“Not that,” she said impatiently. “Stop trying to find my father, I mean.”

“What!” I shouted. “Two days ago you were batting your baby blues and telling me pathetically you counted on me.”

“That was then. I didn’t see then-I didn’t know-anyway, that’s why I need to see you in person. You can’t possibly understand over the phone if you’re going to get so honked off. Just don’t do any more looking until I can talk to you in person, for God’s sake.”

There was no denying the thread of panic in her voice. I pulled a string from the fringe where my left knee was poking through the denim. She knew about Pankowski and the plant sabotage. I pulled another. She didn’t know.

“You’re too late, babe,” I finally said.

“You mean you’ve found him?”

“Nope. I mean the investigation is beyond your power to stop.”

“Vic, I hired you. I can fire you,” she said with terrifying ferocity.

“Nope,” I repeated steadily. “You could have last week. But the investigation has moved into a new phase. You can’t fire me. I don’t mean that. You can fire me, of course. You just have. What I mean is, you may choose not to pay me but you can’t stop my inquiries now. And the top one, first on the list, is why you didn’t tell me about Ferraro and Pankowski.”

“I don’t even know who they are!” she shouted. “Ma never talks about her old lovers to me. She’s like you-she thinks I’m a fucking baby.”

“Not about their being her lovers. About the sabotage and their getting fired. And the lawsuit.”

“I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about, V. I. Know-it-all Warshawski, and I don’t have to listen to it. As far as I’m concerned, V.I. stands for vicious insect, which I would use Raid on if I had any.” She slammed the phone in my ear.

It was the childish insult she ended on that convinced me she really didn’t know about the two men. I also realized suddenly that I had no idea why she was firing me. I scowled and rang up SCRAP, but she refused to come to the phone.

“Ah, screw you, you little brat,” I muttered, slamming down the phone myself

I tried returning to Hugo Wolf, but my enthusiasm was gone. I wandered to the living-room window and watched the nine-to-fivers returning home. Suppose my speculations this morning hadn’t been so far out after all. Suppose Louisa Djiak had been involved in the plant sabotage and Humboldt was protecting her. Maybe he’d called Caroline and pushed her into firing me. Although Caroline was not the kind that pushed easily. If someone Humboldt’s size came for her, she’d be more inclined to sink her teeth into his calf and hang on until he got sick of the pain.

It occurred to me that whatever Nancy wanted to talk to me about might shed some light on the general problem. I tried her number again, but she still didn’t answer.

“Come on, Cleghorn,” I muttered. “You wanted me bad enough to leave two messages. You get run over by a train or something?”

I finally got fed up with my futile churning and called Lotty Herschel. She was free for dinner and glad to have company. We went to the Gypsy and shared a roast duck, then back to her place, where she beat me five times in a row at gin.

I was skimming the paper while I made coffee the next morning when Nancy Cleghorn’s name leapt out at me. The story was on the front page of ChicagoBeat. It explained why she hadn’t been around to answer her phone yesterday. Her body had been found around eight last evening by two young boys who’d ignored both the government and their parents and gone into the posted area around Dead Stick Pond.

A small section of the original marsh remained as Illinois’s last wetland for migratory birds. Dead Stick Pond had once been a great feeding and resting ground, but was now so full of PCBs that little could survive there. Even so, in the middle of the dead mills you could find herons and other unusual birds, and the occasional beaver or muskrat.

The two boys had come on a muskrat there once and hoped to see it again. At the water’s edge they stumbled over a discarded boot. Since there were fifty of those for every animal-and it was dark-it had taken them a few minutes to realize it still had a body connected to it.

Nancy had been hit on the back of the head. The internal injury would have killed her eventually, but she apparently drowned when her body was dumped in the pond. The police knew of no one with a reason to kill her. She was well respected, her work at SCRAP had earned her a lot of kudos in the environmentally troubled community, and so on. She was survived by her mother and four brothers.

I slowly finished making the coffee and took the paper out to the living room, where I reread the story six or seven times. I didn’t learn anything new. Nancy. My snappish thought last night, maybe she’d fallen under a train, made the little hairs prickle on the sides of my face. My thinking hadn’t caused her death. My mind knew that, but my body didn’t.

If only I hadn’t taken that hike to the lake yesterday morning-I broke off the thought when I realized how stupid it was. If I stayed chained to my phone twenty-four hours a day, I’d be at home to needy friends or telemarketers and would have no other life. But Nancy. I’d known her since I was six years old. In my mind I thought we were still young together-that because we’d been young together we would protect each other from ever getting old.

I wandered to the window and stared out. It was raining hard again in thick sheets that made it impossible to see the street. I squinted at the water, moving my head to make patterns with it, wondering what to do. It was only eight-thirty-too early to call my friends at the papers to see if they had news that hadn’t made it to the morning edition. People who go to bed at three or four in the morning are more cooperative if you let them sleep in.

She’d been found in the Fourth Police District. I didn’t know anyone there-my dad had worked the Loop and northwest sides, not his own neighborhood. Besides, that’s been over ten years ago.

I was chewing on my fingertip, trying to decide whom to call, when the doorbell rang. I figured it was Mr. Contreras, trying to get me to come down to take the dog out in the downpour, and scowled at the foggy window without moving. The third time the bell clamored I reluctantly left my hideout. Cup in hand, I unbolted the outer door and padded barefoot down the three flights.

Two bulky figures stood in the outer hallway. Rain glistened on their shaved faces and dripped from their navy slickers to form dirty pools on the tiled floor.

When I opened the door the older one said with heavy sarcasm, “Good morning, sunshine. I hope we didn’t interrupt your beauty sleep.”

“Not at all, Bobby,” I said heartily. “I’ve been up for an hour at least. I just hoped it was a wrong number. Hi, Sergeant,” I added to the younger man. “You guys want some coffee?”

As they came past me into the stairwell cold water from their slickers dripped onto my bare toes. If it had just been Bobby Mallory, I would have thought it deliberate. But Sergeant McGonnigal was always scrupulously polite to me, never participating in his lieutenant’s hostility.

The truth of the matter was that Bobby had been my father’s closest friend, both on and off the force. His feelings toward me were compounded of guilt at flourishing when my father had stayed in beat patrol, at living while Tony had died-and frustration at my being grown up and a professional investigator instead of a little girl he could dandle on his knee.

He looked around in the little entryway of my apartment for a place to put his dripping raincoat, finally sticking it on the floor outside the door. His wife was a meticulous housekeeper and he had been well trained. Sergeant McGonnigal followed suit, running his fingers through his thick curly hair to squeeze some of the excess water out.