“She’s Mrs. Conway, isn’t she?”

“Mmm,” said Amanda.

“She looked terribly familiar when I saw her at Parents’ Night. I’m sure I’ve met her before. Didn’t your dad have a Conway working for him on his last project?”

Amanda shook her head. “Dad has so many graduate students—I never knew any of their names except for the ones who used to babysit me when I was little.”

“I’m sure I ran into her at one or two of those parties your dad gave for his crew. I remember that awful voice—whiny and aggrieved.”

“That’s her.” Amanda pushed her dish aside. “I must have been hungry. I feel better now. And I like the school, really I do. It’s a lot better than my old school out in Mississauga, especially since it’s so close to downtown. Maybe I’ll go shopping now—if you think I can walk down Yonge Street by myself.”

Kate grinned at the challenge, unfolding her almost six-foot frame out of the booth. “I expect so. But why don’t you walk over to the university about 4:30 or so and meet me in my office. We can celebrate the end of school with an early movie and then dinner. You’re making me nervous now. I don’t think you should be walking through Rosedale by yourself going home.”

“Oh, Aunt Kate. Not you, too.” And Amanda shrugged into her jacket, flipping her brown hair over the collar with a grimace at her aunt.

Sanders sat at his desk and drew little stick figures on a pad of paper. It was almost time to go home from a day that he might as well not have shown up for. He had arrived late and had had to chase after Dubinsky, catching up with him at the scene long after most of the routine work had been parceled out and half completed. Dubinsky had said nothing—then—but some day it would come out in little jibes and digs at his not-so-superior superior officer. And now Sanders should be running around, trying to find out the victim’s identity, what the preliminary findings had been, whether this was the work of the same man, and just what they had to go on from here. Instead he was sitting at his desk waiting for the hours to tick by, pushing pieces of paper around and pretending to be writing reports. Not that he wanted to go home. The last thing he wanted to do was to face Marie. Maybe he’d switch around and work Friday, Saturday and Sunday. He looked up at the faint sound of Dubinsky’s cat-like tread. His partner raised one enormous hand in greeting and dropped a sheaf of papers on Sanders’ desk.

“Not much so far. Did you get the note from upstairs?” Sanders shook his head. “I didn’t think so. Anyway, they want a mobile unit set up down there and the adjacent neighbourhoods combed for anyone who might know anything. Now.”

“For chrissake! Do they realize how many ‘adjacent neighbourhoods’ there are to that ravine? How many men are they giving us to do this? One?”

“As many as we like, they say. We’re supposed to look as though we’re doing something useful to calm down the citizens. Even if the activity itself doesn’t do much good.” Dubinsky shrugged and pulled out his notebook. “Well, this is what we’ve got. Number one: the lab found some gold-coloured fiber—a synthetic of some sort—imbedded in the girl’s sweater. They’ll give us more later, but it looks like carpeting, they think.”

“Sure. And when we find out who she is, it’ll turn out she had a gold rug and liked lying on the floor to watch TV. Any word on her identity?”

“Not yet. We might get something after the evening news goes on.”

“There’s not much more we can do then. You go on home. I’ll see about setting up that mobile unit. I’ll look after it this weekend. It’s time I got off my ass and started working.” As Dubinsky picked up his coat, Sanders was reaching for the phone, his face blank and impassive.

It was ten o’clock on Friday morning before Dubinsky walked into the crowded, chaotic office and pulled out his chair at the pair of facing desks that he shared with Sanders. As far as he could tell, Sanders hadn’t moved since the previous night. “You been home yet?” he asked casually.

“You’re damn right I’ve been home,” Sanders replied. “Have you ever considered how much time we waste driving home at night? And coming back in the morning? Do you ever think how nice it would be just not going home?”

Dubinsky gave him a guarded look. “No—no, I never do.”

“I guess you wouldn’t,” he said. Why would he? thought Sanders. He isn’t married to a painted doll who trapped him with honeyed, reluctant submission and then turned into a screaming shrew who paid out her favours one by one in return for concessions, until they didn’t seem worth bargaining for any more. Sally was fierce, hard-working, and conscientious; she led Dubinsky a merry chase sometimes, but she was a real person. “You know, there’s an apartment on a sublet ten blocks from here . . . but what the hell,” Sanders said, clearing his mind for the time being. “The unit is ready to go. I have two shifts of four guys each. Where in hell have you been?”

“I just came back from interviewing a Robert Donaldson who works for an ad agency—he’s an artist of some sort, I guess. His girlfriend—live-in type—called him yesterday morning at work to say that she had a job interview at two and was going to pass the time until then taking a nice long walk. When she wasn’t home by six, he guessed that she’d bombed it and hadn’t felt like coming home right then. That’s happened before, he said. But she’s never stayed out all night before, and after calling all her friends he called us. Anyway, he identified her—sort of. The hair and the body type are right. He’s kind of shaken. We just got back from the hospital.”

“Could he have done it?”

“Maybe. He said he was at work all day, putting together a presentation. Easily checked. Do you want me to look into it?”

“Since you’re going to be sitting around here doing nothing, sure. By the way, who was she?”

Dubinsky looked down at his notebook. “Mary Ellen Parsons, age twenty-three, commercial artist, currently unemployed. And the boyfriend’s apartment has that smooth gray carpeting you get in offices. I checked.”

By Saturday at noon Sanders knocked on the twenty-fourth door of an imposing street close to the ravine. Beside him stood a taciturn young constable, hastily recruited from other duties to make up the special force demanded by the public, the papers, and therefore, the politicians. They had started Friday afternoon, and so far, the results had been less than worthwhile. Each fruitless hour spent reminded Sanders of the equally fruitless efforts made on each, previous occasion, and only served to depress him further. Sanders knocked again. Finally he heard slow footsteps, and the door was partially opened, revealing a bright-eyed elderly lady and a large and sober-looking black Labrador retriever.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” said Sanders, for the twenty-fourth time that day. “We are police officers”—he held out his identification, which she looked at long and carefully before raising her suspicious eyes. “We are investigating an attack on a young woman just a few blocks away from here, and we would like to know if you saw or heard anything at all unusual or suspicious-looking on Thursday—this last Thursday, the eighth.”

“Thursday, eh? Well, I don’t know if it was on Thursday, but I saw something last week that disturbed me a great deal.” Sanders looked up sharply at that. “I took Georgia here out for her walk at 6:00 a.m., the way I always do if I’m awake—and I usually am—and that’s when I saw it.”

“What did you see, ma’am?”

“One of those girls who deliver the papers around here in the morning, it was. It’s a terrible. thing, you know. It’s dark out when they take those papers around, except during the summer. Can’t you do something to stop them from hiring girls to do that?”