“Should we call Ms. Bayard first?” Stephanie Protheroe asked, her hand

still on the doorknob. “Some camera crew is going to be scanning our calls, you know, and they’ll get here. We might want to let her know we think there was a terrorist here before a TV outfit shows up trying to ask her questions.”

So they were here because Renee Bayard had decided on a preemptive strike. I wondered how this would affect Catherine’s relations with her grandmother.

The flashlights cast menacing shadows around the kitchen, turning Schorr’s heavy frown into a gargoyle grimace. “Yeah, I’d better do that. Any place to sit and have a private conversation in this mausoleum?” he added to Yosano.

“All the furniture was taken out when the previous owners had to leave,” the lawyer said.

“There are chairs and a desk in the attic,” I said. “Ms. Graham probably forgot she had discards up there when she sold the house.”

“You have a lot of slick answers, don’t you?” Schorr said. “How do you know they’re her things?”

“I don’t. Really, I suppose Arab terrorists could have stolen them from some of the houses around here and carried them up to the attic. We can’t be too careful about anything these days.” I opened the basement door. “Where the fuck you going?”

“You got your deputies searching the grounds and ordering generators; I thought I’d start on the cellar.”

“You stay right here. Don’t move from the kitchen until I get back from phoning. Yosano, you lock this back door so Princess Twinkle Toes here doesn’t go dancing off into the night before I have a chance to check on her felony warrants.”

So that was why he’d brought the lawyer: to unlock the doors for him. “I still don’t understand how a terrorist got in here without a key. The alarm has not been breached; despite what Ms. Warshawski is saying, we checked the house each time Mrs. Graham phoned in a complaint,” Yosano said, but he obediently did up the lock I’d struggled so hard to open.

His remark made Schorr decide he ought to search me to see if I had a key to Larchmont or, heaven forbid, had used picklocks to get in. Despite Protheroe’s presence, Schorr patted me down himself, a little more roughly than necessary. I thought of Benjamin’s cry of “You woman”-“You man,” I wanted to say “hands off,” but I stood very still.

When Schorr found my house and car keys in my day pack, he made a big show of comparing them to the house alarm key. He thought he was going to pocket them, but I took them from him.

Again, before her commanding officer could escalate hostilities, Deputy Protheroe intervened. “I’m going out to the car, sir, to order the emergency generator. Do you want to come with me to phone Ms. Bayard? It will probably be more comfortable in the car than the attic because we can run the heater.”