"Do you say anything to her?" I asked, clearing my throat.

"I'm going to talk low, tell her if she screams I'll kill her. I tell her that over and over again."

"What else? What else will you say to her?"

"Probably nothing."

He shoved the car in gear and turned around. I took one last look at the house where what he just described happened, or at least I almost believed it happened exactly as he said. I was seeing it as he was saying it. It did not seem speculation but an eyewitness revelation. An unemotional, unremorseful confession.

I was formulating a different opinion of Marino. He wasn't slow. He wasn't stupid. I think I liked him less than ever.

We headed east. The sun was caught in the leaves of the trees and rush hour was at its peak. For a while we were trapped in a sluggish flow of congestion, cars occupied by anonymous men and women on their way home from work. As I looked at the passing faces I felt out of sync, detached, as if I did not belong in the same world other people lived in. They were thinking about supper, perhaps the steaks they would cook on the grill, their children, the lover they would soon be seeing, or some event that had taken place during the day.

Marino was going down the list.

"Two weeks before her murder UPS delivered a package. Already checked out the delivery guy. Zip," he said. "Not long before that some guy came by to work on the plumbing. He squares okay, too, best we can tell. So far, we've come up with nothing to suggest any service person, delivery guy, what have you, is the same in the four cases. Not a single common denominator. No overlapping or similarities where the victims' jobs are concerned either."

Brenda Steppe was a fifth-grade teacher who taught at Quinton Elementary, not far from where she lived. She moved to Richmond five years ago, and had recently broken off her engagement to a soccer coach. She was a full-figured redhead, bright and good-humored. According to her friends and her former fiance, she jogged several miles every day and neither smoked nor drank.

I probably knew more about her life than her family in Georgia did. She was a dutiful Baptist who attended church every Sunday and the suppers every Wednesday night. A musician, she played the guitar and led the singing at the youth group retreats. Her college major was English, which was also what she taught. Her favorite form of relaxation, in addition to jogging, was reading, and she was reading Doris Betts, it appeared, before switching off her bedside light that Friday night.

"The thing that sort of blew my mind," Marino told me, "is something I recently found out, one possible connection between her and Lori Petersen. Brenda Steppe was treated in the VMC ER about six weeks ago."

"For what?" I asked, surprised.

"A minor traffic accident. She got hit when she was backing out of her driveway one night. No big deal. She called the cops herself, said she'd bumped her head, was a little dizzy. An ambulance was dispatched. She was held a few hours in the ER for observation, X-rays. It was nothing."

"Was she treated during a shift when Lori Petersen was working?"

"That's the best part, maybe the only hit we've gotten so far. I checked with the supervisor. Lori Petersen was on that night. I'm running down everybody else who might've been around, orderlies, other doctors, you name it. Nothing so far except the freaky thought the two women may have met, having no idea that this very minute their murders would be in the process of being discussed by you and yours truly."

The thought went through me like a low-voltage shock. "What about Matt Petersen? Any chance he might have been at the hospital that night, perhaps to see his wife?"

Marino replied, "Says he was in Charlottesville. This was a Wednesday, around nine-thirty, ten P.M."

The hospital certainly could be a connection, I thought. Anyone who works there and has access to the records could have been familiar with Lori Petersen and might also have seen Brenda Steppe, whose address would be listed on her ER chart.

I suggested to Marino that everyone who may have been working at VMC the night she was treated should be turned inside out.

"We're only talking five thousand people," he replied. "And for all we know, the squirrel who took her out might've been treated in the ER that night, too. So I'm juggling that ball, too, and it don't look real promising at the moment. Half the people treated that shift was women. The other half was either old geezers suffering heart attacks or a couple of young Turks who was tanked when they got in their cars. They didn't make it, or else are hanging around in comas even as we speak. A lot of people was in and out, and just between you and me, the record-keeping in that joint stinks. I may never know who was there. I'm never going to know who might've wandered in off the street. Could be the guy's some vulture who drifts in and out of hospitals, looking for victims-nurses, doctors, young women with minor problems."

He shrugged. "Could be he delivers flowers and is in and out of hospitals."

"You've mentioned this twice," I commented. "The bit about flower deliveries."

Another shrug. "Hey. Before I became a cop, I delivered flowers for a while, okay? Most flowers is sent to women. If I was going around wanting to meet women to whack, me, I'd deliver flowers."

I was sorry I'd asked.

"That's how I met my wife, as a matter of fact. Delivered a Sweetheart Special to her, nice arrangement of red and white carnations and a couple of sweetheart roses. From some drone she was dating. She ends up more impressed with me than with the flowers, and her boyfriend's gesture puts him out of business. This was in jersey, a couple years before I moved to New York and signed on with the P.D."

I was seriously considering never' accepting delivered flowers again.

"It's just something that jumps into my mind. Whoever he is, he's got some gig going. It puts him in touch with women. That's it, plain and simple."

We crept past Eastland Mall and took a right.

Soon we were out of traffic and gliding through Brookfield Heights, or the Heights, as it's usually called. The neighborhood is situated on a rise that almost passes for a hill. It's one of the older parts of town the young professionals have begun to take over during the last ten years. The streets are lined with row houses, some of them dilapidated and boarded up, most of them beautifully restored, with intricate wrought-iron balconies and stained-glass windows. Just a few blocks north the Heights deteriorates into a skid row; a few blocks beyond are federal housing projects.

"Some of these cribs are going for a hundred g's and up," Marino said as he slowed the car to a crawl. "I wouldn't take one if you gave it to me. I've been inside a few of 'em. Incredible. But no way you'd catch me living in this neighborhood. A fair number of single women here, too. Crazy. just crazy."

I'd been eyeing the odometer. Patty Lewis's row house was exactly 6.7 miles from where Brenda Steppe lived. The neighborhoods were so different, so far from each other, I couldn't imagine anything about the locations that might link the crimes. There was construction going on here just as there was in Brenda's neighborhood, but it wasn't likely the companies or the crews were the same.

Patty Lewis's house was squeezed between two others, a lovely brownstone with a stained-glass window over the red front door. The roof was slate, the front porch girdled in freshly painted wrought iron. In back was a walled-in yard dense with big magnolias.