And everything that had happened that morning came spilling out.

“So,” summarized Hilary when I’d finished,“You’re never home, but you have plenty of time to flounce around with some guy from work. And meanwhile, Peter’s moved three thousand miles to do nothing but be supportive and sweet and cook for you and hack e-mail accounts for you and bring you Diet Coke in bed, and you pick a fight and accuse him of espionage?”

I would be the first to say my behavior had been deplorable, but it all sounded even worse when she put it like that.

“Why are you trying to drive him away?” asked Jane.

“Because you were right. I’m scared.”

“Of what?” asked Emma.

“I don’t know, exactly. I mean, there are all the usual clichéd answers: I’m scared of losing my independence, and I’m scared of things not working out. But none of that excuses taking it out on Peter. Is it even fair to ask him to forgive me? Wouldn’t he be better off getting rid of me and finding some nice emotionally stable person to marry?”

“You’re completely insane,” said Hilary.

“That’s exactly my point,” I said.

My friends were eager to settle in for a long session of psychoanalysis with me as their subject, but I insisted that we focus on more immediate problems instead. Emma left to pick up the food and call Matthew, but the rest of us gathered around the antique wooden farm table that loosely defined the dining area in the large open-plan space. Hilary refilled wineglasses while Jane pulled an easel over from the corner of the room that served as Emma’s studio. She tacked a large piece of drawing paper onto it, and then turned to us, marker in hand.

“Why don’t we make a list of all the possible suspects?” she suggested brightly. “Then we’ll divide them up and investigate.” Jane taught math at a private school in Cambridge, and I suddenly had a vivid sense of what it would be like to be in her class.

Hilary groaned. “Good Lord, Jane. We’re not your students, and this isn’t Scooby-Doo.”

“But if it were, I’m not Velma,” I said.

“I have the feeling it’s going to be a very long night,” said Luisa. She had crossed over to a window at the far end of the room, opened it wide, and lit a cigarette. I watched as she exhaled a stream of smoke out into the night.

“Come back, Luisa. How are you going to see the chart from way over there?”

“I’m trying to protect your unborn child from secondhand smoke,” she pointed out.

“Oh. Thanks, I guess.” Jane turned back to the easel. “Now, where were we? The suspects. Or should we start with the victims? What do you think, Rach?”

“Here’s the way I see it,” I said. “Gallagher was the primary target, but Dahlia knew something, or somebody thought she knew something, and that’s what got her into trouble.”

“Knew what?” asked Jane, scribbling on the easel.

“I don’t know. But that brings us back to why anybody would want to kill Gallagher in the first place. His current and former wives have the most obvious motives. They both were in his office the day before he died, so they had the opportunity. And now Naomi’s daughter probably gets an inheritance, and Annabel probably does, too, rather than getting divorced. Although, I’m not sure how much she’ll actually get.” I shared with them the tutorial Jake had given me on prenuptial agreements.

“Women are more likely than men to use poison to murder people,” commented Hilary. “I read that somewhere. There’s something very personal-almost domestic-about poison. It implies being close enough and trusted enough to access food or drink, or knowing somebody’s habits well enough to poison him.”

“But what about the work aspect of things?” asked Luisa. She crushed out her cigarette on the edge of the saucer she was using as a makeshift ashtray and rejoined us at the table. “You said yesterday that there was something off about this deal, Rachel. Could that be part of it?”

“I guess it’s not out of the question, and I still think that there’s something wrong with the Thunderbolt buyout,” I said. I had already filled them in on the anonymous e-mail I’d received. “But, if somebody was trying to block the deal, and if the deal was dirty and Gallagher was involved, all he’d have to do is report him to the SEC. Poisoning him-well, it’s like Hilary said. There’s something sort of personal about it. Besides, it was a woman who pushed Dahlia, and as far as I can tell, I’m the only woman associated with this deal in any way.”

“Then what would Dahlia know?” Luisa asked me. “If it was personal, rather than professional?”

“She’s worked for him for a long time, so she knows both of the wives, and she probably ends up fielding a lot of his personal calls and correspondence, even though she shouldn’t have to. Maybe she saw some papers that showed he was planning on divorcing Annabel, something like that?”

“But she said on her message that she wanted to talk to you about something she saw on the news,” Jane reminded me.

“Maybe that was unrelated. Maybe she wanted to tell me about something else altogether?” I ventured.

“Could be,” Hilary agreed. “But here’s what I don’t get. If it was one of the wives, how did she know to dress up like you when she went after Dahlia?”

The door opened just then and I gave an involuntary shriek. Being on the lam was still new to me, and I was a bit jumpy.

But it was only Emma, laden down with bags of food and, she said with a grimace, some “not-so-great news.”

It had taken her awhile to locate a working pay phone “-I guess they just assume everyone has a cell phone now-” but she finally found one and got through to Matthew. He had another update from Peter: the police had returned to the apartment in the afternoon with a search warrant. It didn’t occur to me at the time to wonder why Peter seemed to be spending all day in the apartment.

“A search warrant?” echoed Luisa. “That’s really not good. That means they’re serious.”

“Rachel’s innocent,” Jane pointed out. “So there’s nothing for them to find.”

“Well, sort of,” said Emma. “But I guess there was some stuff which, taken out of context, could be construed as evidence.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“They took your computer, for starters.”

“That won’t be a problem. Peter seemed pretty confident he’d cleaned up the hard drive.”

“It wasn’t just your computer. They also went through your study and found something interesting enough to box up everything in there and take it all away. Do you know what they could have found?”

I didn’t have to think very hard to answer this. Mostly the files in my study held financial statements and medical records-it was all fairly innocuous, unless you counted the number of cavities I’d had filled. But in my rush to leave this morning, I’d also left my briefcase, complete with my “insurance policy,” the notebook I stored in its inside pocket, on top of the file cabinet. The most recent entries were pretty explicit regarding Gallagher’s treatment of me and my reactions.

“That’s not all,” Emma continued. “They took your TiVo, too.”

“My TiVo? There’s nothing on it but Peter’s Star Trek episodes and reruns of Dawson’s Creek. And my entire Forensic City backlog-oh.”

“Oh, what?”

“Forensic City. I didn’t see it, but Jake told me there’s an episode where somebody dies from a poisoned toothpick, sort of like how Gallagher died from the poisoned pencil.”

“I saw that episode,” said Hilary. “It was really good. I didn’t figure out what happened until the very end.”

“Was there anything else?” I asked Emma.

“Um, yes. One more thing,” she said reluctantly.

“What?”

“Under the sink. In the kitchen.”

God only knew what was in that cabinet-I’d been surprised simply to find usable dishwasher detergent the other night. It was probably all the same stuff that was there when I moved in. I’d always meant to sort it out, but I never really used the kitchen, so what was the point? I was fairly confident that my housekeeper kept it reasonably neat, but that was about the extent of it. “The woman I bought the apartment from was in her nineties. I have no idea what she might have accumulated,” I said.