Murphy was starting to get nervous. He called again and got the same damn answering machine. "Yeah, it's an answering machine. Live with it. Better yet, communicate with it. Beep."

The last two times he'd called, he'd left messages.

As the clock edged toward noon, Murphy decided it would be just as easy to go over.

He was sure she was fine. Probably just working in the yard or something. Attending parents' day at school. Walking the lizard. It wouldn't hurt to check, though. He got there in record time and blamed it on the Porsche.

The house was quiet. A pretty place ringed in flowers with a porch that creaked right at the top step. He remembered that from the night he'd done a belly flop on Leary's floor. Amazing how different the outside and inside of that house were.

Nothing looked out of place, though. There weren't fire engines or worried neighbors. Just a pretty, tree-lined street where kids played in the afternoons. Slamming the door of his Porsche shut, Murphy trotted up the steps, still expecting Leary to appear any minute with a trowel or something in her hand.

He rang the doorbell and waited for an answer.

Nothing.

He could hear something inside, though. He leaned closer, trying to make it out. A flute? No, it wasn't as full-throated as a flute. Pretty, though. Soft and sweet. She must have a CD on, although where she'd gotten a recording of some wind instrument playing Barber's "Adagio for Strings", he couldn't figure.

He rang again. And again, he got nothing.

This wasn't right. The back of his neck was itching, and he had the most overwhelming urge to walk away before he found something bad on the other side of that door. So he did what any self-respecting newsman would do. He tried the knob.

And just like in the movies, it opened.

"Leary?"

Nothing.

Somebody was in here. He could sense it. He was already holding his breath, and he wanted to tiptoe. The flute, or whatever, stopped. It had been coming from upstairs. There wasn't another sound in the house. No obvious signs of a struggle. The Nerf ball had been knocked off the line again, but Murphy imagined that happened a lot around here.

"Leary?" Gingerly, Murphy mounted the stairs.

Those creaked, too, which didn't help his heart rate any. Jesus, he hated walking into something like this. He'd walked in on one too many crime scenes, and in almost every one the victim had greeted him with wide eyes, as if still startled by what had happened.

"Leary? You up here?"

He got three fourths of the way up the stairs and saw her.

Alive. Sitting in the first bedroom on the left, on top of an old mahogany sleigh bed. Disheveled and pale, cross-legged and dressed in a pink sweat suit, a punk Buddha of the Flea Market.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" Murphy demanded, trying as hard as hell to calm his heart down. He was still half-expecting to see a gun-wielding madman forcibly keeping her in the room.

She didn't move. "I should have remembered to lock the door."

She was way too quiet. Her body language was all wrong. Tight, curled, her fingers tapping like a typist's against something in her lap. Murphy suspected she'd slept in that sweat suit, and at the foot of her bed sat a sealed brown evidence box and a phone that dangled a broken chord. This was going to be complicated, and he hadn't even had breakfast yet. He climbed the rest of the stairs and made for her room.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"I'm out of practice," she said in an odd, small voice, her attention back on whatever she was mangling in her lap. "I can't remember the whole piece."

She was way, way too quiet.

Then Murphy saw what she'd been holding. A tin whistle. The kind of thing you saw the Chieftains play jigs and stuff on, all high, sharp notes that could shatter glass. She'd been playing that? She'd been playing Barber on that?

"You play that thing?" Murphy found himself asking.

"Maudlin, but appropriate, don't you think?"

"Aren't you supposed to play, like, 'MacNamara's Band' and stuff like that?"

She almost smiled. Lifted the thing to her mouth and spun off about thirty bars of the most complicated jig Murphy had ever heard. Then she dropped it back in her lap and went back to battering it.

Murphy decided it was wiser to stay where he was and leaned against the doorway where she wouldn't notice how uncomfortable she was making him. "Wanna tell me what's going on?"

She shrugged, still not facing him. "I'm just sitting here."

"You're not answering your calls."

She shrugged again, fingered the instrument. Made him even more nervous. This just wasn't the Leary he'd come to know and fear.

"I saw your article on my father," she said. "You did a good job."

Murphy couldn't contain his surprise. "I didn't think you'd read it."

She nodded absently. "You were right. He really did make an impact on the town. On everybody he met, really. He's never known a stranger or had a dollar that didn't need to be in somebody else's pocket more. My mother always yelled at him because he spent his paychecks at the bars. The truth is, he never paid for two drinks in the same night. But he never said no if a person needed help."

"I'm just sorry I didn't know him before," Murphy said.

Unbelievably, she smiled. She smiled fondly, as if they'd never had the conversation the day before. "You would have loved him," she admitted. "I probably wouldn't have been able to pry you two out of the saloon for a month."

Murphy was itching again. He had the most insane urge to look over his shoulder, as if the real conversation were going on right behind him. He sure couldn't figure this one out. So he lobbed a test missile.

"I heard we have another set of statistics," he said.

She started a little, as if she'd come in contact with a live wire. Then she just tightened up a little more. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe not. After all, like everybody said, she was old and she had Alzheimer's. Maybe it was just her time to go."

Murphy blinked in surprise. "You believe that?"

She looked out the window, then back at her hands. "Ah, who knows? I think it's one of the great conceits of the modern world that so many people know just what other people need or want or believe. I don't think I want to do that anymore."

Now he knew he was nervous. "You don't."

She shook her head. "My mother does that, and she doesn't have any friends left. Only dependents."

"And you think that's what this is all about."

Another shrug. Another silence.

"I will tell you one thing I've figured out," she said as if continuing a thought. "An awful lot of people are trying to cover up something they haven't figured out yet. They think maybe patients are being murdered in their geriatric center, but they don't want to know for sure. Landry because it would hurt the hospital. Mary Jane because it would hurt Alex. Davies because it would hurt research, and Van Adder because it might interfere with his towing business. Oh, and the nurses up in the nursing care wing because it could hurt their reputations as good nurses. You know what I haven't heard as a reason yet, Murphy?"

"What's that?"

She looked at him, and he saw what she'd been hiding. Tight, old eyes that glittered with shame. "Those patients. Not one person is doing what they're doing because they think maybe they're helping those poor little old people." She sucked in a shaky breath. Shook her head. "Maybe if one person..."