The man does maintenance and works around the grounds.

Talk to him. He may have a toolshed or workshop on the premises."

"Oh-ho," Jason T. Jason said. "You want to know if he owns a ball peen hammer-right?"

"Right. And if he does, has he still got it? And if he has, you grab it."

"Oh, yeah," Jason said.

"And while you're at it, get a look at the house and grounds. I'd like your take on it."

"I'm on my way."

"And so am I," Boone said, as both officers rose.

"Sergeant, I'll meet you at the Ellerbees' townhouse at five-thirty.

It'll give us a chance to look around the neighborhood before we brace the widow."

"I'll be there," Abner Boone promised.

After they left, Delaney returned to his study and looked at the cartons of files with dread. It had to be done, but he didn't relish the task.

He set to work, dividing the records into separate folders: the victim, Dr. Diane Ellerbee, Dr. Julius Samuelson, the ME's reports and photographs, the reports, photos, and map of the Crime Scene Unit, statements of everyone questioned.

Then he added notes of his conversation with Dr. Murray Walden, and what Sergeant Boone and Jason T. Jason had just told him.

It went faster than he had anticipated, and by 12:30 he had a satisfyingly neat stack of labeled file folders that included all the known facts concerning the murder of Dr. Simon Ellerbee.

It was time, he decided, for a sandwich.

He went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and inspected the possibilities. There was a single onion roll in there, hard as a rock, but it could be toasted. And there were a few slices of pork left over from a roast loin. Some German potato salad. Scallions he could slice.

Maybe a wee bit of horseradish.

He slapped it all together and ate it leaning over the sink.

Monica would have been outraged, but she was gone, doing volunteer work at a local hospital. She kept nagging him about his addiction, and she was right; he was too heavy in the gut. It was hard to convince her that the Earl of Sandwich had been one of civilization's great benefactors.

He returned to the study and stared at the stack of Ellerbee file folders.

He had a disturbing bunch that this was going to be a "loose-ends case."

That's what he called investigations in which nothing was certain, nothing could be pinned down. A hundred suspects, a hundred alibis, and no one could say yes or no.

You had to live with that confusion and, if you were lucky, discard the meaningless and zero in on the significant. But how to tell one from the other? False trails and time wasted chasing leads that dribbled away.

Meanwhile, Thorsen was sweating to have a murder cleaned up, neat and clean, by the holidays. So his man could be promoted.

Two sets of unidentified footprints and two blows to the victim's eyes.

Was there any meaning in that? Or in Ellerbee telling his wife he had scheduled a late patient, presumably meaning someone after 6:00 P.m. But he had died at approximately nine o'clock. Would he have waited that long for a late patient? Someone who would arrive, say, at 8:00 P.m.

No signs of forced entry. So Ellerbee buzzed someone in, someone he was expecting. One person or two? And why leave that street door open when they left?

"The butler did it," Delaney said aloud, and then pulled his yellow legal pad toward him, put on his reading glasses, and began making notes on how much he didn't know. It was a long, depressing list. He stared at it and had an uneasy feeling that he might be missing the obvious.

He remembered a case he had worked years ago. There had been a string of armed robberies on Amsterdam Avenue; six small stores had been hit in a period of two months. Apparently the same cowboy was pulling all of them-a young punk with a Fu Manchu mustache, waving a nickel-plated pistol.

One of the six places allegedly robbed at gunpoint was a mom-and-pop grocery storenear78th Street. The owners lived in a rear apartment. The old lady opened the store every morning at 7:30. Her husband, who had a weakness for slivovitz, usually joined her behind the counter a half-hour or hour later.

On this particular morning, the old man said, his wife had gone into the store to open up as usual. He was dressing when he heard a gunshot, rushed out, and found her lying behind the counter. The cash register was open, he said, and about thirty dollars' worth of bills and coin were gone.

The old lady was dead, hit in the chest with what turned out to be a.38 slug. Delaney and his partner, a Detective second grade named Loren Pierce, chalked it up to the Fu Manchu punk with the shiny pistol. They couldn't stake out every little shop on Amsterdam Avenue, but they haunted the neighborhood, spending a lot of their off-hours walking the streets and eyeballing every guy with a mustache.

They finally got lucky. The robber tried to rip off a deli, not knowing the owner's son was on his knees, out of sight behind a pile of cartons, putting stock on the shelves. The son rose up and hit Fu Manchu over the head with a five-pound canned ham. That was the end of that crime wave.

It turned out the punk was snorting coke and robbing to support a $500-a-day habit. Even more interesting, his nickel-plated weapon was a .22, the barrel so dirty it would have blown his hand off if he had ever fired it.

Detectives Delaney and Pierce looked at each other and cursed. Then they went back to the mom-and-pop grocery store, but only after they had checked and discovered that Pop had a permit to keep a.38 handgun in the store. They leaned on him and he caved almost immediately.

"She was always nagging at me," he complained.

That was what Delaney meant when he worried about missing the obvious.

He and Pierce should have checked immediately to see if the old man had a gun.

It never hurt to get the simple, evident things out of the way first. It was a mistake to think all criminals were great brains; most of them were stupes.

He pondered all the known facts in the Ellerbee homicide and couldn't see anything simple and obvious that he had missed. He thought the case probably hinged on the character of the dead man and his relationship with his patients.

He reflected awhile and admitted he had an irrational contempt for people who sought aid for emotional problems. He would never do it; he was convinced of that. The death of Barbara, his first wife, had left him numb for a long time. But he had hulled his way out of that funk-by himself.

Still, he had no hesitation in seeking help for physical ills.

A virus, a twinge of the liver, a skin lesion that wouldn't heal-and off he went to consult a physician. So why this disdain for people who took their inner torments to a trained practitioner?

Because, Delaney.supposed, there was an element of fear in his prejudice. Psychologists and psychiatrists were dealing with something you couldn't see.

There was a mystery there, and dread. It was like taking your brain to a witch doctor.

Still, Delaney knew that if he was going to get anywhere on the Ellerbee case he'd have to cultivate and evince sympathy for those who fled to the witch doctor.

He left the house early, deciding to walk to the Ellerbees' townhouse to meet Abner Boone. It was a dull day with a cloud cover as rough as an elephant hide. The air smelled of snow, and a hard northwest wind made him grab for his homburg more than once.

On impulse, he stopped in at a First Avenue hardware store. All the clerks were busy, for which he was thankful. He found a display of hammers and picked up a ball peen. He hefted it in his hand, swinging it gently in a downward chop.

So many useful tools made lethal weapons. He wondered which came first.

If he had to guess, he'd say weapons evolved into tools.