Jack looked at Warren’s sculpted face. To add insult to injury, as far as Jack was concerned, Warren wasn’t even perspiring, nor was he breathing particularly heavily. And to make matters worse, he’d been playing before Jack had arrived. The only evidence of exertion was a tiny triangle of sweat down the front of his cut-off sweatshirt.

“Reassure Natalie that Laurie’s fine,” Jack said. “She and I were just taking a little vacation from each other. It was mostly my fault. I just wanted to cool things down a bit.”

“I hear you,” Warren said.

“I was with her last night,” Jack added. “And things are looking up. She was asking me about you and Natalie, so you weren’t alone.”

Warren nodded. “You sure you’re finished or do you want to run one more?”

“I’m finished,” Jack said.

“Take care, man,” Warren said as he pushed off the fence. Then he yelled out to the others: “Let’s run, you bad asses.”

Jack shook his head in dismay as he watched Warren amble away. He was envious of the man’s stamina. Warren truly wasn’t tired.

Jack pulled on his sweatshirt and started for home. He’d not won a single game, and although during the play the inability to win had seemed overwhelmingly frustrating, now it didn’t matter. The exercise had cleared his mind, and for the hour and a half he’d played, he hadn’t thought about work.

But Jack wasn’t even all the way across 106th Street when the tantalizing mystery of his floater began troubling him again. As he climbed his refuse-strewn stairs, he wondered if there was a chance that Ted had made a mistake with the DNA analysis. As far as Jack was concerned the victim had had a transplant.

Jack was rounding the third-floor landing when he heard the telltale sound of his phone. He knew it was his because Denise, the single mother of two who lived on his floor, didn’t have a phone.

With some effort, Jack encouraged his tired quadriceps to propel him up the final flight. Clumsily, he fumbled with his keys at his door. The moment he got it open, he heard his answering machine pick up with a voice that Jack refused to believe was his own.

He got to the phone and snatched it up, cutting himself off in mid-sentence.

“Hello,” he gasped. After an hour and a half of full-court, all-out basketball, the dash up the final flight of stairs had put him close to collapse.

“Don’t tell me you’re just coming in from your basketball,” Laurie said. “It’s going on nine o’clock. That’s way off your schedule.”

“I didn’t get home until after seven-thirty,” Jack explained between breaths. He wiped his face to keep his perspiration from dripping on the floor.

“That means you haven’t eaten yet,” Laurie said.

“You got that right,” Jack said.

“Lou is over here, and we were going to have salad and spaghetti,” Laurie said. “Why don’t you join us?”

“I wouldn’t want to break up the party,” Jack said jokingly. At the same time he felt a mild stab of jealousy. He knew about Laurie’s and Lou’s brief romantic involvement and half wondered if the two friends were starting something up.