“Wait,” Jerod said.

Perfect.

“It was Marc,” he said. “It was Marc’s idea to go see this guy, and it was Marc who hit him with the weight, afterward. Like, four times. I said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ but he didn’t listen to me.”

Whether it was true or not, who could tell? It didn’t matter anymore to Cicero, and not much more to me.

Hadley set the notepad down in front of Jerod. “Give us Marc’s full name and other information first,” he said. “Then I’m going to have you write down a statement about what happened in Mr. Ruiz’s apartment.”

“Dr. Ruiz,” I said.

“What?” Hadley looked at me blankly.

“Dr. Ruiz. He was a doctor,” I said.

Jerod was writing. When he finished, and Hadley had torn off the top sheet with Marc’s information, we were technically ready to go, to put the information out on the radio. Hadley turned to the door, but I didn’t. I was following the train of thought Hadley had interrupted at the crime scene.

There were only three people in the world who’d known that Cicero had a prescription pad in his apartment. One of them was dead, and one of them was me. That left only one other person.

I sat on my heels next to Jerod’s chair. It was an intimate, rapport-building position. “Jerod,” I said, in a quieter voice from the one I’d been using, “how’d you know to target Dr. Ruiz?”

“I told you, it was Marc’s idea,” Jerod said.

“How did Marc know?”

“He hangs out with this girl, they’re from the same town in Michigan,” he said. “She said she knew where there was a guy who had cash and a prescription pad in his apartment.”

I tried to keep my voice level. “Marc’s from Dearborn, is that it?”

Jerod blinked, surprised. “Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Do you know the girl’s name?” I asked, ignoring his question.

Jerod thought. “Something French, kind of like Charmaine, but that’s not it. She thinks she’s his girlfriend, but she’s not. Marc’s just letting her wax his stick.”

“Thanks, Jerod,” I said, unsmiling. “Put all of that in your statement.”

Out in the hall, Hadley said, “What was that about?”

My hands were shaking with anger. I laced them behind my back where Hadley couldn’t see. “Marc’s girlfriend is a sometime informant named Ghislaine Morris,” I said. “She might know something about where’d he’d go in a situation like this.”

“Right,” Hadley said. He was walking down the hall, and I was following. “But why’d you tell Jerod to put all that in his statement?”

“She set these events in motion,” I said.

“So she ran her mouth,” Hadley said. “That’s not against the law. We can’t charge her with anything.”

“No, we can’t,” I said. “But I’m going to check out a motor-pool car and go talk to her.”

We stopped in front of the coffee machine, and Hadley filled a paper cup to the rim. He looked at me and raised an eyebrow in invitation. I shook my head, No, thanks.

“Good idea,” Hadley said. “But why a motor-pool car?”

“My Nova is back at the building Ruiz lived in,” I explained. “I rode over here with you.”

I’d been so numb from finding out what happened to Cicero that I hadn’t even thought of my car as we’d left; I would have climbed into a spaceship if that was what Hadley had led me to.

“Right,” Hadley said. “Wait a minute, then, and I’ll go talk to the girlfriend with you.”

I shook my head in negation. “Sooner is better,” I said. “You’ve still got to look over Jerod’s statement and get him processed in at the jail.”

At the motor pool, I signed out a nondescript, well-maintained mid-size sedan, dark blue. It reminded me of something that Gray Diaz would drive. I shot it up the ramp a little faster than necessary, and two administrators, crossing the garage in rippling trench coats over their suits, looked at me with disapproval.

I’d decided what to do with Ghislaine. I was going to bring her down to the station and find out what she knew about the whereabouts of her boyfriend, Marc. But first we were going to make a little detour to the medical examiner’s office.

I’d warned her that if she threatened again to give up Cicero, I’d put her in prison. It had been an empty threat. Now she’d done worse than report Cicero to the police, and my hands were tied. She’d done nothing chargeable, as Hadley had said. But I could do this: I could make Ghislaine look at Cicero, make her see the end result of her actions in a stainless-steel drawer.

The girl who opened the door at Ghislaine’s apartment looked like her country cousin: a little shorter, a little heavier, with hair that was as white as corn silk, and small, apprehensive blue eyes. She was braless under a V-necked white T-shirt, her pale legs in cutoffs, barefoot. Behind her issued the mindless noise of a television talk show.

“I’m here to see Ghislaine,” I said.

“She’s not here,” the girl said.

“You don’t mind if I come in and verify that, do you?” I took out my shield. Her eyes widened fractionally, and she stepped backward. “I was just feeding the baby,” she said as I came in.

“Shadrick?” I said.

She shook her head. “My baby. Shad’s with Ghislaine.”

A six-month-old infant, dressed in fuzzy, androgynous yellow, sat in a high chair on the border between kitchen and living room, linoleum and carpet.

“Did Ghislaine do something wrong?”

Yes. “No,” I said. “I need to ask her some questions. She’s a material witness.”

I moved toward a short half-hallway, like the one in Cicero ’s apartment. The bathroom didn’t take long to check out. A ghost of steam hung in the air from an afternoon shower, and creams and cosmetics cluttered the sink. There was no one behind the rippled, frosted glass of the shower door.

In the first bedroom, the bed was unmade, but not so much that I couldn’t see the giant, yellow face of Tweety bird on the rumpled comforter. On the wall was a Packers pennant, and below that bookshelves with no books on them except high school yearbooks. Model horses lined two of the shelves in their entirety, and a stuffed dog lounged on its side on a third shelf. I’d come to an apartment inhabited by children.

“That’s my room,” the girl said.

“I didn’t catch your name,” I said.

“Lisette,” she said.

Another improbable Gallic name. Lisette’s heritage, as evinced by her looks, seemed to be pure Saxon; I didn’t think she was French.

“Are you and Ghislaine related?” I asked.

Lisette shook her head. “Just roommates.”

I moved on to the last bedroom.

Ghislaine, I was guessing, was a year or two older than her roommate. It showed in her room, more feminine than childlike. Ghislaine’s bed was made up, a pale-pink eyelet comforter pulled taut with cheap lace-trimmed throw pillows carefully arranged, and Ghislaine’s toys were more expensive: an MP3 player, a cell-phone charger, a row of CDs. The closet door was open, and inside I saw leather coats and party dresses. A bulletin board like Marlinchen Hennessy’s showed photos of Ghislaine, mostly with boys or Shadrick, rarely other girls.

Lisette was still watching me from the doorway. “Which one of these boys is Marc?” I asked.

“None of them,” she said. “He didn’t do things like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Get his picture taken with Gish,” Lisette said. “Or act like a boyfriend. He was too cool for that.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Lisette nodded. “Gish loans him the keys to her car, so he can go to these parties he doesn’t even take her to. He leaves his laundry here for her to take to the Laundromat, and his clothes smell like other girls’ perfume.”