Then I realized that at the time of Mr. Silk's trauma—sometime before seventy-nine, probably closer to seventy-three, the year Delmar Parker had gone off the mountain—she hadn't yet graduated. In her early twenties, still a grad student.

Two patterns . . . part of some elaborate rage-lust fantasy that a sane mind could never hope to understand?

And where did Becky Basille fit in?

Two killers . . .

I remembered the clean, bustling street where Harvey Rosenblatt had landed: French restaurants, flower boxes, and limos.

How long had it taken the poor man to realize what the swift, sharp shove at the small of his back meant?

I hoped he hadn't. Hoped, against logic, that he'd felt nothing but the Icarus-pleasure of pure flight.

A fall, always a fall.

Delmar Parker. Had to be.

Avenging an abused child?

Surely if de Bosch had been abusive, someone would remember.

Why hadn't anyone spoken out after all these years?

But no big puzzle there: without proof, who would believe them? And why rake up the dirt around a dead man's grave if it meant stirring up one's own childhood demons?

Still, someone had to know what happened to the boy in the stolen truck, and why it had set off a killer.

I sat there for a long time, staring at tiny, microfilmed words.

Corrective School alumni . . . how to get hold of them. Then I thought of one. Someone I'd never met, a name I'd never even learned.

A problem child whose treatment had given Katarina the leash to put around my neck.

I returned the microfilm spools and rushed to the pay phones in the library's lobby, trying to figure out who to call.

Western Pediatric, the late seventies . . .

The hospital had undergone a massive financial and professional overhaul during the past year. So many people gone.

But one notable one had returned.

Reuben Eagle had been chief resident when I'd started as a staff psychologist. He'd taken a professorship at the U's med school, a gifted teacher, specializing in medical education. The new Western Peds board had just wooed him back as general pediatrics division head. I'd just seen his picture in the hospital newsletter: the same tortoiseshell spectacles, the light brown hair thinner, grayer, the lean, ruddy outdoorsman's face adorned by a trimmed, graying beard.

His secretary said he was out on the wards and I asked her to page him. He answered a few moments later, saying, “Rube Eagle,” in a soft, pleasant voice.

“Rube, it's Alex Delaware.”

“Alex—wow, this is a surprise.”

“How're things going?”

“Not bad, how about you?”

“Hanging in. Listen, Rube, I need a small favor. I'm trying to locate one of Henry Bork's daughters and I was wondering if you had any idea how to reach her.”

“Which daughter? Henry and Mo had a bunch—three or four, I think.”