembark in Tribeca before the bus headed uptown for the third time.

The first part of my plan involved finding a hideout that was warm, comfortable, and equipped with Diet Coke and other important staples. In addition to meeting these criteria, Emma’s loft would be a relatively safe retreat given its out-of-the-way location and that it lacked the potentially prying eyes of a doorman. It had the further advantage of being accessible, because if Emma turned out not to be home, I had a convenient copy of her key stashed on my key ring. And if she were home, I doubted that she would turn me in to the cops.

Instead, when I finally emerged from the stairwell, she was standing in the open doorway holding out a glass of white wine.

“We thought you’d never get here. Are you hungry? We were thinking of ordering Thai.”

My friends had been awaiting my arrival since midafternoon. They’d anticipated the thought process that would lead me to Emma’s loft-in fact, they’d arrived at my decision well before I had. They probably hadn’t wasted as much time trying not to hyperventilate and getting rid of spy phones.

“How’s our favorite fugitive from justice?” Jane said by way of greeting.

“Assuming there’s actually a warrant out for Rachel’s arrest, which is probably premature, let’s remember that technically neither Rachel nor anybody here knows she’s a fugitive from justice,” warned Luisa. “Otherwise, we’d be harboring a fugitive. And this isn’t my area of expertise, but I’m fairly confident that would be against the law.”

“So you’ve heard the whole story?” I asked.

“Matthew called me,” Emma explained. “Peter called him from a pay phone, apparently being very cloak-anddaggers about the whole thing. He was concerned enough about his call being traced, even from the pay phone, that he didn’t want it to go to any of our cell phones or homes. I guess he thought Matthew’s clinic was the best option-he even dialed the switchboard rather than Matthew’s direct extension as an extra precaution. If anyone were actually tracing the call, it would probably take awhile to figure out that Matthew was the person he called and that his girlfriend was your college roommate.”

At least I wasn’t the only one being paranoid about phones. I’d been scared to even use a pay phone. Not that there was one on the bus.

“And then Matthew called Emma, and Emma called us,” said Luisa. “We figured you’d come either to my apartment or here, but since my building has a doorman, we thought you’d choose here.” Luisa’s family practically owned a small South American country, and their New York apartment had more than a doorman-it had a staff that included a butler, a cook, and assorted other uniformed attendants. It was a great place to hang out if you wanted your every whim catered to, but it probably wasn’t the place to be if you wanted to minimize personal interactions.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” said Jane. “But we thought you’d be here sooner-we were starting to worry.”

“And for Peter to get so worked up, when he’s usually so calm-we knew that whatever was happening had to be serious,” added Emma.

“Little did we know that you’d cooked up such a clever disguise, Rach. It’s a good look on you. Is it Mary-Kate or Ashley that you’re going for?” asked Hilary.

In addition to the warmth, comfort and availability of certain caffeinated beverages, I’d chosen Emma’s apartment because I knew it was the most likely to yield another important part of my plan. If the police thought I’d killed Gallagher and attempted to kill Dahlia, they would be focusing all of their efforts on finding me and further building their case against me.

Which meant that nobody was trying to find out who the real murderer was. And not only was unmasking the killer a prerequisite for clearing my name and returning to business as usual, it seemed to be the only way to guarantee that he or she-and a lot of what I knew implied that it could very well be a she-wouldn’t strike again.

However, tracking down a killer wasn’t going to be easy when I was a fugitive. I needed help.

There was Peter, of course. But even if I hadn’t been so awful to him, and even if I had been able to deliver a decent apology, it wasn’t possible to turn to him in this situation, when the police were probably tracking his movements and communications in the hope that he’d lead them to me.

No, I knew who I needed, and that unusual twist of events that had brought all of my friends to the city this week now seemed especially fortuitous. And, fortuitously, they all seemed eager to come to my aid. In fact, they were surprised that I bothered to ask.

“Why do you think we’ve spent the entire afternoon cooped up here, waiting for you to show?” Hilary replied.

Emma called in an order to a restaurant around the corner. “I’ll pick it up instead of having them deliver,” she said. “That way we don’t have to worry about a deliveryman seeing you, and I can stop at a pay phone and call Matthew. Then he can call Peter and let him know you’re safe.” She giggled. “We’ll have to figure out a code. Like ‘the eagle has landed’ or ‘full moon over Tulsa’ or something like that. Rachel, is there any special message you want to get to him?”

I opened my mouth, but I wasn’t sure what to say. Asking Emma to tell Matthew to tell Peter I was sorry could hardly undo the damage I’d wrought. As apologies went, that would be setting a whole new standard for lame.

“Rachel?”

“We’re sort of in a fight,” I confessed sheepishly.

“Excuse me?” asked Jane.

“What could you possibly fight about with Mr. Too-Good-To-Be-True?” asked Hilary.

“You’re being ridiculous about something, aren’t you?” asked Luisa.

“Yes,” I admitted. “It’s pretty much all my fault.”