"We understand that cocaine and heroin may have been involved in Maison's death."

"I have heard that, but my source probably wasn't any better than yours," Lucas said mildly.

"Weren't you at the death scene early this morning?"

"Yes, I was." Reluctantly.

"And now you're here investigating the exact same drugs that were found."

"Look," Lucas said, interrupting, "I don't want to talk about the Maison investigation. Chief Roux is taking direct charge of that investigation, and all comment has to come through her."

"But we understand that you are coordinating"

"I really can't comment, sorry. Excuse me." Lucas pushed through the group, walking down toward the cars. The interview-on-the-scene was over, and the cameras went down, but the reporters tagged along behind.

"There's gotta be more than that, Lucas," one of the reporters said. She was an intense young woman with short dark hair and small, pretty features.

"I wish I could tell you more, but I can't," Lucas said. "I just can't. But I'll tell you whatif you hang around here, I'll talk to Jim Jones, Lieutenant Jones from Narcotics, and I'll get you inside the house. Marijuana might not be that big a deal, but it is when you've got a mountain of it, and there's a mountain of it in there. And I'll get them to show you the cocaine and heroin."

"Alie'ewas using heroin, at least in New York she was," another reporter asserted. This one was a honey blonde, with a nose so tidy that it could only be explained as the product of surgery.

"Listen," Lucas said, dropping his voice. "This has honest-to-God gotta be off the record, okay? I'm serious."

The three reporters glanced at each other and nodded. "Alie'e had what's called a short pop of heroin about the time she was murdered. I don't know what they're planning to say downtown, but that's the truth. If you push them on it, they'll confirm it." He looked back at Shaw's housesignificantly, he hoped. "That's all I can tell you."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," the blonde said. "You said, 'short pop,' is that the phrase?"

"Yeah, short pop."

"That's good. That sounds really, you know, ghetto," she said. "And one more question, this can't hurt anyone. When you saw Alie'e this morning was she wearing a green dress?"

"A green dress?"

"Yes, a green dress with a narrow, dropped neck and"

"This has gotta be off the record." He couldn't see how it could hurt.

"Sure. Of course. We just want toknow," she said.

"Itwas green. Kind of semitranslucent."

"Excellent." The cameramen had been drifting over to listen in, their cameras pointed awaythis was off the record, and they knew the rules. The blonde picked out her cameraman and lifted a hand, palm up, and said, "The dress was green."

They high-fived, and Lucas asked, "What?" The other reporters looked as puzzled as he was.

"Death dress," the reporter said. "We got it on tape yesterday. It's by Gurleon. A twenty-five-thousand-fucking-dollar shroud, and we got it on tape, with Alie'e in it. Are we fuckin'good, or what?"

" and became a beautiful filmy-green twenty-five-thousand-dollar shroud for the mysterious women with the jade-green eyes. Back to you, Henry."

The first man hadn't gotten any sleep; he paced his office, watching the TV. The blond reporter was smiling at him. Filmy green shroud. She was proud of that. Filmy green.

At the tips of his fingers, the man could still feel the soft skin of Alie'e's throat. He hadn't had any choice with her. She'd come along at the precisely wrong time in everybody's life

Sandy Lansing was panicking, she was going to run. He'd had totalk with her, todiscipline her: You did not run when there was business to be done. He'd reached out, intending to push her against the wail. Somehow the pit of his palm had landed under her chin, and when he pushed, her head snapped back, into a molding around a door. He'd actually felt her skull crack, the vibration through the heel of his handlike feeling a raw egg crack on the edge of a china cup.

Her eyes had gone up, and she'd slipped down the wall, and he'd glanced back up the hallway toward the party. If the door opened "Get up," he said. "Come on, get the fuck up."

He'd taken her arm and pulled, but her arm was deathly slack. And after a minute, he'd believed. He'd looked for a pulse, tried to find a heartbeat, but could find neither. He'd been seized by fear: Christ, she was dead. He crouched over the body, like a jackal over a baked ham, looking from her face to the still-closed door. He hadn't meant to kill her.

But nobody knew

The body was next to a door. He pulled the door open: a closet, with a rack of cold-weather jackets and coats. He lifted her, her heels dragging, and shoved her into the closet. She wouldn't fit; she kept slumping, and she had to be upright to fit. He was holding her by the throat with one hand, trying to get the door shut, when a voice said from a few inches behind his ear, "What are youdoing?"

He'd almost had a heart attack. He turned and saw the green eyes; and the closet door finally clicked shut. Alie'e asked again, "Why did you put her in the closet?"

The second man heard about Alie'e's death from his dashboard radio. At first, he thought he'd misheard; and then it occurred. to him that he was crazythat he wasn't hearing this at all. But the radio kept talking, talking, talking and when he changed stations they were talking, talking

Alie'e this, Alie'e that.

Alie'e with lesbians.

Alie'e nude in a photo shoot.

Alie'e dead.

The second man swerved to the side of the road, pulled on the park brake, put his head on the steering wheel, and wept. Couldn't stop: his shoulders shaking, his mouth open, breathing in stuttering gasps.

After a long five minutes, he wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve, turned, found a clipboard in the back, clipped in a piece of notepaper.

He wrote: Who did this? And drew a line under it.

And under that, he wrote the first name.

There would, he thought, be quite a few names before he finished the list.

On the way back to police headquarters, Lucas took out his cell phone, thumbed it on, and called Rose Marie Roux on her command line. She picked up and Lucas said, "We got the media fixed. The raid turned up a ton of grass, and a bunch of coke and heroin. I think they all bought it."

"Good. Now we need a second act."

"It's like managing the media has gotten more important than finding the killer."

Roux said, "You know the truth about that, Lucas. We'll either get the killer or we won't, no matter what the media does. But the media can killus. And I don't have anything else I'd rather be doing right now."

For the rest of the day, Lucas hung around the interrogation rooms, listening in. One item came up earlyAlie'e didn't have any dope in her possession, or any cooking equipment for the heroin, or a syringe or needles. Somebody else put the dope on her, but nobody at the party was admitting to the use of dope, and nobody knew anybody else who was using.

A question they asked everyone involved the scribble on Sandy Lansing's wrist. They got the answer to that in the early afternoon.

"A woman named Pella," Swanson told Lucas. "She's going to England in December, for three weeks, and Lansing was going to get her a rate at a hotel. She said Lansing wrote her name on her wrist to remember to set it up."

"This holds water?"

Swanson shrugged. "Does with me, I guess. Pella said a decent hotel in London is gonna cost her two hundred a night, but with Lansing's connection, she can get the same room for one and a quarter. That's something like fifteen hundred bucks in savings."