“Did you tell the police about this?” asked Jane.

I shook my head. “I tried, but as far as they were concerned, they had a confessed killer and his brother on the hook. They weren’t terribly interested in my theories.”

The phone rang just then-not my BlackBerry, which I’d long since given up any hope of recovering from the tourist’s backpack-but my home phone.

“Should I get that?” asked Peter. He consulted the caller ID on the handset. “It says Private Caller.”

“Why don’t we let the machine get it? Everyone I’d want to talk to is already here.”

“How sweet,” said Hilary dryly.

We could hear the answering machine from the study, and my voice inviting callers to leave a message. Then we could hear the caller leaving his message.

“Rachel, Jake here.”

His tone was friendly. Like it never would have occurred to him to frame me for murder, much less try to kill me.

“Speak of the devil,” said Jane.

“It’s been a crazy couple of days, hasn’t it? I still can’t get over the news about Mark Anders. I heard that it was you who managed to get the gun away from him at the shareholders’ meeting-nice work! I didn’t even recognize you, and then I guess I missed you after. It was quite a scene. Give me a call when you get a chance. I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“The nerve of that guy!” said Peter. This was rapidly becoming his standard response to all matters involving Jake.

“He doesn’t know that we know what we know,” I told him. “But he probably wants to find out if we do know what we know, so that he can know if he needs to worry about what we know.”

“When you put it like that, I don’t know if we know what we know,” said Luisa. She had opened both the window and the screen and was now perched on the sill, the hand with her cigarette held carefully outside.

“Luisa, you’re making me very nervous,” Jane said. “We’re fifteen flights up.”

“Actually, only fourteen. There’s no thirteenth floor,” I said.

Luisa just shrugged and exhaled a stream of smoke into the air above 79th Street.

“How do children in New York learn to count, anyhow?” asked Jane.

“While we’re on the subject of what we know, or don’t know, or wherever we were, what about the mysterious stranger in the suede jacket?” asked Emma.

“That’s right,” said Hilary. “What about Mr. Mysterious? Who is he?”

“And why does he keep showing up everywhere and then disappearing again?” asked Jane.

The intercom chose that moment to buzz.

“That had better not be Jake,” said Peter.

I got up and went to answer it.

“Miss Rachel?” said the doorman. I’d long since given up on trying to convince him to drop the “miss.”

“Yes?”

“There’s a man here to see you? He said you’d recognize him from his black eye?”

“Speak of the other devil,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Send him up, please.”

T here were only four apartments on my floor, but their front doors opened onto a space so small that it felt full when just one of my neighbors and I chanced to be in it at the same time. This didn’t stop all six of us from rushing out to meet the mysterious stranger. We watched with great anticipation as the old-fashioned dial above the elevator began to trace its slow path from the lobby up to fifteen.

The elevator dial stopped for a long moment at three. “One would think that a person could walk up two flights of stairs,” said Luisa.

“That was probably Mr. and Mrs. Ditweiler. He has a touch of rheumatism in his knee, and she just had her hip replaced a few months ago,” I explained. “She makes gingerbread men for the building Christmas party every year. They’re really good.”

The dial resumed its path, creeping along to five, six and seven. Then it stopped again at eight.

“The mysterious stranger is big on building suspense, isn’t he?” said Hilary.

“It’s part of the whole mysterious thing,” Emma told her.

“How much of their lives do you think New Yorkers waste waiting for elevators?” asked Peter.

“Less than Californians waste sitting in cars,” I said.

The dial started moving again, this time advancing steadily onward from eight to twelve and then directly to fourteen.

“The poor kids,” said Jane. “They have no reason to think that thirteen even exists.”

The doors finally slid open, and the mysterious stranger stepped out, black eye and all.

“Hi!” cried Hilary. “I’m Hilary. Who are you?”

He looked from one face to another. I guessed he wasn’t expecting to find such a crowd waiting for him. I cleared my throat and gave a little wave, and his gaze landed on me.

“Ms. Benjamin?”

“Why don’t we skip right to first names?” I suggested. After all, we’d been spending a lot of quality time together of late.

“I’m Special Agent Lattimer. Ben Lattimer.”

It was nice finally to have a real name for the guy-“Mysterious Dark-Haired Stranger in the Suede Jacket” had been more than a little cumbersome. But Ben didn’t look anything like a special agent. He wasn’t wearing a dark suit, white shirt, narrow tie, and sunglasses. Instead, he had on a pair of faded Levi’s, a striped button-down, and, of course, his suede jacket.

“When you say Special Agent, what exactly are you a special agent of? Could we see some identification?” Peter asked, placing his hand on my shoulder. Only if you knew him as well as I did would you have picked up on the note of tension in his voice. He’d been both embarrassed and annoyed that a complete stranger had been in on the Andrew Marcus tackle with me. He’d also been less than appreciative when I pointed out that his Iron City consumption the previous evening might have slowed his reflexes.

Ben reached into his jacket and withdrew one of those leather badge holders you see on TV. He flipped it open. “FBI Financial Fraud Unit.”

“Cool,” said Hilary.

We all took turns studying Ben’s ID before agreeing that it looked authentic and ushering him into the apartment. None of us was sure if it was appropriate to offer food to special agents, but it seemed rude to continue eating without making the offer, and he accepted with an enthusiasm that suggested he hadn’t been recently feasting on pierogies, coffee cake, or Quarter Pounders with Cheese.

“I first got interested when Perry did the Tiger buyout,” he told us between mouthfuls of curry. “Bill Marcus wrote us-the Unit, I mean-a bunch of letters outlining his theory.”

“You pay attention to that sort of thing?” I asked in surprise. I didn’t want to think about how much trouble I could have saved myself, not to mention everyone else in the room, if I’d simply reported my concerns to somebody like Ben in the first place.

“We get a lot of letters from crackpots,” Ben acknowledged. “But you never know when one of those crackpots is going to be blowing the whistle on the next Enron.”

“There seem to be a lot of crackpots in Texas,” said Hilary. Ben looked at her blankly. “You know. Enron. Texas. Crackpots.”

“Anyhow,” continued Ben,“the Marcus letters were actually pretty coherent, at least compared to some of what we see. And the basic chronology and the people involved were exactly as Marcus outlined. Which made me think that maybe he wasn’t your garden-variety crackpot. I started looking for a money trail, and it turned out that all three of the principals-Perry, Gallagher, and Brisbane-had some interesting offshore accounts.”

“Were the accounts in their own names?” said Luisa. “Because I couldn’t find a thing.”

“Far from it. I’d heard that Gallagher was an expert at making money, but he was also an expert at hiding it. They were buried deep, hidden inside a maze of shell companies and private partnerships. It was a real mess, but once I located the accounts, I could begin tracing the flows of cash in and out.”